The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate change

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/30/migrant-caravan-causes-climate-change-central-america

Oliver Milman in New York, Emily Holden in Washington and David Agren in Huixtla, Mexico
Tue 30 Oct 2018

Thousands of Central American migrants trudging through Mexico towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty.

But another crucial driving factor behind the migrant caravan has been harder to grasp: climate change.

Most members of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – three countries devastated by violence, organised crime and systemic corruption, the roots of which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts.
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Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty.

And they warn that in the coming decades, it is likely to push millions more people north towards the US.

“The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture – which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.

“The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.”

Migrants don’t often specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes.

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Lara said he thought that changing weather patterns had a lot to do with the problem, though he also blamed his plight on greedy bosses and coffee dealers. “I didn’t leave my country because I wanted to. I left because I had to,” he said.

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Climate change is bringing more extreme and unpredictable weather to the region: summer rainfall is starting later and has become more irregular. Drought fuelled by El Niño has gripped much of Central America over the past four years, but the period has been occasionally punctuated by disastrous flooding rains.

As a result, more than 3 million people have struggled to feed themselves.

“Coffee and maize are sensitive to temperature and rainfall changes,” said Albro. “If a coffee crop fails you can’t just turn on a dime and do something else, it takes a long time to recover. There have been several lost crops in a row and it’s caused tremendous hardship for small-scale farming.”

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Climate change is bringing more extreme and unpredictable weather to the region: summer rainfall is starting later and has become more irregular. Drought fuelled by El Niño has gripped much of Central America over the past four years, but the period has been occasionally punctuated by disastrous flooding rains.

As a result, more than 3 million people have struggled to feed themselves.

“Coffee and maize are sensitive to temperature and rainfall changes,” said Albro. “If a coffee crop fails you can’t just turn on a dime and do something else, it takes a long time to recover. There have been several lost crops in a row and it’s caused tremendous hardship for small-scale farming.”

Farmers first migrate to urban areas, where they confront a new set of problems, which in turn prompt them to consider an international odyssey.

“There’s an internal movement where someone will go to, say, Guatemala City and then perhaps get extorted by a gang and then move to the US,” said Leutert. “When they get here they will say they’ve moved because of violence – but climate change was the exacerbating factor.”

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“If your farm has been dried to a crisp or your home has been inundated with water and you’re fleeing for your life, you’re not much different from any other refugee,” said Michael Doyle, an international relations scholar at Columbia University. “The problem is that other refugees fleeing war qualify for that status, while you don’t.”

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