Climate Change: Planting Amid Uncertainty in El Salvador

6 hours ago 4

HAVANA TIMES – It’s a torrid Sunday in Cuisnahuat, a community in El Salvador’s northwest Sonsonate department. Although the sky is cloudy and threatens rain, the dense heat persists without easing. Sitting in a chair in front of her house, Veronica Barrera, a 44-year-old woman farmer, watches the distant fields still empty of crops, awaiting the ideal moment for planting.

This zone houses 2.2% of El Salvador’s indigenous population, according to data from the official 2024 Population and Housing Census. Veronica is one of those who remains here. Her memory holds images of these fertile lands when it was her father who cultivated them.

It’s mid-May, 2025, and the seeds are still in sacks inside her house, sealed against the humidity to avoid rotting before they can be planted. Meanwhile, her two manzanas of land – equal to just under three and a half acres (1.4 hectares) – are unplanted.

When her father was alive, the first planting cycle began every May 1^st, and the second, or postrera, the beginning of August. However, the sudden changes in climate have forced them to delay the planting for each cycle, despite the ancestral calendar.

For seven years now, the rain has been irregular. It comes when not expected and is lacking when most needed. Sometimes it rains for several hours or a few days, but later the rain suddenly stops, leaving the half-grown plants unable to mature.

The same pattern repeats in other fields in Cuisnahuat: plots covered with weeds from the last harvest, waiting for the raining season to finally settle in and create the conditions for planting.

Behind these changes are the alterations in climate patterns and ocean temperatures. According to NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, between 2020 and 2024 the rate of temperature change in the Pacific Ocean increased from + 0.73⁰ C to +0.97⁰ C. Hotter ocean water alters climate patterns, affecting the rainfall in the land areas.

The rainfall patterns have changed, confirmed Gabriel Ceren, who specializes in land systems. It rains less, the rainy season begins later, and when the rains come they do so with great force for a few hours or minutes. “It’s now common for it to rain in one block while in the next it doesn’t. They’re localized rains, influenced by heat islands. This generates violent runoff currents that erode the fertile soil,” he stated.

It’s precisely those violent rains that damage the soil. The most fertile layer – between five and ten centimeters deep – is the first to be carried off by the water. Without that layer, the soil is weakened and loses productivity. Add to this the heat, which quickly evaporates the small amount of humidity left.

These climate changes are intensifying the process of desertification and the degradation of the soil, negatively affecting productivity and yields, and increasing food insecurity, warns the Intergovernmental Group of Climate Change Experts in their “Special Report on Climate Change and Land.”

On the other hand, the increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts, heat waves and extreme rainfall are another step leading to the loss of soil fertility and the decreased capacity of the soil to retain water and nutrients. All these changes in climate have begun to affect the way of life of those who live in Cuisnahuat, along with the pertinence of their indigenous roots.

Constant crop losses

Since she was seven years old, Sonia Perez has cultivated the same land as her father. But those same fields where she grew up have become unrecognizable. In the years of regular harvests, a manzana of land used to yield up to 6,000 pounds of corn. Now, with luck, they can barely reach a yield of 3,000 in their cornfield, using the traditional agricultural system of combining the corn with other plants like beans and squash.

Last year, they failed to recover the US $800 dollars they invested in the planting – including food, fertilizer, compost, and seeds. They only managed to recover a little over half, making up for the rest with aid from organizations working in the zone.

The reduced production is the consequence of either drought or too much water; phenomena that end up either drying up or drowning the plants.

To guarantee survival and growth, a corn stalk needs water and nutrients. But higher temperatures alter the natural development of the corn plant, according to the document “Potential impacts of climate change on corn production” of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes in Mexico.

Previously, Sonia Perez recalls, the most common problem was a lack of rain. Those years, the corn plants would manage to reach a height of some 30 centimeters, but then there’d be 8 – 30 days without a drop of rain, causing the plants’ development to stagnate. However, she notes that the threat has diversified in the last four years: prolonged drought or heavy rainfall, both extremes ending in losses.

The data supports her experience. The “State of the climate in Latin America and the Caribbean” report elaborated by the World Meteorological Organization indicates that in 2024 the median temperature in Latin America and the Caribbean was about 0.90⁰ C above the average for 1991-2020, making that year the warmest, or second warmest, on record.

The Salvadoran Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources’ Climate Summary agreed, adding that 2024 will go down in history as a year of extremes in El Salvador: it was 0.6⁰ C hotter than the average, but also the fifth rainiest year in 54 years of record-keeping, with 17.8% more rainfall than the annual average.

These conditions hit families like Veronica Barrera’s directly. Last year, she lost one of the two manzanas of corn and beans she plants. In addition, the 100 chickens she was raising died of cold. For a long while now, the land hasn’t given back like it used to.

“Before, we would plant two manzanas and everything would flourish. It’s like it was a different time. Everything you planted – corn, sorghum, all kinds of beans, squash, zucchini, even chipilines [leafy vegetable used in soups and other dishes] – they all grew well, you could grow anything,” she added nostalgically.

According to the Inter-American Development Bank’s 2024 report “Panorama of opportunities,” corn production in the country fell 13% due to climate effects, while rice and bean production registered losses of 11%.

In addition, estimations from the Salvadoran Chamber of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers indicate that crop losses have increased dramatically in the past few years, especially corn production, where losses increased from 16 million pounds in 2021-22, to over 230 million in 2023-24.

This situation dealt a heavy blow to the 350,000 small producers who subsist from agriculture in the country, according to the “2024 El Salvador Socioeconomic report” released by the Jose Simeon Cañas campus of the Central American University.

To both Veronica Barrera and Sonia Perez, the losses not only represent less food at home; they also mean the disappearance of an extra income that has allowed them to balance their expenses. When there was a little extra corn, they could sell it and have a little money coming into their household.

Now, however, the mere 3,000 pounds of corn they manage to harvest only covers their household consumption for three to six months, depending on how much they ration the tortillas. Sometimes, they admit, you just have to eat less.

This situation could get still worse, given that the projections from the Intergovernmental Group of Climate Change Experts in chapter 5 of their “Special Report on Climate Change and the Land,” indicate that without adaptive measures, the corn yields could continue to decrease, due to the rising temperatures and changes in the rainfall patters.

Veronica Barrera is already feeling the weight of this loss of productivity. When their crops fail, they have no other choice but to purchase the corn and beans they used to produce. “Now we even buy those,” she lamented.

To Gabriel Ceren, one of the factors behind this drop in production is the extensive use of hybrid seeds. These seeds, he explains, are highly sensitive to the temperature and humidity variations caused by climate changes.

Planting no longer drives permanence

When the soil stops bearing fruits, remaining in these territories also ceases to be an option. In Cuisnahuat, crop losses have pushed many families to migrate – internally or outside the country – thus breaking the cycle of ancestral knowledge transfer that for generations linked the indigenous identity to the cultivation of the land.

“Sometimes you can get by on what you harvest, but sometimes people have to migrate to sustain the family, because keeping our hopes all pinned on staying here, well, we can’t do that,” Veronica Barrera noted. Even though no one in her family has yet had to leave, she’s seen neighbors, young people and complete families depart.

Over 20 million people in the world are forced to leave their homes and move to other parts of their own countries due to the dangers posed by the growing intensity and frequency of extreme meteorological phenomena (rains, droughts, desertification and others) according to the UN Refugee Agency.

This displacement, as among the Cuisnahuat indigenous people, leads to a disconnection with the earth in turn, because the bond here isn’t just the agricultural activity, but also inheritance, memory and culture.

To Veronica Barrera, when the youth abandon the rural area, not only do they lose the work of cultivation, but also their connection to their origins. The cycle of transmission is broken, because when they return – if they do – they discover they’ve lost the little they learned about their land.

Many young people have stopped seeing agriculture as their best bet, the way their ancestors always did, Dora Agustin, a 44-year-old indigenous leader, affirms. For the new generations, planting is no longer an economically viable way of life. By having no connection to the land, they also feel no tie to their sacred crop: corn.

But that rupture goes further – it also affects the ancestral knowledge of how to read the signs of nature. Their forefathers, Sonia Perez recalled, used to teach them to observe the cabañuelas, the weather signs, in the form of small clouds that in January predicted the rains for the following months.

When drought threatened past generations, they practiced rituals like wetting a cross to bring the water. “They’d wet the cross, and in a little while it would start raining,” Perez said, before adding: “But that ritual has been lost.”

Sonia’s father, Expedito Perez, is 84. He still recalls the ancient agricultural calendar that governed the times for planting in the community. Every April 24, whether it had rained or not, they knew it was time to plant, because the 25^th is St. Marco’s day, which was commemorated with traditional food and family celebration. Now, that isn’t celebrated either.

Today, those farming practices barely survive as memories. The new generations, by migrating or distancing themselves from farm work, no longer learn these concepts. So, together with the corn, the beans, and the land itself, the customs, language, and identity of a people is being diluted.

Carlos Lara Martinez, anthropologist, and founder and coordinator of El Salvador University’s Sociocultural Anthropology program, believes that this disruption of the calendar “also implies a disruption of religious festivities and social life.”

Since ancestral times, the planting of corn has not only been a sacred activity, but also a form of resistance, Lara explained. “The land is like a defense, that keeps them from letting themselves be totally absorbed into the corporate economy,” he added.

According to the report: “Climate Change and the Rights of Women, Indigenous Peoples and Rural Communities in the Americas,” the essence of most of Latin America’s indigenous peoples derives from their relationship with the land. Hence, conditions affecting their territory directly leads to the “negation of their identity as a people.”

In this sense, the repercussions of climate change on environmental conditions also affect the subsistence of the indigenous peoples, deepening their vulnerability. Such effects are known as non-economic losses. They are impacts of climate change, such as cultural loss, displacement, or harm to mental health, that can’t be measured in money.

Beginning with COP27 – the 27^th UN Climate Change Conference held in 2022 – the losses and damages occasioned by the climate crisis began to be recognized with the agreement for creating climate funding. However, this agreement has yet to translate into concrete actions for communities such as Cuisnahuat.

The indigenous peoples in El Salvador have been marginalized for years. Since 2000, they’ve tried to open a space for participation in the decisions that affect their lives, but their voices remain unheard. In May 2021, amid the debates about reforms to the Constitution, different associations requested that the Magna Carta include the creation of an Indigenous People’s Council and representation for the original peoples in El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly. However, the petition went unanswered.

Today, the struggle to survive and remain on the land is a solitary one. Previously, the government distributed agricultural packets with seeds and fertilizers. This year, that support has been reduced to a 75-dollar voucher, barely enough to buy fertilizer or compost.

Faced with this panorama, the community seeks to revive their tradition of using native seeds – those same ones their grandparents planted, in an attempt to return to the crops that are more resistant to climate variations.

The idea is to have the young people recover the traditions they’ve lost, so they don’t aspire to leave their land and disconnect from their roots. “We have to motivate them every day, so they can feel the love that we feel for the land,” stated indigenous leader Dora Agustin.

This year, Expedito Barrera proposed to his daughter that they plant early. They prefer the risk of putting the corn in the ground to the risk of being left with empty barns.

He’ll continue guiding himself by the signs he learned from his parents and grandparents, the same ones he taught his daughter. However, he knows that those teachings will no longer continue on to the generations beyond her. The grandchildren have begun to look towards other work, because the land no longer promises them what it promised their forebearers.

Here, planting was always much more than just putting seeds in the ground: it was the act that sustained the food, the customs, and the memory of a people. Today, though, the struggle to remain is no longer merely economic – it’s also a silent defense of their identity.

First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.

Read Entire Article