Hunger and Food Security

As is true in many parts of rural Latin America, most people in our focus area -- the Lower Lempa region of El Salvador-- rely on subsistence farming to feed their families. Most families grow corn as their main crop, and sometimes as their only crop, using intensive amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This practice can be attributed in part to World Bank-sponsored government agricultural extension training that date back to the 1950s.

A family husking corn. Photo: Jillian Baker

During the civil war in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992, thousands of rural families were forced into exile, surviving in refugee camps and wilderness areas in Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama for over a decade. When these families marched back to El Salvador in the early 1990s to demand their right to return, most did not go back to their home villages in the remote and rocky highlands. Instead they settled on coastal lands in the Lower Lempa region that had been former cotton and sugar cane plantations. Read more on our history page.

Many returned refugees faced hunger when they returned to El Salvador. They found to their distress that the soils of their new lands were overtaxed and depleted from years of highly concentrated use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and their yields were poor. Moreover, by growing only corn they could not give their families the nutrition they needed, nor afford to buy food from elsewhere. Since the mid-1990s, we have been supporting sustainable agriculture programs to help these families to diversify their crops, improve their soils, and build a local, green economy.

Events in the last decade have only increased the urgency of this work. Malnutrition in the countryside has always been high, but has increased since the passage of CAFTA in 2004, when corn from the U.S. flooded the Salvadoran market, driving many farmers out of business. Now, severe droughts and torrential rainstorms are on the rise each year due to climate change. Families who grow just one crop are the most vulnerable to these extreme changes in the weather. In 2009, at least 60% of basic grain crops nationwide were wiped out by Hurricane Ida. There is an urgent need for farmers to grow many different kinds of crops, and use the most effective ways to grow them, to protect themselves from both the effects of climate change and the fluctuations of the international market.