El Salvador Perspectives

For a significant percentage of families in El Salvador, putting food on the table continues to get more difficult.  Prices for food climbed after the COVID-19 pandemic and have remained high, and climate change and natural disasters put at risk the basic foodstuffs which can be grown locally.   Five UN agencies just released their 2023 Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean .   The UN report describes ranges of food insecurity countries may face: The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), is an estimate of the proportion of the population facing moderate or severe constraints on their ability to obtain sufficient food over the course of a year. People face moderate food insecurity when they are uncertain of their ability to obtain food and have been forced to reduce, at times over the year, the quality and/ or quantity of food they consume due to lack o...

This article was originally published on  Undark  under the title In El Salvador and Beyond, an Unsolved Kidney Disease Mystery . November 16, 2022 by Fletcher Reveley J osé Lopez didn’t want to die, but the alternative — having a scalpel plunged through his abdominal wall to install a soft, silicone dialysis catheter — filled him with terror. For weeks in the fall of 2021, the then-34-year-old agricultural worker from Tierra Blanca, El Salvador, had refused the surgery, holding out instead for a miracle from God. Regional lore held that such acts of grace were possible: There was the man from Las Salinas whose invocations had restored his ailing kidneys; the boy from La Noria who was recovering swiftly after devoting himself to the gospel. Through his mounting illness, Lopez clung to the rumors and prayed for a similar deliverance. But he was running out of time. The fluid buildup in his abdomen had grown so severe he felt like he was choking. He couldn’t stand, eat, or s...

Officials in El Salvador hope to make visas for farmworkers available for temporary stints  in the United States in the near future.  El Salvador's Minister of Labor Rolando Castro says he will travel soon to the US to discuss details of the program. There was immediate interest when the program was first announced, the AP reported: Hundreds of Salvadorans who had waited in line for U.S. work visas have started heading back to their hometowns after learning the program wasn’t ready yet.  The lines started forming in front of the Labor Ministry last week after the government announced it was negotiating a temporary farm work visa program with the United States.  Other countries like Mexico have long had access to such H-2A visas.  But by Monday, officials at El Salvador’s Labor Ministry acknowledged they could only take people’s names for a later date when the program is finally implemented. RevistaFactum shared profiles of some of those hoping t...

Mexico promised the US that it would take steps to reduce the flow of migrants from Central America arriving at the southern border of the US. One way Mexico proposes to do that is by funding a program in the Northern Triangle countries to reforest rural areas and generate employment.      The  Associated Press  described the recent inauguration of the project in El Salvador: Mexico is bringing to El Salvador a tree-planting program that aims to support rural residents and ease economic pressures driving thousands of people to leave for the United States. The program known as “Sowing Life” offers farmers $250 a month to plant fruit or timber trees, and whatever they harvest belongs to them. Mexico is donating $31 million to fund the plan in El Salvador, and authorities say it should create 20,000 jobs.  The program is a smaller version of a much larger reforestation plan the Mexican government has begun implementing in southern Mexico.  ...

Cultivation of coffee has played an important role in the history of  El Salvador.  It was a source of great wealth for the country's landed elites during much of the twentieth century and the country's leading export crop.   But today the industry is falling on increasingly hard times.  A London-based coffee buyer, Mercanta, described the history of the Salvadoran coffee industry: El Salvador is the smallest of the Central American nations, but don’t let its diminutive size fool you. It produces exceptional coffees to a consistently high standard. Mercanta regularly buys selected single varietals such as Orange/Pink Bourbon, Red Bourbon and Pacamara, and has strong, long-term relationships with many producers and mills in this small, coffee powerhouse.  The history of coffee in El Salvador is inextricably linked to the development of the nation, itself. Introduced in the late 1880’s, coffee quickly displaced indigo as the country’s chief expo...

A drought is currently affecting much of eastern El Salvador.   The map below produced by the environment ministry shows the number of consecutive days without rain in different areas of the country.  The drought could have a major impact on the production of corn, one of the staples of the country.   Farmers will try to recover in a second planting between now and the end of the rainy season in November.  The eastern part of the country has often suffered from drought in recent years.

In recent years, El Salvador's coffee production was hit hard by a fungus known as "roya" which decreased the coffee harvest by as much as 60% in the country.   This blow to the coffee sector cost tens of thousands of jobs in the small country. This chart using data at the International Coffee Organization  shows the steep drop off in Salvadoran coffee production starting in 2012: Now Reuters reports on how many farmers are turning to higher quality beans, which require more intensive care but also fetch a higher price in world markets: Farmers in the Central American country have turned to specialty coffee trees - identified by fanciful names such as bourbon, geisha and pacas - in hopes of reviving a local industry devastated by crop disease just a few years ago.  The trees produce some of the world’s highest quality coffee, beans with distinctive tastes prized by consumers in the United States and elsewhere who are willing to pay up for top-drawer ...

The young are leaving rural El Salvador for the country's cities.   The result is rural farmers who are getting old with no one to take their place.  According to the country's agriculture ministry, the average age of farmers is now 57 years old. The exodus of the young seems to be driven by rural poverty.   56.1% of households in rural El Salvador suffer from multi-dimensional poverty compared to less than 22% of households in urban areas.  The government of El Salvador has a program of scholarships for young people in rural areas, as part of its "Amanacer Rural" (Rural Dawn) program.   The scholarships are aimed at giving young people the skills to make farming a profitable occupation and an alternative to leaving for the cities.

Driving in north central El Salvador this weekend as I have often done, I was struck by a changing landscape.   In many more locations than before, sugar cane was being grown and harvested.  Where once corn stalks had stood or cows were grazing, the tall stalks of of sugar cane dominated.   This is the time of year of the sugar cane harvest.    The smoke of cane fields being burned can be seen every day.    We live on the southern side of the capital city of San Salvador, and the black ash regularly floats through open windows and doors.    Massive cane trucks fills the highways carrying the harvested cane stalks to the country's sugar mills. Statistics from El Salvador's Ministry of Agriculture confirmed my impressions that sugar cane production has expanded signficantly in El Salvador in recent years.   According to numbers from the Ministry , the amount of land dedicated to sugar cane production increased by 33% between 2010 a...

Current trends in global climate change pose serious threats to the production of El Salvador's food staples of corn and beans, particularly in the eastern part of the country.   This was one of the conclusions of a study of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization presented at a meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) last week. According to the FAO , the average temperature in El Salvador has increased 1.3 degrees centigrade in recent decades, more than the global average increase of 0.8 degrees.   Future projections see another increase of 2.6 degrees if current patterns are not changed. Although short term forecasts are for an increase in rain, there could be a long term reduction in annual rainfall of as much as 11% and delays in the annual start of the rainy season.   This will mean continued stress on El Salvador's water resources. The eastern part of the country will be the most severely impacted. The region already lies in...

Two recent articles highlight some of the health risks faced by workers in agriculture in El Salvador. One source of death an injury is pesticide use in Salvadoran agriculture.   According to a report in La Prensa Grafica , El Salvador's ministry of health estimates there have been 831 deaths and 7,982 poisonings of farm workers just in the five years from 2011 through 2015.   The ministry urged the country's legislators to ban a list of 53 agro-chemicals, a request which has been stalled in the National Assembly for years.   The executive branch of the government has restricted 36 of the chemicals, but a ban needs to be placed into law.   The ban is opposed by El Salvador's farm sector.  Even with the restrictions on 36 chemicals, 115 rural workers died and 1114 were poisoned during 2015. Another article comes from alJazeera, titled  Murder and malady: El Salvador's sugarcane workers , The article looks at the incredibly tough lives of El Salvador's ...

Cane cutters take a break in El Salvador A photo essay by Ed Kashi in the Guardian shows the hard lives of sugar cane workers in El Salvador and Nicaragua and describes the problems of chronic kidney disease and some of the measures to combat the illness.

For the second year in a row, drought is greatly reducing the production of corn, beans and other foodstuffs in El Salvador.   The map above shows the number of days without rain since June 14.  As the map shows, the most severe impact is in the east, where the rains have not been falling since June 14 in what is supposed to be the rainy invierno season.  Much of the first harvest has been lost , and farmers can only hope for rain to resume so that a second planting can mature before October. Detect language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Cebuano Catalan Chichewa Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kazakh Kannada Khmer Korean Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Macedoni...