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By Karla Jacobs, 18th February 2010
To avoid a situation of food insecurity in certain parts of rural Nicaragua over the coming months the Agriculture Ministry (MAGFOR) together with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Program (WFP) recently began implementing an innovative program to assist the communities worst affected by last year's drought.
All of Central America suffered varying degrees of drought during the second half of last year's rainy season as a result of El Niño - a cyclical climatic phenomenon which significantly reduces rainfall in Latin America. Compared to neighbouring countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, however, Nicaragua, is not faced with the threat of a national food shortage. This is mainly thanks to the FSLN government's prioritization of agricultural production by small and medium sized farmers.
Despite false claims by the country's corporate media (whose owners are passionately opposed to President Daniel Ortega's government), the threat of famine does not exist in Nicaragua. But, as MAGFOR confirms, a number of subsistence farming families from rural communities in 36 of the country's 153 municipalities are facing local food shortages after having lost most of their harvests due to the lack of rain.
After carrying out a locally coordinated census in the affected municipalities (which all fall within the deforested central and northern Pacific part of Nicaragua in the departments of Managua, Boaco, Matagalpa, Esteli, Leon, Chinandega, Madriz and Nueva Segovia), MAGFOR has established which communities require food security assistance over the coming months. Currently MAGFOR plans to assist approximately 50,000 people within the worst affected communities (this is on top of the 200,000 rural Nicaraguans who are already involved in longer term WFP food security programs).
The assistance program basically involves providing with basic foodstuffs in return for work on different projects in their own community. The local organizations (CPC, cooperative or other) will decide which specific projects should be carried out although the projects chosen should be aimed at reducing the community's vulnerability to future droughts, for example reforestation of water sources, sinking of new wells, soil conservation activities or implementation of drip irrigation systems.
Additional funds and other forms of input to make these projects possible including technical assistance are being made available from different sources including the Rural Development Institute (IDR) and local government, while MAGFOR, WFP and FAO are guaranteeing the food with which farmers are being paid for their work. The families assisted by this program will also be provided with the inputs they require in order to plant crops when the rains come in May.
Pedro Haslam, President of IDR, spoke to Tortilla con Sal about the FSLN government's efforts to mitigate climate change in rural Nicaragua in an interview in November. He explained that:
the issue of
food handouts is very delicate for the [FSLN] government because
we don't want to create more dependency among the population on
programs or institutions. ...
When I say that we are working to reinstate people's dignity what I mean is that the government knows that people feel good if they are producing their own food. .. We work to create sustainability for people with regards to their ability to establish a productive base, even if that base is very small. The important thing is that it is their productive base which will guarantee, if tomorrow the World Food Program doesn't turn up, that they can produce their own food. ...
The crisis provoked by climate change isn't just going to affect us once. Like I said earlier, the cycles are increasingly short. So we need to get these communities producing food. We need to help people generate life in their communities. It's not that we have all the resources we need to solve everyone's problems but at least we are working to solve specific problems in specific areas.
When I say that we are working to reinstate people's dignity what I mean is that the government knows that people feel good if they are producing their own food. .. We work to create sustainability for people with regards to their ability to establish a productive base, even if that base is very small. The important thing is that it is their productive base which will guarantee, if tomorrow the World Food Program doesn't turn up, that they can produce their own food. ...
The crisis provoked by climate change isn't just going to affect us once. Like I said earlier, the cycles are increasingly short. So we need to get these communities producing food. We need to help people generate life in their communities. It's not that we have all the resources we need to solve everyone's problems but at least we are working to solve specific problems in specific areas.
In that same interview, Haslam described the government's efforts to ensure record production levels during the third bean harvest of the 2009/10 agricultural cycle in order to guarantee a sufficient amount of beans for the national market over the coming months. Those government efforts paid off. Agriculture Minister Ariel Bucardo announced recently that more than enough beans to satisfy the national demand have been produced and that Nicaragua, as happens most years, will look to export excess produce to El Salvador, Venezuela and the US.
Also as a result of government efforts during the third crop cycle of 2009/10, MAGFOR is able to guarantee that the national demand for seeds will be satisfied when the rains come in three months time. Normally after significant drought hits, a large proportion of subsistent farmers struggle to find seed with which to plant crops at the beginning of the next agricultural cycle.
The figure of approximately 50,000 people facing imminent food insecurity should be placed in the context of the severe drought provoked by El Niño, which has caused crisis conditions across much of Central and South America. The situation would be much worse without the dramatic transformation of domestic agricultural production under the FSLN government since 2007. After the FSLN came to power three years ago corn and bean production have greatly increased while rice production has more than doubled. Hundreds of thousands of farming families have received very favourable credits for food production and nearly 50,000 families have been included in the successful "Zero Hunger" food production and poverty reduction program.