The project, which is implemented by the Chortí Regional Farmers' Association (ASORECH) will immediately benefit 112 indigenous farming families in eastern Guatemala severely affected by the drought, while a broader humanitarian aid program is being prepared.

As a result of the El Niño phenomenon and the effects of climate change, this year drought has once again hit many hundreds of thousands of families of small agricultural farmers in the Central American dry corridor, who have lost a large part of their basic grain crops for self-supply due to the absence of rain during the critical period of crop growth.

According to preliminary figures published in late July and early August by various United Nations agencies, international NGOs and national governments, the partial or total losses of basic grain crops caused by this year's drought would be affecting more than 300,000 families in the Central American dry corridor, or more than 1.5 million people.

The project, which is implemented by the Chortí Regional Farmers' Association (ASORECH), ASB local partner in Guatemala, will provide basic grain seeds, fertilizers and agricultural tools for the second basic grain season, which runs from mid-August to mid-September. In addition, filters and water tanks will be provided to each of the 112 families in the Municipality of Camotán, Chiquimula, to ensure their access to safe water at the household level and thus reduce diarrhoeal diseases that particularly affect children. Medicines will also be equipped and supplied to these families' reference health post and training will be implemented for beneficiary families in agricultural techniques for drought resilience and water management for human consumption at the household level. Finally, community health promoters will be trained.

"We seek to alleviate the suffering of the most vulnerable families, who have been severely hit by the drought and who have not received any assistance so far. At the same time, we aim to strengthen their resilience to the increasingly recurrent and inclement weather in the region," says Alejandro Zurita, ASB's Regional Director for Latin America. He adds: "However, vulnerability and susceptibility to drought is strongly associated with the structural poverty that Central American countries suffer and which continues to be a social and ethical debt of their rulers". The case of Guatemala stands out, where 49% of children under 5 years of age suffer from chronic malnutrition, in other words, they have an unrecoverable delay in their growth due to insufficient and/or unbalanced nutrition.

This project has been enabled by the financial support of Action Germany Aid - ADH ((https://www.aktion-deutschland-hilft.de/en/), the consortium of German humanitarian NGOs.

While this project is being implemented, ASB, together with its local partner organisations, is preparing a more extended humanitarian aid programme for thousands of drought-affected farming families in the Central American dry corridor, not only in Guatemala, but also in El Salvador and Honduras.

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