Still not sure whether climate change is real? Come to Nicaragua

   

Without irrigation, small farmers in dry regions like
Terrabona, Nicaragua wouldn't have had any crops in the last 3 years.

A dry summer in Canada means our lawns turn brown. A dry summer in parts of Nicaragua means dead livestock and families on the edge pushed into full-on disaster. 
    It's been during these last four-plus years living and working here in Central America that I've gone from being passingly interested in the concept of climate change as a potential future threat, to being fully engaged and very alarmed by the impact that it's having right now in countries like this one, especially for farming families with few resources.

    A Cuso International delegation from Canada is in the country right now touring projects that Cuso supports through its volunteer placements. I went out on a field trip with some of the Canadian visitors this week to show them a project that my organization FEMUPROCAN has in the north with women’s farming cooperatives around Terrabona, Matagalpa.

    The region is in the fourth year of a devastating drought. In all of 2015, rain fell just twice. Not a drop has fallen yet this year. Desperate local farmers are counting down the days until mid-May, which is when the rainy season always used to start, and praying that this year it finally does.

    The trip into the village of Los Mangitos on Monday was almost apocalyptic in its dryness: Shades of brown in all directions, leafless trees, dust layered on everything. Here and there, groups of skinny cows and horses clustered around tiny bits of greenery that were the last remnants of anything edible in the arid landscape.

    The project we were visiting is a simple irrigation system installed three years ago with the financial and technical help of FEMUPROCAN, a federation of 73 women’s farming cooperatives in Nicaragua. (I do communications work for them as a Cuso cooperante.) The system pumps water from an underground aquifer to irrigate a 1.5-hectare plot owned by Ricarda Mairena and her family, transforming barren land into cool, green fields of tomatoes, corn and the pale, long-necked squash the Nicaraguans call pipian.

The aquifer is still producing, but the water level has fallen
dramatically after 3 years of drought. 

    And for three years, things have gone pretty well. Irrigation lets the family farm year-round rather than only during the brief three months of “winter,” the wet season. That has substantially boosted their food security and income, especially given that there hasn’t even been a real wet season since 2012. The commercial produce buyers that Nicaraguans know as intermediarios now pass through the village regularly, picking up produce from Ricarda to sell at the public market in Managua.

    But one more year without a wet season would be disastrous, says the family. They’re scared by how low the water level is in their well these days, and scared by the absence of pasture for their 5 cows. The animals are getting by on corn husks and spent tomato plants these days, at least until the sorghum is ready to be harvested.

    The 24 families that live around Ricarda’s farm are at least still getting drinking water from the municipality, once every day and a half. In a neighbouring village, no one has had water in their households for five months. The nearest community well is a kilometre away.

    A fellow Cuso volunteer in the north told me last week of families in one village outside of Esteli that are having to get by on deliveries of five litres of water every five days. Water for drinking, animal care, cleaning, bathing, cooking – all of it has to come out of those precious five litres.

    Nicaragua counts on small farmers to produce much of its food. But many women farmers associated with my organization aren’t even sure whether to plant anymore, as investing in seed or agreeing to rent farm land for what ultimately ends up being a failed crop can sink a family. Farming is a low-margin undertaking at the best of times, and a bit like tying a rock to your ankle and jumping into the sea in these years when the traditional rainy season can’t be counted on.

Producer Ricarda Mairena grows sorghum as a
"living barrier"at the edges of her gardens, both to
reduce pest invasions and produce feed for her 5 cows.

    These are desperate days, in other words. Down in the south, commercial banana plantations are dying for lack of water, with only the ones planted nearest to massive Lake Nicaragua able to survive. Water levels in the lake itself are significantly lower than usual, and the river that the lake drains into along the Costa Rican border is so low that local fishermen can’t get their boats out.

    In the municipality of Terrabona where Ricarda has her farm, locals believe that there are vast quantities of underground water waiting to be tapped into. FEMUPROCAN’s financial support for the bricks, mortar, pumps and large quantity of tubing and hoses that are essential to even the simplest irrigation system has been warmly received by women farmers because of that belief, and so far the wells that do exist are still producing.  Ricarda’s family is in the process of digging a second one.

    But even aquifers need to catch a break sometimes. The proliferation of heavily irrigated commercial tobacco-growing enterprises in the area make me wonder if anyone has studied how much underground water is actually available. Elsewhere in the country, treasured waterfalls in protected areas are drying up due to unregulated upstream water use and the lack of rain.

    An acquaintance from back in Canada commented to me a couple weeks ago that he still wasn’t sure “whether to believe all this climate-change stuff.” Any doubters, come on down. It’s real and scary in lands like this one, with so much more at stake than nice green lawns. 

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International. Here's our fundraising site. 

Nicaraguans can grow their own food, but not without land

     Who has the right to own land?

     In countries like Canada, we decided some time ago that it’s either government, aboriginals or people with enough money to buy a piece of tierra firma, and many of us get along just fine without owning land. While almost 70 per cent of Canadians own their own homes, it’s not a prerequisite to happiness.

     But the issue is more complex in countries like Nicaragua, where owning land can make the difference between being able to feed your family and going hungry.

     Subsistence farmers in Nicaragua can survive on the most minimal incomes if they own enough land to grow their food. Their basic diets of corn and beans may be monotonous and not diverse enough to guarantee good nutrition, but at least the calories are sufficient to keep a family going. 

     But that breaks down when a poor family doesn't own land or can't plant on someone else's land.

     If you have to buy your beans and corn at the local market, you’re going to need money – something that’s in scarce supply in much of rural Nicaragua. If you have to rent land to grow your food, every harvest has to be sufficiently productive that you don’t find yourself in the hole at the end of the day. With little access to affordable credit for land purchases and climate change wreaking havoc with production cycles in Nicaragua, these are difficult days for small-scale farmers. 

     Land ownership is a critical concern for the 2,200 women farmers that belong to the organization I work for here in Managua, a federation of women’s farming cooperatives that goes by the acronym FEMUPROCAN. Much of the organization’s advocacy efforts these days are focused on one section of an agricultural reform law that promises credit to women farmers so they can buy their own land, but has never been enacted.

     Only eight to 12 per cent of the country’s private lands are owned by women.  That places them at a huge disadvantage, not only in their ability to feed their families but to be able to participate in the country’s economic development. They’re up against the culture as well; even when a farming family does own land, more times than not the title is in the name of the husband only. In the event of his death, it’s not uncommon to see that title pass to his brother or other male member of the family, leaving the wife with neither land nor recourse.

     Without land of her own or her name on title, a woman in Nicaragua also struggles to qualify for credit – vital for small farmers given that they have to borrow against tomorrow’s harvest to be able to afford the seed today. Bank interest rates are brutal, upwards of 30 per cent.

     This year has been particularly harsh for FEMUPROCAN’s members in the parts of Nicaragua hit hard by drought, where some farmers who rent their lands are so afraid to lose what little they have that they didn’t even plant at the start of the second growing season in September.

     In Somoto, a particularly dry region, a woman farmer told me that with land renting for around 2,700 cordobas ($120 Cdn) per hectare, poor farmers risk ending up worse off financially than if they’d never planted at all if the rains don’t come on time. The owners of those lands expect to be paid regardless of how the growing season turns out.

     And with no additional money to buy more seed if the rains start late and the first crop dies in the field – as has happened this year in the country’s “dry corridor” – farmers are in some cases choosing to scrap the whole season and wait until next May to plant, hoping that the drought will be over by then.

     That means at least one member of the family will have to find day labour somewhere between now and then, because otherwise there’s no money for food. But day labour is in short supply as well, seeing as most of that work involves earning money by helping land-owning farmers with their own harvests. With the drought now in its second year, this is a tough time to be a small-scale farmer in Nicaragua.
     The solution is simple enough: Find ways to help women buy farm land. FEMUPROCAN's members have said over and over again that they don't expect to get anything for free, but they're going to need realistic interest rates, a generous amount of time to pay back their loans, and at least a little understanding that in a year when the weather doesn't cooperate, they're going to be strapped and might need a break. 
     It's all doable. Unfortunately, nobody's doing it, and probably won't be until Nicaragua works out the whole other complicated issue of a largely non-functional land registry system.

     But as I’ve come to expect from Central American farmers after almost four years of working here, they carry on. The Somoto woman I spoke to said all of 2015 has been a disaster, from the drought that disrupted both of the year’s two growing seasons to the community well that ran dry. But then she smiled, shrugged, and added that the women of FEMUPROCAN will just keep fighting the good fight. “That’s what we do,” she said. 

Thanks for supporting our work in Central America with a donation to Cuso International! Here's our fundraising site.