Storms, coronavirus and drought spread hunger to millions in Central America

The back-to-back hurricanes destroyed a small patch of corn that helped Tomasa Mendoza feed her five children in a tiny hamlet nestled in the impoverished mountains of eastern Guatemala.

Even before the storms buried her crop in mud last month, Mendoza's husband hadn't worked for months after day-laboring coffee plantation jobs dried up during the coronavirus pandemic.

With food increasingly scarce, the children cry from hunger and are losing weight. One has a cough that won't go away. To survive, Mendoza is selling her chickens to buy grains of corn. She only has five hens left. Each will fetch $4.

"When they are gone, I'll have nothing," said Mendoza, a thin 34-year-old who lives in the El Naranjo hamlet in Jocotan municipality, bordering Honduras.

Jocotan sits in a Latin American region known as the Dry Corridor, which runs from southern Mexico and down to Panama, crossing parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua along the way. It includes some of the areas that are most vulnerable to food shortages in the Western Hemisphere, pounded by year-after-year of crop-destroying droughts.

Then in the first half of November, Hurricanes Eta and Iota brought weeks of incessant rain, washing out bridges, toppling power lines and wrecking crops in Jocotan and across a wide swath of Central America.

The two extremes, scientists say, are signs of climate change exacerbating regular weather cycles. The pandemic has compounded the problems. With measures to contain the coronavirus cutting off supplementary income for many, the number of people who suffer from severe food shortages has sharply increased across rural areas of Guatemala and Honduras.

In Guatemala, the problem is particularly severe. Even before the storms hit, some 3.7 million people - or more than a fifth of the population - were already suffering high levels of acute food insecurity, according to a report prepared for a United Nations hunger tracking body by the government's Food and Nutritional Security Secretariat. The

U.N. defines acute food insecurity as food shortages that put people's lives or livelihoods in immediate danger. Nearly half a million of those people were considered to be in a situation of emergency, the report said.

The report forecast a reduction in levels of hunger by early 2021, but it has not yet been updated to reflect the storms, which have been estimated as causing $5.5 billion of losses in Central America. Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei, overwhelmed by the scale of the damage, urged Washington in November to exempt Guatemalans arriving in the US from deportation.

The droughts were a contributing factor to the mass migrations north in the past few years, and as Iota bore-down on the region on Nov. 16, Giammattei reminded wealthy nations that if they do not step up to help Central America's economies recover from the storms, they would face "hordes" of new migrants.

The number of U.S. migrants from Central America is already ticking up to pre-pandemic levels.

But for most in Jocotan, moving to the United States is not an option: the journey's typical cost of up to $14,000 is simply too expensive. Instead, they are trapped in cut-off villages, with little government aid, and diminishing supplies of food. "We can't migrate, because that requires money," said Mendoza, speaking outside a modest home built of mud and sticks.

The effects are also felt in other countries through which the Dry Corridor runs, including in Honduras, which had 1.65 million people suffering high levels of acute food insecurity, or food shortages, according to a report prepared by the Honduran government using the same U.N. classification of hunger.

With large parts of Central America reeling from storm damage, coronavirus outbreaks and the fallout of years of drought, aid agencies seemed daunted by the scale of the task to keep people from tipping into extreme poverty.

"The combination of emergencies makes the emergency quadruple," said Felipe Del Cid, operations manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, based in Panama.