Floods bring misery for half a million Central Americans

For several weeks from mid-October, Honduras and Guatemala were drenched by heavy rains caused by a slow-moving tropical depression. Areas of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize also experienced flooding and landslides. A November update from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said 320,000 people had been affected in Honduras and 150,000 in Guatemala. At least 60 people were killed and tens of thousands made homeless.

Aid workers said the disaster in Honduras was the worst since the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch a decade ago. They fear the flooding – which washed away crops as well as houses – will push malnutrition higher in a region already struggling with food price inflation. OCHA has warned that the most vulnerable communities have lost their livelihoods and income, and their living conditions will remain precarious for several months to come.

Yet, despite the scale of emergency, relief work has been hampered by a lack of funding. The United Nations issued an emergency appeal for $17 million to provide food, shelter, health care, water and sanitation for six months. But just 10 percent of this had been funded by late November, and that included a $1.5 million grant from the U.N. Central Emergency Response Fund - which helps plug the gaps for neglected emergencies like this.

Christian Aid has criticised the slowness of the international response, which it attributes partly to scant coverage in the world's media. "This is the worst flooding Honduras has experienced since Hurricane Mitch ten years ago," said Erwin Garzona, Christian Aid’s emergencies officer for Central America. "The impact is worse than Hurricane Felix in 2007 or Hurricane Bertha in 2004, but there has been little media coverage, partly because this situation is caused by continuous heavy rainfall rather than a dramatic hurricane strike."

Garzona told humanitarian news website AlertNet that the disaster was exacerbated by the large number of landslides caused by widespread deforestation, which has become much worse in the last decade. Landslides have long-term effects because villagers cannot replant crops and rebuild homes when the rains subside. And some aid workers say the level of poverty in Honduras has increased since Mitch, meaning more people are building homes on land that is marginal and prone to flooding.

October's floods also damaged huge swathes of farm land, which could lead to food shortages. Millions of poor people in Central America and the Caribbean have struggled to buy enough food for their families as the price of basic staples like corn and beans hit record highs earlier this year. "If we add, in a situation such as this, massive damage to crops that exacerbates already-high food prices, we've got a time-bomb in the making," warned Nils Kastberg, regional director for the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF). "We've already seen one dramatic example of storms aggravating an existing food crisis this year in Haiti, where the numbers of malnourished children coming to UNICEF-supported nutrition centres rose substantially in the wake of the storms there."

For the latest on the disaster and the relief response: www.reliefweb.int (English) and www.redhum.org (Spanish)