Guatemala's children go hungry as extreme weather hits harvests

• Guatemala struggles to stem high malnutrition rates
• Climate change causing widespread food crop losses
• Women farmers supported to stem child hunger

CHIQUIMULA, Guatemala - Weighing a crying 3-year-old girl on scales that dangle from the ceiling of a rural health clinic in eastern Guatemala, nurse Gamaliel Amador is not surprised by the reading - she hasn't gained weight.

The scales show 8 kg (17.6 lb), the same number recorded by Amador when the girl was first brought in two weeks ago - well below average for a child of her age and a sign of moderate malnutrition.

"You need to give the girl what I asked you to," Amador reminds her grandmother, referring to his previous prescription of free high-calorie peanut paste and a supplement to ward off zinc deficiency - commonly linked to malnutrition.

Similar cases of child malnutrition are repeated across Indigenous mountain villages in Guatemala's Chiquimula province, a poor, farming area that lies in the drought-prone Dry Corridor - a belt of land stretching across Central America.

Subsistence bean and maize farmers in Guatemala are finding it harder to put food on the table as prolonged droughts and torrential rains driven by climate change hit harvests.

In Guatemala, rates of stunted growth in children aged from 6 months to 59 months caused by chronic malnutrition are among the world's highest and the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP).

"Malnutrition is a combination of many things - an unbalanced diet, poor hygiene, a lack of clean water and education," Amador, a government health worker, said.

Not all parents show up for weight and height check-ups, meaning some children fall through the cracks, he added.

Economic cost

For decades, Guatemala has struggled to stem chronic child malnutrition, which harms brain development and learning, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF.

Stunted children face a future of ill health, poor education, low earnings and are more likely to live in poverty.

Malnutrition is also bad for the economy, World Bank research shows, costing poor countries up to 3% of their annual gross domestic product (GDP).

Malnourished children risk losing more than 10% of their lifetime earnings potential.

Like previous leaders, Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arévalo, who is due to take office in January, has pledged to expand development in rural areas to combat malnutrition.

But such promises have in the past made little headway in a country where corruption scandals and political turmoil often dominate the attention of officials and lawmakers.

Globally, efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition are moving backwards. According to the United Nations, the number of people affected by hunger globally rose to 828 million in 2021, an increase of about 46 million from the previous year.

U.N. projections also show the world is falling behind schedule on efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of ending all forms of hunger and malnutrition by 2030.

Counting tortillas

In Guatemala, hunger is often invisible - considered part of everyday life in poor, rural communities.

Villagers often measure hunger by the amount of small tortillas a person eats in a day.

When villagers say they eat three meals a day and have enough food, it usually means just eating three to four tortillas a day, while having five to eight tortillas with beans and a herb soup is regarded a feast. Eating meat is rare.

"Unfortunately, the poorest of families are used to eating just a few tortillas a day. They consider this to be normal," said Amador.

With two-thirds of Guatemala's 17 million people living on less than $2 a day, many farmers cannot afford to buy food if their harvests fail due to extreme weather events.

About 3.1 million Guatemalans are likely to face "acute food insecurity" from September to February 2024, according to U.N. data, driven by rising prices of food and fertilizer.

Food harvests this year could also be depleted as "below-normal" rainfall is predicted until December in the region's Dry Corridor, fueled by the El Niño weather phenomenon.

Next to the clinic that lies in a hamlet in Chiquimula's Camotán municipality, Monica Ramirez de Leon, an elderly subsistence maize and bean farmer, recalled recent years when poor harvests have meant eating just one or two tortillas a day.

"We've gone to bed hungry. It's better now as we're eating more than five tortillas a day," said Ramirez de Leon at her adobe and straw thatched-roof home set amid rolling mountains.

For the first time in her life, Ramirez de Leon, who lives with her mother and grandmother, has received financial aid to help cushion climate impacts on her harvests.

Along with support in the form of cash transfers and a community savings bank, destitute small-scale farmers are receiving parametric insurance payments for crop losses for up to $500 as part of a WFP-run project.

Ramirez de Leon has received two payments - one for crop damage caused by excess rainfall last year and another payout for drought this year.

"I bought eggs, rice and fertilizer with the payout. I also save about five quetzals ($0.64) a week to add to our community savings group that I use for emergencies to buy medicine," said Ramirez de Leon, one of more than 14,000 people, mostly women, who are insured across Guatemala.

Nearby along a narrow unpaved path, neighbor Lea Ramirez, a mother-of-three, spent her insurance payout on a pig that she hopes to sell for a profit in nine months.

U.N. and international aid agencies tend to focus on providing women farmers with technical and financial assistance, as women are far more likely to spend money on food for their children and not on alcohol, as villagers say some fathers do.

"As a mother, you know what your children need and what's missing in the kitchen," said Ramirez, as her 5-year-old son played on the dirt floor with a plastic car.

"I've experienced hunger growing up. I don't want my children to feel the same. The pig is my emergency plan," said the 26-year-old.

Climate adaption

In Guatemala's western highlands in the Huehuetenango province, similar efforts are underway as aid agencies prop up small-scale farmers to tackle malnutrition and extreme poverty with multiple interventions targeting a single family.

This includes helping women to grow different food crops, set up rainwater storage systems, as well as cash transfers and donations of biofortified and drought-resistant bean seeds.

"The aim is to help farmers change from just consuming what they grow to being able to sell food and get an income, to lift them from extreme poverty," said Fredy Palacios, a Guatemalan agriculture expert with aid group Action Against Hunger, which supports farming communities in the country.

In San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán, an area home to Indigenous Mayan communities where running water, internet and electricity connections are often lacking, laborers are helping farmer María Domingo build a deep pond in her garden to catch rainwater.

She aims to use the stored water to grow avocado trees that will bear fruit in about four years, and generate a future source of income.

"It takes patience and hard work but I know that if it doesn't rain, my reservoir will help me," said Domingo, who is responsible for feeding seven children at her mountaintop farm.

In a nearby hamlet, Maria Perez, a mother-of-two, said the five cash transfers of 600 quetzals ($76) she has received in the past 18 months from Action Against Hunger are a lifeline.

"What I farm isn't enough to feed my children. With the money, I'm buying fruit, milk, and eggs at the market," said Perez, speaking a mixture of Spanish and the Indigenous Mam language and wearing a traditional red and purple dress.

"It's a big help. My children eat more and get sick less," she said.

($1 = 7.8450 quetzals)

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney; Additional Reporting by Diana Baptista;  Editing by Helen Popper.)