A prolonged drought has devastated crops and left families with little food and no means of making a living. Australia’s Afghanistan War Crimes: A Case of Old Habits Die Hard? Amidst beautiful landscapes, active volcanoes and a diverse indigenous population, Guatemala suffers from malnutrition and hunger. They divert the river water to their greenhouses or for watering the palm trees, and the rivers are drying up. You can’t sleep because you’re thinking about what you can do. Américo González López, Mayor of the Manos Unidos Cooperative, talks about how the RESPA palm oil project in the Sayaxché municipality was flawed from the beginning and had state protection for whatever plunder it did in the region: “This case [contamination of Río la Pasió] proves that MARN [Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources] has failed and that the municipality has failed. The COVID-19 crisis is hitting Central America’s fragile Northern Triangle–Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador–full force. Official mortality statistics for 2019 have not yet been made public, but doctors and medical staff working across the country tell CNN that unusually high levels of … It provided food assistance to over 18,100 people, including more than 4,900 children under five who were at risk of malnutrition. Extreme poverty spiked by 10 percentage points between 2006 and 2014”. You get scared and wonder if your child is going to die. Palm oil and sugarcane plantations, apart from leading to market-oriented de-peasantization, also cause displacement, environmental disasters, economic uncertainty and consequently, food insecurity. The words used by UNICEF back then in 1989 resonate loudly with the current situation in Guatemala. In the 1961-1990 period, maize imports had accounted for less than 4% of total consumption. They monopolize the water. The expansion of sugar-cane plantations in Guatemala occurred between 2001 and 2012, leading to a 55% increase in production area and a 46% increase in production volume. Food crisis in Guatemala. “We are dying not only from the virus but also from hunger, poverty, forgetfulness of the state, exploitation by businessmen, and corruption by politicians and the military”. These children in the clinic are severely malnourished, many have kwashiorkor. The area reports high rates of violence against women , and there are few resources for victims or … The people of the area were not consulted about the project in spite of the fact that it was a project with a huge environmental impact. Malnutrition and chronic food shortages are not unusual in Guatemala. Almost half the population cannot afford the cost of the basic food basket. The systematic dismantling of domestic maize production has paved the way for the installation of an export-oriented agricultural model comprising predominantly of palm oil and sugarcane. In 1979, “88 percent of productive farm units were less than family subsistence size, holding 16 percent of arable land, while 2 percent of units held 65 percent of arable land…Between 1964 and 1979 the number of farms of less than 3.5 hectares doubled; between 1950 and 1979, the average farm size among those with less than 7 hectares fell from 2.4 to 1.8 hectares.” Through this drastic decrease in the size of landholdings, approximately 96% of farm units (comprising 20% of all agricultural lands) fell into the subsistence or below-subsistence categories in 1998. In its 1989 annual report, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) had blamed the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s for the death of hundreds of thousands of children in the Global South. 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