Why are people from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala so desperate that they are willing to abandon their homes and walk for thousands of miles to reach the US border, for a uncertain chance of crossing and becoming refugees? A years long drought is driving these rural campesinos off of their land. And Climate Change is to blame for the drought.
Worsening coffee production and financial despair drive migration to the US
By Jude Webber
Sergio Isaula Castillo peels the coffee cherry with his nail. Out pops a shrivelled bean.
“That’s because of a lack of water,” the 55-year-old Honduran farmer sighs. “It’s climate change that’s to blame.”
Coffee is the Central American country’s biggest agricultural export, and Mr Isaula said he has seen a 40 per cent drop in his yield over the past couple of years. “Every year it goes down. The plantations are drying out.
The rainfall is erratic.” Compared with some Honduran farmers in other parts of the “dry corridor” in the south and west of the country, Mr Isaula is lucky — he has not lost everything. But with production steadily worsening, compounded by financial despair, he and other farmers in Tepanguare, in the western La Paz department, are preparing to play the only card they have left: migration to the US.
“We’re already getting ready — there’s a group of about 50 of us, we’re going to go in February,” he said, standing in his fields down a bumpy dirt track deep in the hills. “It’s my first time. But I have no choice. There’s no other option in Honduras.”
Coffee beans
Honduras is one of the most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change. Some 40 per cent of the population works in agriculture, and farming supplies as much as 45 per cent of gross domestic product, including all related goods and services. But a double weather whammy is forecast to reduce rainfall by as much as 14 per cent by 2050 and lead to longer, hotter droughts.
by Gus Bova
Donald Trump thinks there’s an immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. He has no idea what’s coming.
Central America hosts both spectacular catastrophes — Hurricane Mitch displaced 3 million people in 1998 — and slow-burn disasters, such as frequent droughts worsened by climate change. Many of the current crop of refugees hail from the region’s “dry corridor,” a zone afflicted by alternating drought and flooding, where farmers face crop failure even without the effects of a warming planet. The corridor falls mostly within the poor, violent Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala — a major source of immigrants to the United States.
Recent spikes in migration have tracked with precipitation patterns. In 2014, the year of the much-politicized surge in families and unaccompanied children arriving at the border, a drought struck the dry corridor. Farmers were still scrambling to recover when another untimely drought hit early this summer, wiping out first harvests of beans and maize. Many of the asylum-seekers caught up in Trump’s short-lived family separation policy were indigenous Guatemalan farmers fleeing the specter of starvation.
The interplay between climate change and migration can be complex. Many Central Americans displaced by hurricane or drought first relocate within their home countries (a rule that holds true worldwide). They often face gang violence, marginal employment and racial discrimination. When they later flee to Mexico or the United States, García said, the original cause of their displacement is obscured, leading to an undercount of climate-driven refugees.
BY LAUREN MARKHAM
This summer, a drought in Central America’s Dry Corridor—a swath of historically arid land that runs through Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador—decimated 80 percent of the region’s maize and bean crops. By August, Honduras declared a state of emergency.
By September, what would have been a time to harvest and store crops became yet another exodus, following a long line of migrants who have left Honduras in recent years. Individuals and families made plans, first via Facebook and then via the news and word of mouth, to travel together toward the United States.
On October 12, a group of a few hundred people set forth from San Pedro Sula, Honduras—one of the most dangerous cities in one of the most dangerous countries on Earth—and began walking to Guatemala. Moving en masse provided protection from criminals and officials who prey and profit off migrants, as well as political visibility in the face of an increasingly xenophobic U.S. government.
According to migration experts, and to the hundreds upon hundreds of migrants whom I have interviewed while researching a book on migration from Central America, migrants are leaving Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—a region known as the Northern Triangle—because of a complex set of factors: poverty, the need to reunite with family, and violence, largely at the hands of the region’s brutal gangs. But what we don’t hear as much about is the compounding impact that climate change has on migration from Central America to the United States.
Another migrant left from El Salvador on October 28, and a few days later, yet another. On November 18, according to reports from El Salvador, a fourth migrant caravan is scheduled to depart.
After years-long drought in Honduras, crops are failing. Starvation lurks. Farmers have become 'climate refugees.'
Source: CNN (VIDEO)
Climate Change driven drought in eastern Syria drove the unrest that led to a catastrophic civil war, resulting in millions of Syrians fleeing their homeland as refugees.
Climate Change driven drought = Internal refugees + Violence & Repression = Refugees fleeing their Homeland
Climate Refugees are the new normal, but they aren’t being seen as Climate Refugees.
