Farmers and communities in the drier areas of Central America will face water scarcity and economic hardship if an El Niño weather phenomenon takes place later this year, as national and international climate experts deem increasingly likely. These areas comprise the so-called Dry Corridor of Central America, a vulnerable region that relies on subsistence agriculture. During the last El Niño event (2014‑16) nearly 3.5m people needed humanitarian assistance there. Rain scarcity is having a significant effect on regional agricultural production, mostly of maize and beans; however, if a full-blown El Niño ensues, the social and economic effects of the drought will be much more damaging.

The Dry Corridor is an arid strip of tropical dry forest ecosystems covering the lowlands of the Central American Pacific coast, from Guatemala to Guanacaste, Costa Rica's northwestern province. Around 10m people live in the Dry Corridor, close to 20% of the combined population of the Central American isthmus. Climate risks include prolonged droughts that can can alternate with severe rains and floods. This can affect agricultural production and is particularly harmful to degraded areas. The projected impacts of climate change in the region are likely to exacerbate these issues in the long term.

The current drought and the risk of an El Niño

One million families that rely on subsistence farming live in the Dry Corridor, along with over half of Central America's small-scale producers of staple grains (mostly maize and beans). These farms are generally small, with an average area of 1.3 ha in Guatemala and El Salvador, 2.4 ha in Honduras, and 2.8 ha in Nicaragua. Prolonged dry spells can provoke loss of livelihoods and impoverishment in already poor communities, and are cause for internal and external migration.

The region is currently in the midst of a drought that has been underway since July, driven by high temperatures and record days without rain. The Salvadoran government estimates that 62,000 ha of crops, representing over 13% of the national harvest and US$30m worth of damages, has been lost, while business chambers put the figure at US$45.2m. The government has already begun to distribute seeds to help those affected replant crops. In Guatemala, 118,000 ha of crops have been lost, worth US$46m, according to an unofficial estimate. The Honduran government has activated contingency plans to address the situation, while Nicaraguan maize and sugar cane farmers are reportedly also being considerably affected by the current drought.

Central American governments are monitoring the potential of an El Niño phenomenon later in the year, which would further impact their economies. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US agency, puts the risk of an El Niño this autumn at 65%, and the Salvadoran government estimates a 70% probability by year-end. The region is regularly affected by cyclical droughts, which farmers are used to planning for, but precipitation drops 30‑40% below normal levels during an El Niño. This rain deficit often leads to diminished agricultural yields or harvest loss.

The effect of the 2014‑16 El Niño still lingers, and the 2015 drought is considered the worst to have struck the region in at least three decades. With less rainfall, farmers reported harvest declines of as much as 60% for maize and 80% for beans, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). According to UN data, El Niño-linked drought left more than 3.5m people suffering from food insecurity and economic hardship in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala (10% of those countries' combined population) in 2015. El Salvador reported that 60% of its small-scale maize production was lost to drought that year.

Hardship exacerbates social problems

The social impacts of drought-related food insecurity and financial hardship can be significant. After successive bad harvests in recent years, many inhabitants of the Dry Corridor were forced to look for new sources of incomes for their families, according to the UN World Food Programme. The prolonged 2014‑16 drought has also been linked to an increase in irregular migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to the US. As the journey to North America becomes increasingly more complicated and more expensive for prospective migrants, owing to a much stronger anti-migration stance from the US and Mexico, vulnerable people—mostly younger workers—are increasingly likely to migrate internally, to already overpopulated and crime-ridden cities where jobs are hard to come by.

Almost one in every two families with a family member who has migrated outside of Central America since the 2014‑16 El Niño was food insecure (47%) at the time, and three in every four applied emergency measures to deal with the crisis, such as selling off land. Such emergencies increase the social vulnerability of families that previously relied on their farms for sustenance, forcing them to purchase crops.

Hope invested in new ideas

National and regional initiatives have sprung up since the last El Niño phenomenon to increase the Dry Corridor's resilience, including projects funded by the FAO, the UN Environment Programme and the isthmus's governments. The initiatives range from small-scale agricultural aid for specific communities to region-wide projects sponsored by international funds.

The Central American nations have submitted a US$400m project proposal to the UN Green Fund, the international body that oversees climate change finance. The project would fund watershed initiatives, strengthen social programmes in areas such as education and capacity building, and improve agricultural conditions. Moreover, in July 2018 the FAO announced the launch of an early-warning system for the Dry Corridor, which will need to be connected to each of the countries' national risk-management systems, in order to alert local authorities and farmers about climatic conditions.

A more arduous test for Central America's driest regions will come if the El Niño phenomenon materialises as expected by climate forecasters. If anything, the recent drought in El Salvador revealed that the Corridor's frailty remains largely unchanged. Communities and subsistence farmers have had little time to recover from four consecutive years of drought (in 2012‑16) in some countries of the region. A new dry spell would strain national and local resources, damaging the agricultural sectors of the poorest regions of Central America, as well as placing inflationary pressures on most national economies.