El Salvador Perspectives

Flooding in Olocuilta July 9 El Salvador Perspectives has been on vacation for the past month.  Here is a short summary of some of the major stories during that time. Flooding rains which impacted much of the country continue. Days of flooding rain began in mid-June over El Salvador and other parts of Central America as tropical weather systems impacted the region.  In El Salvador, at least 19 people died in floods, mudslides and other calamities due to the rain between June 14 and 19 with thousands forced to evacuate to government run shelters.  After that first week of flooding in mid-June, the country continued to be buffeted by more storms and rains.  Saturated soils meant that rainfall runoff quickly overran river banks or prompted trees to fall over.   The storms have continued in early July.   As of July 8, there were 8 government run shelters open housing 196 people.  A child drowned in flood waters over the weekend.  Beyond ...

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...

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.

700,000 people, or one out of every nine people in El Salvador, suffer from food insecurity, especially in the country's rural areas according to international organizations working in El Salvador .   Droughts, the El Niño phenomenon, and the impact of roya (coffee rust fungus), have had a serious negative affect on families incomes and harvests over the past three years. The effects are widespread, touching 104 of the country's municipalities especially in the east.  In 24 municipalities, almost 20,000 families are receiving direct food aid.   The aid is provided by the World Food Program and the National Council on Food Security. The recent periods of drought have reduced flow rates in El Salvador's rivers by as much as 20 to 60%, and declining as much as 90% in the eastern region.  According to OxFam, which works with populations in the eastern departments of Morazan, San Miguel and Usulutan, there has been a 40% reduction in access to water.  One...

Three days ago I was with farmers in the eastern part of El Salvador on the slopes of the Chaparrastique volcano.   This year's drought has caused a loss of 80-100% of their corn and bean harvest.   They only hope now that the rains will come so there can be a second planting of the crops in August and three months of rain through the end of the rainy season in October.   They wait and pray.

In April of ths year, the price of a pound of beans in El Salvador was 50 cents;  last week the price had risen to levels between $1.10 and $1.35 in markets around the country according to La Prensa.Grafica .   The price rise is blamed on a shortage of beans.   Linked to the shortage is a lack of rain in some parts of the country, a weather problem blamed on the El Niño climate phenomenon. (Meanwhile the ARENA party is alleging that any scarcity of beans is being caused by the FMLN government sending beans to Venezuela to pay for oil received from the socialist government there). Farmers are concerned about periods during this rainy season when no rain has fallen for extended period of time in various parts of the country.   The most recent dry spell began on July 4. The government has denounced hoarding of bean stockpiles by speculators and announced plans to buy beans on international markets to reduce shortages. The government will spend $4.6 million ...

Food sovereignty is an important issue in El Salvador.  It is the issue of whether the country, its farmers and its consumers can be largely self-sufficient in the area of basic foodstuffs and not dependent on imports and the whims of world markets.   One area where the discussion of food sovereignty is focused is corn -- the basic food staple of El Salvador. On the EcoViva blog, there is a detailed discussion of this topic and pressure being exerted by the US in a post titled  Seeds of Food Sovereignty Grow in the Shadow of CAFTA .   Here is an excerpt: The Family Agriculture Program is part of the left-leaning Salvadoran government’s strategy to promote food sovereignty in a country that has a long history of food insecurity, social conflict, and ecological degradation related to industrial agriculture. It has strengthened the technical ability and capacity of local agricultural cooperatives to cultivate seeds and food so crucial for the food security of the ...

On Thanksgiving Day in the United States, I want to share an essay by Brian Rude, a Lutheran pastor living in El Salvador titled Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread .   Brian describes the role of corn in the dance of life in rural El Salvador: Corn–next only to water–is the lifeblood of the Salvadoran people. Salvadoran people are “el pueblo de maíz”, corn people. Their tortillas, without which a meal isn’t a meal, are made from dried and ground corn kernels.... The majority of the harvest–the “mazorcas”, or cobs–is left to dry, after the dried stalks are broken and bent. At harvest, these corn husks are broken off and are brought to the house, where the mounds of cobs fill every available storage space, even much of the living space, waiting to be husked and degrained. This labour-intensive process, danced while seated and often while socializing, fills every waking hour. The kernels are then stored in cylindrical metal grain bins, often inside the farmhouse. They are mixed...

I recently learned of a blog which has the recipes in English for all of my favorite Salvadoran foods.    POSTRES de La Cipota  is written by a woman who says she learned Salvadoran cooking after marrying a man from El Salvador.   The recipes are written in a conversational style with lots of information, so it's fun to read even if, like me, your culinary talents are limited.

Karla Boza recently wrote me to point out her new blog which reviews restaurants in El Salvador (and New York).   The blog is titled Dual Citizenship , and you can find it at  http://foodcitizenship.com/ . This is not what you might expect -- it's not a blog about pupuserias and places to get a "plato tipico."   Instead Karla's posts have included places where you can get a great pulled pork sandwich ( Esperanto ), cream puffs ( Beard Papa's ), or the stadium food at Estadio Cuscatlan . Check it out.  

For your weekend reading, I highly recommend the article  Free Markets and the Food Crisis in Central America  by Carlos G. Sanchez at CIP Americas.  The article describes the transformation of the economies of Central America and the loss of food sovereignty. The countries of the region, including El Salvador, have been transformed from ones where enough food was grown to feed their own populations to countries which rely on imported food and are subject to the swings of prices in the global food and commodity markets.  The impact of free trade policies, an emphasis on cash export crops, and economic forces which have driven people out of the countryside and into crowded urban areas has resulted in widespread food insecurity throughout the region. Sanchez includes a call to action in his article: The starting point should be that every Central American has adequate access to food, and for this to happen, the structure of production and commerce must change. Nat...

October 16 is the annual Blog Action Day , and the global topic this year is Food.   In light of the weather emergency continuing in El Salvador, I will deal with the implications of the ongoing rains on food issues in the country. The country is under a state of emergency.   In a press conference Saturday night, president Funes called for all elements of Salvadoran society to pull together.   As of tonight some 13 thousand Salvadorans have been forced  to flee their homes, and the death toll has risen to 10.  Emergency efforts to distribute food are underway for families forced from their homes.  Donations are being received from many sources , and the Salvadoran armed forces are participating in distribution of emergency aid.   This picture from LPG shows Scouts receiving and organizing food donations. LPG picture gallery . A tweet from LaPrensa reported that some 4000 pupusas are being made and donated by an association of pupuser...

Linda, at Linda's El Salvador Blog , recently discovered pupusas named for Barack Obama, as she tells in this story: This afternoon, as we sat in a large circle a question was placed before Bishop Gomez : "What is your favorite kind of pupusa?" The Bishop side-stepped the answer for a while, and told a couple of pupusa stories. The pupusa is an indigenous food; the best ones puff up as they are cooked; one place has a pupusa loca (which I believe has a little bit of everything in it). The question was asked again. This time the response involved President Obama. Did we remember when President Obama visited El Salvador? Weeks before he came, the Bishop said, "resourceful vendors prepared a special pupusa and began calling it the Pupusa Obama." Why was it called the Pupusa Obama? It was made with black corn. We laughed in disbelief, but the Bishop assured us that this was true. We laughed some more and asked the Bishop again...did he have a favorite kind of ...

Food blogger Sasha Martin has spent the past week writing about and cooking the food of El Salvador.  Here's how she introduced the topic: Do you like colorful birds? What about ruins – ancient, gothic, and colonial? Step right this way. Meet El Salvador, a tiny country freckled with mighty volcanoes, thickly coated by lush tropics, and so much more. In this steamy dreamland, I discovered a theme: corn. You can read Sasha's week of posts on Salvadoran food, including recipes, at this link .  Yum.

Two news stories from the past week in the paper El Mundo highlight El Salvador's problem of food insecurity.   The first was a  story about the price of beans .   In the past year, the price of a pound of red beans has increased 138% from $0.52 to $1.24 per pound.   The price increase reflected the significant destruction of the bean crop by the damaging rains in 2010.  The story noted that the price of corn also rose last year. The second was the report that the Salvadoran government will import approximately 9 million pounds of beans from China.  The purchase will cost around $5 million, and will help alleviate the scarcity of beans for the Salvadoran markets.  According to the story, Salvadoran officials say the Chinese bean is not the same as beans from Nicaragua, but they tested it, and it's a "buen frijol."

Sunday, November 14, was El Salvador's National Day of the Pupusa. By legislative decree, the second Sunday of November celebrates the country's national food dish. Even Martha Stewart has paid tribute to the pupusa. In this episode from her show in 2009, Martha Stewart learns how to make pupusas and offers a recipe for pupusas with cheese.

The tragic deaths of two children in El Salvador are a vivid reminder of the plight of the poor and the hungry. To understand this story, you need to understand that the government has a program to provide seed corn to poor families in rural El Salvador. Treated to resist pests, the corn is not intended for human consumption. A story in the Latin American Herald Tribune tells what happened: SAN SALVADOR – Two children are dead and their parents and siblings remain hospitalized after the family ate tortillas made from seed corn that was treated with pesticide, officials at Salvadoran hospitals said Thursday. “It’s an entire family: papa, mama and five minors. Two of the five minors had already died” by the time medical assistance was available, the deputy director of Jose Molina Martinez General Hospital, Dr. Jose Roberto Gonzalez, told Efe. The fatalities, ages 10 and 12, died Wednesday after eating the tortillas made from government-issued seed corn, which is treated with the pe...

Storms which have brought torrential rains and flooding often wipe out food crops, while too little rain has the same effect. A recent IPS article highlights the vulnerability to weather events of local production of food in El Salvador: In September and October of that year, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon led to a shortage in rainfall throughout Central America, which negatively affected the planting of grain and bean crops in areas of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, according to the FAO report. Then, in November, Hurricane Ida struck Central America, causing severe damage to agricultural infrastructure in parts of the region. In El Salvador, heavy rains left 198 people dead and 15,000 homeless, in addition to 239 million dollars in losses and damages. "All of my efforts were destroyed. Only a small part of my corn crop was saved," Isidro Rivas, 48, a farmer in the village of Izcanal, 45 kilometres east of San Salvador, told IPS...

The website Epicurious.com featured the Salvadoran national dish, the pupusa , in its series Around the World in 80 Dishes . There is a recipe for pupusas there, as well as a video for making the pupusas. The recipe is pretty traditional, but the video shows a "pupusa" pressed in a tortilla press and fried in oil which is unlike any pupusa I have ever seen a Salvadoran make. When I think of making pupusas, this is the kind of image I see: