NUEVA CONCEPCION (AP):
Victor Torres is on the hunt for clouds as he flies over parched corn fields ravaged by months of drought in the rugged Honduran mountains.
“We’re seeing strong cloud cover over here,” the pilot says, pointing to a map on the dashboard as he banks the small plane sharply into a patch of dark gray.
Behind him, a technician cranks the knob of a large metal tank, which hisses as it sprays yellow silver iodide particles into the skies. This “cloud seeding” is a gamble by the Honduran government, aiming to induce enough rain over enough fields to help farmers and their crops survive.
The El Niño climate pattern, scrambling weather worldwide and now exacerbated by warming seas, has devastated communities across the Central American Dry Corridor, an arid region from southern Mexico through Panama.
The effects are particularly acute in the dry forests of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, where corn and bean crops have dried up, leaving subsistence farmers without food. Cattle have either died or been sold off. Coffee plantations have withered, and shrimp farms have lost production.
“Families are going to bed with one or two meals a day, and that’s after turning to other survival strategies like selling off their animals, their tools … just to get by,” said Aníbal Zúñiga, who coordinates World Food Program aid distribution in Nueva Concepción, a 250-person village tucked in the mountains 90 minutes north of Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa.
The WFP estimates that nearly 50 million people globally could be pushed into acute food insecurity now that El Niño is expected to last into 2027. Central America is among the places to be hit the hardest.
‘Expensive experiment’
In Honduras, where one in five people already face some level of food insecurity in a normal year, the government has paid a Mexican company US$750,000 for 20 flights to trigger rainfall. Meteorologists have routinely cast doubt on cloud seeding, saying weather modification is no solution to long-term drought. Some religious rural farmers see it as trying to play God with the weather.
“This is an experiment,” said Nabil Kawas, a meteorologist and former dean of sciences at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. “Now if you ask me whether I would have taken that US$750,000 and invested it in an irrigation project or water reservoir … it would likely have a greater benefit to poor farmers who use the water for their crops.”
José Francisco Ordóñez, a spokesman for the Honduran secretary of agriculture, defends the flights as one of a number of climate-mitigation projects being carried out by the government and international aid groups. Others include fortifying existing irrigation systems, building water reservoirs, and distributing food aid, fertiliser, and seeds to farmers hit the hardest.
Ordóñez said the cloud seeding programme has taken advantage of recent clouds and rainfall briefly breaking up the painfully dry season to make the most of the water before the drought stretches on.
He said the flights have boosted rainfall between 20 per cent and 60 per cent in key areas, compared to projected rainfall, and they hope to extend it. Kawas said a previous cloud seeding programme in Honduras during comparable droughts boosted rain by less than 10 per cent.
Carlos Alberto Hernández spends most of his days wondering if he and his wife will go hungry.
They have long lived off their small patch of bean crops in Nueva Concepción, and like most people in the Dry Corridor, the 81-year-old farmer has never been able to afford an irrigation system, so they depend on the skies to yield their two yearly harvests.
As Honduran authorities issued a series of drought alerts this summer, he watched his first crop of the year die.
“We can’t afford to buy food. What we grow, that’s what we live off,” Hernández said. “Without water, we’re left with nothing.”
Ordóñez estimated that farmers like Hernández have lost 80 per cent to 90 per cent of their crops during this year’s drought.
Hernández, who joined hundreds at the WFP site, said he has spent many nights with an empty stomach, preferring to save what food he had for the next day. Thursday’s food shipment, funded by WFP and coordinated with Honduras’ government, was the first such aid the community had received.
But Hernández dismissed the cloud seeding, saying what he and his neighbours need is help digging wells so they can survive with or without the rain.
In an attempt to fend off a deeper crisis, Salvadoran authorities declared a six-month state of emergency. Guatemala approved emergency measures to mitigate hunger in poorer indigenous communities, including importing staple grains without tariffs.
As for Nicaragua, where the government tightly controls information, the exiled opposition has criticised the lack of an emergency declaration or contingency plan. Nicaragua’s government did not respond to a request for comment.
The recent rainfall, which was expected before the cloud seeding began, has given farmers some hope. Hernández has planted bean seedlings. If more rain falls, they could provide him with steady food by December.
But the World Meteorological Organization now projects that El Niño will persist until February, and the US National Weather Service predicted that it would strengthen and likely break records. For the Dry Corridor, this likely means that what little rain they usually get will fall elsewhere, feeding everything from floods to hurricanes in other regions.
In Nueva Concepción, another crop failure would be a second blow in a year when families already sold whatever they could to buy food and have few resources to recover, Zúñiga said.
Hernández keeps a close watch on his small patch of bean sprouts, peeking out from soil that had been cracked and dry.
“You go to bed at night, and you wake up in the morning praying to God that he sends water,” Hernández said.
