The result: The United Nations says that, at best, it will be able to raise enough money to help about 60 per cent of the 307 million people it predicts will need humanitarian aid next year. That means at least 117 million people won’t get food or other assistance in 2025.

The U.N. also will end 2024 having raised about 46 per cent of the $49.6 billion (C$71.4 billion) it sought for humanitarian aid across the globe, its own data shows. It’s the second year in a row the world body has raised less than half of what it sought. The shortfall has forced humanitarian agencies to make agonizing decisions, such as slashing rations for the hungry and cutting the number of people eligible for aid.

The consequences are being felt in places like Syria, where the World Food Programme (WFP), the U.N.’s main food distributor, used to feed 6 million people. Eyeing its projections for aid donations earlier this year, the WFP cut the number it hoped to help there to about 1 million people, said Rania Dagash-Kamara, the organization’s assistant executive director for partnerships and resource mobilization.

Dagash-Kamara visited the WFP’s Syria staff in March. “Their line was, ‘We are at this point taking from the hungry to feed the starving,’” she said in an interview.

U.N. officials see few reasons for optimism at a time of widespread conflict, political unrest and extreme weather, all factors that stoke famine. “We have been forced to scale back appeals to those in most dire need,” Tom Fletcher, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, told Reuters.

Financial pressures and shifting domestic politics are reshaping some wealthy nations’ decisions about where and how much to give. One of the U.N.’s largest donors – Germany – already shaved $500 million (C$719.5 million) in funding from 2023 to 2024 as part of general belt tightening. The country’s cabinet has recommended another $1 billion (C$1.44 billion) reduction in humanitarian aid for 2025. A new parliament will decide next year’s spending plan after the federal election in February.

Humanitarian organizations also are watching to see what U.S. President-elect Donald Trump proposes after he begins his second term in January.

Trump advisers have not said how he will approach humanitarian aid, but he sought to slash U.S. funding in his first term. And he has hired advisers who say there is room for cuts in foreign aid.

The U.S. plays the leading role in preventing and combating starvation across the world. It provided $64.5 billion (C$92.8 billion) in humanitarian aid over the last five years. That was at least 38 per cent of the total such contributions recorded by the U.N.

Sharing the wealth

The majority of humanitarian funding comes from just three wealthy donors: the U.S., Germany and the European Commission. They provided 58 per cent of the $170 billion (C$244.6 billion) recorded by the U.N. in response to crises from 2020 to 2024.

Three other powers – China, Russia and India – collectively contributed less than one per cent of U.N.-tracked humanitarian funding over the same period, according to a Reuters review of U.N. contributions data.

The inability to close the funding gap is one of the major reasons the global system for tackling hunger and preventing famine is under enormous strain. The lack of adequate funding – coupled with the logistical hurdles of assessing need and delivering food aid in conflict zones, where many of the worst hunger crises exist – is taxing efforts to get enough aid to the starving. Almost 282 million people in 59 countries and territories were facing high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023. Reuters is documenting the global hunger-relief crisis in a series of reports, including from hard-hit Sudan, Myanmar and Afghanistan.

The failure of major nations to pull their weight in funding for global initiatives has been a persistent Trump complaint. Project 2025, a set of policy proposals drawn up by Trump backers for his second term, calls on humanitarian agencies to work harder to collect more funding from other donors and says this should be a condition for additional U.S. aid.

On the campaign trail, Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025 blueprint. But after winning the election, he chose one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to run the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, a powerful body that helps decide presidential priorities and how to pay for them. For secretary of state, the top U.S. diplomat, he tapped Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has a record of supporting foreign aid.

Project 2025 makes particular note of conflict – the very factor driving most of today’s worst hunger crises.

“Humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes,” the blueprint says. It calls for deep cuts in international disaster aid by ending programs in places controlled by “malign actors.”

Billionaire Elon Musk has been tapped by Trump to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a new body that will examine waste in government spending. Musk said this month on his social media platform, X, that DOGE would look at foreign aid.

The aid cuts Trump sought in his first term didn’t pass Congress, which controls such spending. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and close Trump ally on many issues, will chair the Senate committee that oversees the budget. In 2019, he called “insane” and “short-sighted” a Trump proposal to cut the budget for foreign aid and diplomacy by 23 per cent.

Graham, Vought, Rubio and Musk did not respond to questions for this report.

Olympics and spaceships

So many people have been hungry in so many places for so long that humanitarian agencies say fatigue has set in among donors. Donors receive appeal after appeal for help, yet have limits on what they can give. This has led to growing frustration with major countries they view as not doing their share to help.

Jan Egeland was U.N. humanitarian chief from 2003 to 2006 and now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council, a nongovernmental relief group. Egeland said it is “crazy” that a tiny country like Norway is among the top funders of humanitarian aid. With a 2023 gross national income (GNI) less than two per cent the size of America’s, Norway ranked seventh among governments who gave to the U.N. that year, according to a Reuters review of U.N. aid data. It provided more than $1 billion.

Two of the five biggest economies – China and India – gave a tiny fraction as much.

China ranked 32nd among governments in 2023, contributing $11.5 million (C$16.5 million) in humanitarian aid. It has the world’s second-largest GNI.

India ranked 35th that year, with $6.4 million (C$9.2 million) in humanitarian aid. It has the fifth-largest GNI.

Egeland noted that China and India each invested far more in the type of initiatives that draw world attention. Beijing spent billions hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, and India spent $75 million (C$107.9 million) in 2023 to land a spaceship on the moon.

“How come there is not more interest in helping starving children in the rest of the world?” Egeland said. “These are not developing countries anymore. They are having Olympics … They are having spaceships that many of the other donors never could dream of.”

Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China has always supported the WFP. He noted that it feeds 1.4 billion people within its own borders. “This in itself is a major contribution to world food security,” he said.

India’s ambassador to the U.N. and its Ministry of External Affairs did not respond to questions for this report.

To analyze giving patterns, Reuters used data from the U.N.’s Financial Tracking Service, which records humanitarian aid. The service primarily catalogs money for U.N. initiatives and relies on voluntary reporting. It doesn’t list aid funneled elsewhere, including an additional $255 million (C$366.9 million) that Saudi Arabia reported giving this year through its own aid organization, the King Salman Humanitarian Aid & Relief Centre.

Restrictions and delays

When aid does come, it is sometimes late, and with strings attached, making it hard for humanitarian organizations to respond flexibly to crises.

Aid tends to arrive “when the animals are dead, people are on the move, and children are malnourished,” said Julia Steets, director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a think tank based in Berlin.

Steets has helped conduct several U.N.-sponsored evaluations of humanitarian responses. She led one after a drought-driven hunger crisis gripped Ethiopia from 2015 to 2018. The report concluded that while famine was avoided, funding came too late to prevent a huge spike in severe acute malnutrition in children. Research shows that malnutrition can have long-term effects on children, including stunted growth and reduced cognitive abilities.

Further frustrating relief efforts are conditions that powerful donors place on aid. Donors dictate details to humanitarian agencies, down to where food will go. They sometimes limit funding to specific U.N. entities or nongovernmental organizations. They often require that some money be spent on branding, such as displaying donors’ logos on tents, toilets and backpacks.

Aid workers say such earmarking has forced them to cut rations or aid altogether.

The U.S. has a long-standing practice of placing restrictions on nearly all of its contributions to the World Food Programme, one of the largest providers of humanitarian food assistance. More than 99 per cent of U.S. donations to the WFP carried restrictions in each of the last 10 years, according to WFP data reviewed by Reuters.

Asked about the aid conditions, a spokesperson for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversees American humanitarian spending, said the agency acts “in accordance with the obligations and standards required by Congress.”

Those standards aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian aid, the spokesperson said, and aid conditions are meant to maintain “an appropriate measure of oversight to ensure the responsible use of U.S. taxpayer funds.”

Some current and former officials with donor organizations defend their restrictions. They point to theft and corruption that have plagued the global food aid system.

In Ethiopia, as Reuters has detailed, massive amounts of aid from the U.N. World Food Programme were diverted , in part because of the organization’s lax administrative controls. An internal WFP report on Sudan identified a range of problems in the organization’s response to an extreme hunger crisis there, Reuters reported earlier this month, including an inability to react adequately and what the report described as “anti-fraud challenges.”

The U.N. has a “zero tolerance policy” toward “interferences” that disrupt aid and is working with donors to manage risks, said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Solving the U.N.’s broader fundraising challenges will require a change in its business model, said Martin Griffiths, who stepped down as U.N. humanitarian relief chief in June. “Obviously, what we need to do is to have a different source of funding.”

In 2014, Antonio Guterres, now the U.N.’s secretary-general and then head of its refugee agency, suggested a major change that would charge U.N. member states fees to fund humanitarian initiatives. The U.N.’s budget and peacekeeping missions already are funded by a fee system. Such funding would offer humanitarian agencies more flexibility in responding to need.

The U.N. explored Guterres’ idea in 2015. But donor countries preferred the current system, which lets them decide case by case where to send contributions, according to a U.N. report on the proposal.

Laerke said the U.N. is working to diversify its donor base.

“We can’t just rely on the same club of donors, generous as they are and appreciative as we are of them,” Laerke said.

— Reporting by Jaimi Dowdell, Kaylee Kang, Benjamin Lesser and Raymon Troncoso. Additional reporting by Giulia Paravicini, M.B. Pell, Emma Farge, Gram Slattery, Michelle Nichols, Patricia Zengerle, Charlie Szymanski and Allison Martell.

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The number facing hunger during the June-August lean season has quadrupled over the last five years, they said, noting that economic challenges such as double-digit inflation and stagnating local production had become major drivers of the crisis, beyond recurrent conflicts in the region.

Among the worst-affected countries are Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Mali, where around 2,600 people in northern areas are likely to experience catastrophic hunger, said the World Food Programme, U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, and the Food and Agriculture Organization in a joint statement.

“The time to act is now. We need all partners to step up … to prevent the situation from getting out of control,” said Margot Vandervelden, WFP’s acting regional director for West Africa.

Due to the food shortages, malnutrition is alarmingly high, the agencies said, estimating that 16.7 million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished across West and Central Africa.

The region’s heavy dependence on food imports has tightened the squeeze, particularly for countries battling high inflation such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.

Policies should be introduced to boost and diversify local food production “to respond to the unprecedented food and nutrition insecurity,” said Robert Guei, the FAO’s Sub-regional Coordinator for West Africa.

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A coalition of gangs has prevented the distribution of diesel and gasoline for over a month to protest a plan to cut fuel subsidies. Most transport is halted, with looting and gang shootouts becoming increasingly common.

“We have for the first time a famine present in Haiti,” Ulrika Richardson, resident and humanitarian co-ordinator for the U.N. system in Haiti, said in a telephone interview.

“The gang violence has cut off the capital from the food-producing south, and that means that we have now an increase in food insecurity.”

A U.N. spokesperson later clarified that Richardson should have described the situation as catastrophic hunger rather than famine.

Richardson said other countries need to do more to support Haiti, as the Caribbean country’s humanitarian response plan for this year has received less than 30 per cent of the required funding.

“While we address the current symptoms of the multiple crises that Haitians are facing… the security and the fuel crisis — we also have to make sure that we invest in the longer-term root causes, such as impunity, such as corruption,” said Richardson, the U.N.’s most senior humanitarian official in Haiti.

Some 19,200 people in Haiti’s Cite Soleil are suffering famine conditions, according to an analysis by U.N. agencies and aid groups on Friday. A famine is declared when at least 20 per cent of the households in a region are suffering famine conditions.

The analysis said that in total 4.7 million people — nearly half of Haiti’s population — are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.

The situation was “close to breaking point,” Jean-Martin Bauer, World Food Program country director in Haiti, told reporters earlier.

A U.N. report released on Friday said children as young as 10 and elderly women have been subjected to sexual violence, including collective rapes for hours in front of their parents or children.

“Gangs use sexual violence to instil fear, and alarmingly the number of cases increases by the day as the humanitarian and human rights crisis in Haiti deepens,” said Nada Al-Nashif, the acting human rights chief.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry last week asked for military assistance from abroad to confront the gangs, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has proposed “a rapid action force” to help Haiti’s police.

It is not immediately evident which countries would participate in such a force.

U.S. development agency USAID on Friday sent a disaster assistance response team to Haiti, the agency’s chief, Samantha Power, wrote on Twitter.

Such teams are dispatched in response to natural disasters and complex emergencies, and typically include infectious disease specialists, nutritionists, and logistics experts, according to USAID’s website.

The U.S. State Department has offered support for Haiti’s police and has sent a Coast Guard vessel to patrol the area.

The U.S. and Canada in the coming days will deliver armoured vehicles to the Haitian police that have been purchased by Haiti, U.S. assistant secretary of state Brian Nichols said in an interview with Haitian TV on Thursday.

— Reporting for Reuters by Brian Ellsworth in Miami and Paul Carrel; additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations.

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Inhabited by nomadic pastoralists, the semi-arid and remote Karamoja region on the border with Kenya has long lagged behind the rest of Uganda in terms of development. A surge of cattle raids by armed groups this year has worsened the situation.

“People like the elderly, lactating mothers and children, they are dying silently in their homes. They just succumb to hunger,” Jino Bornd Meri, the head of local government for Kaabong district, in Karamoja region, told Reuters.

In one county the district has recorded at least 184 deaths from hunger this month alone, he said.

Moses Okori, leader of the local charity Integrated Community Agriculture and Nutrition (ICAN), said he knew of at least 22 people who had died of hunger this month in Kotido, another district in the region.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) last month said at least 518,000 people, or 40 per cent of the region’s population, were facing high levels of food insecurity.

Local legislator Faith Nakut estimated that at least 600 people had died of hunger in the region since early June.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister’s office, Julius Mucunguzi, said he had received reports of hunger-related deaths but was unable to give an exact toll.

The government dispatched trucks of food to the region last week, he said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Elias Biryabarema.

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The U.N. agency said it is in the process of finding partners in Ukraine to help it distribute the food, and that it will also assist Ukrainian refugees coming across the border to neighbouring countries.

Ukraine closed its ports last Thursday after Russian forces invaded in the biggest assault on a European state since the Second World War. The closure means an inability to import goods, exacerbating food shortages caused by the general mayhem of war.

“In a year when the world is already facing an unprecedented level of hunger, it’s just tragic to see hunger raising its head in what has long been the breadbasket of Europe,” WFP executive director David Beasley said during a visit to the agency’s operations hub on the Polish-Ukrainian border.

The Russia-Ukraine war has contributed to surging global food price inflation.

The two countries account for 29 per cent of global wheat exports and 19 per cent of global corn exports. Ukraine is however unable to export due to the port closures, while Russia’s exports have been hamstrung by unprecedented Western financial sanctions.

The WFP itself buys more than half its wheat from Ukraine, and there are fears disruption to the country’s upcoming harvest will drive global food prices further and add to already worsening global hunger levels.

“The crisis in Ukraine could have a serious impact on vulnerable people around the world. (It) speaks to the urgent need not only to fund vital humanitarian aid programmes, but to invest in peace,” U.N Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said earlier this week during a funding appeal for Ukraine.

— Reporting by Maytaal Angel in London; additional reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva.

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“There’s a perfect storm coming because of several years of drought, conflict, economic deterioration, compounded by COVID,” David Beasley told Reuters in Doha. “The number of people marching towards starvation has spiked to now 14 million.”

The WFP is warning of a human catastrophe looming in Afghanistan if the United Nations agency is not able to raise US$200 million by September.

Afghanistan is facing economic collapse after foreign countries and institutions said they would withhold aid and monetary reserves after Islamist Taliban insurgents took control of the capital Kabul on Aug. 15.

Beasley said the international community faced some very difficult decisions, warning it would be “hell on earth” for the people of Afghanistan if the economic situation deteriorated.

“The people of Afghanistan need aid now,” he said, adding that the amount of people needing the WFP’s help could double if the international community “turns their back” on Afghans.

“The politics needs to be worked out as soon as possible.”

Beasley said he was very worried about whether the agency would raise the money needed and that it hoped Qatar, other Gulf Arab states and the United States would contribute.

Without the $200 million, he said, the WFP would start to run out of food for Afghanistan next month and four million lives would be at risk if food aid could not be pre-positioned for them before winter.

Beasley also said the Taliban had provided assurances to the WFP to allow its aid to continue to reach people unimpeded.

“They have thus far been co-operative. They have allowed us independence, neutrality and impartiality,” he said, adding that the Taliban were not taxing vehicles carrying aid supplies.

— Reporting for Reuters by Alexander Cornwell in Doha and Emma Thomasson in Geneva.

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The WFP’s first take-home rations were distributed for children under six years old at some 277 schools and preschools, as well as school staff, in 25 municipalities in northwestern Falcon state, WFP said in a statement.

Since Venezuela’s schools are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, parents or teachers picked up the monthly rations — which consist of six kilograms of rice, four kg of lentils, 454 grams of salt and one litre of vegetable oil — on their behalf, according to Susana Rico, the WFP’s Venezuela representative.

“We are reaching these vulnerable children at a critical stage of their lives when their brains and bodies need nutritious food to develop to their full potential,” Rico was quoted as saying in the statement.

Activists had been clamouring for years for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to allow the WFP to distribute food in the country, which contains the world’s largest crude reserves by some measures, as a drop in crude prices and gaping fiscal deficits led to hyperinflation and recession.

Maduro and the WFP reached a deal in April, in what was seen by some analysts and western diplomats as a concession by the government aimed at getting U.S. sanctions on its oil industry lifted.

More than five million Venezuelans have emigrated, according to the United Nations, while some 60 per cent of households live in poverty, according to the Encovi survey by researchers at Andres Bello Catholic University. Some seven million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations.

WFP aims to feed some 185,000 children by the end of the year, 850,000 by July 2022 and 1.5 million by 2023.

— Reporting for Reuters by Vivian Sequera.

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Beasley will replace another American, Etharin Cousin, who has been the WFP executive director since 2012. Washington was the top contributor to WFP in 2016 with US$2 billion, a third of the agency’s budget.

Trump has proposed an unspecified cut in funding for the United Nations and its agencies. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, like Beasley, is also a former governor of South Carolina.

“Mr. Beasley has a wealth of experience that would greatly benefit WFP, the United Nations and the international community at large,” Guterres wrote in a letter, seen by Reuters, notifying the WFP executive board of the appointment.

Guterres said Beasley, who served as South Carolina governor from 1995 to 1999, was among 23 applications/nominations for the job. The WFP executive board noted his appointment in a letter to Guterres on Tuesday.

— Reporting for Reuters by Michelle Nichols.

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“When I saw how things were going with the drought, I had to go to work,” she says. Now, her 11-year-old son tends the family’s gardens before he goes to school each day at noon. A neighbour stops in to check on the farm when he can.

On the day I meet Arana, she’s home with her nine-year-old daughter. She’d asked for the day off from her employer to meet with me. Her husband has worked in neighbouring Costa Rica for the past 18 years, returning home once every month or two. So it’s up to Arana to prepare, seed, weed and harvest the family’s seven acres of land. Most of it is dedicated to corn, beans and sorghum, but for the past number of years she’s also been growing fruit trees — coconut, mango, orange, lemon, papaya and passion fruit.

Arana tells me that it’s been two years since she’s harvested anything, due to the drought. She can count on one hand the number of rains in the past year, none of which were significant. She lives an hour’s drive south of the capital city Managua, in what’s known as Central America’s “Dry Corridor.”

Traditionally, farmers in Nicaragua depended on two rainy seasons in the year. Rain would start in early May, and the crops would be planted. A three- to four-week dry window in August allowed the crops to be harvested before the rains began again in early September and the second planting. The first crop cycle is the smaller of the two, but having a harvest is vital for food and to produce seed for the second planting. The second cycle is in the hurricane season when more rain is expected and, in turn, a bigger harvest.

But, that was before. Their agricultural calendar is in disorder now, and scientists blame climate change. The rain has become less predictable, and when it does come, there isn’t enough, and it has been made worse by El Niño.

“Before, the rainy seasons were a lot better,” Arana says. “We’d get 25 to 30 hundred-pound bags of corn, 20 to 25 bags of beans and 20 to 30 bags of sorghum.”

Arana was able to plant in both cycles in each of the last two years, but says that she got next to nothing for her efforts. “We wasted our money,” she says. “We’re in debt because of the drought. I don’t know how we’re going to pay it off. We have enough for food and to send the kids to school and that’s it.”

Arana’s story isn’t unique among smallholder farmers in central Nicaragua. Of the 13 farmers I met during my recent trip to Nicaragua, nearly all spoke of having to purchase food, reducing their meal sizes or cutting out foods that were no longer affordable to them, and needing to search for work off the farm. In recognition of the severity of the drought, the government of Nicaragua, with help from the World Food Programme, increased school meals for children from one to two a day.

The United States Agency for International Development’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) issued a food security alert for Central America and Haiti last fall, calling the drought in the region one of the worst in recent decades. Total rainfall between January 1 and September 10 of 2015 was the lowest in the past 35 years. The alert from FEWS, stating that approximately 2.5 million people in the region were already in need of urgent food assistance, was released on October 16, World Food Day, an annual day to raise awareness of issues of hunger and food insecurity.

High altitude farming

Drought is on the mind of every farmer I meet. But, like anywhere in the world, there are always some who are able to escape the worst of what the climate throws at them. At 49, coffee farmer Felipe Pastrana is one of these, and to thank for that is his farm’s location at 1,600 metres above sea level, near the community of Monzonte, close to Ocotal in Nicaragua’s northwest. “We’re at high altitude so we always get shade and rain,” he says.

Pastrana is temporarily immobile when we meet. A motorcycle accident led to a broken leg, a cast and crutches. We sit in rocking chairs inside the coolness of his house. Music carries in from the next room. I presume if it wasn’t for his bad luck I wouldn’t have been able to meet him. He gives the impression of a man who doesn’t sit still for long.

Pastrana owns about 78 acres of land. He’s recently given just under nine acres to each of his three adult children who manage their portions on top of day jobs. Of the 52 acres he has left, seven are in coffee. Pastrana says that coffee farming has become more technical and better managed in the years since he took over from his parents. He has a field that was planted 17 years ago that is still in production, but the plants are normally renewed every 12 years as yields start to decrease.

“Where I have my farm, it’s cool, so we start the harvest in February and we go through April. We’re the last ones to harvest here because we’re at the highest elevation.” Harvest on coffee farms at lower altitude will start in November and finish in January. Pastrana has four full-time workers and hires 20 more for the harvest season. The temporary workers are also farmers, but at a smaller scale, who have already finished their own harvest before going to work on the larger farms.

There are essentially three harvests, with the coffee being picked at different maturities. First is the select harvest, followed by the main harvest and then finally a clear-cut harvest, where everything is taken including the green berries. Each takes about three weeks.

A typical harvest for Pastrana is 100 bags of 100 pounds each from his seven acres. His export quality beans are sold to a business in Ocotal. The beans are delivered de-pulped and dried. At the plant they are re-dried and prepared for roasting.

Tasters at the processing plant will drink a cup of coffee made from his beans and score it out of 100 points to determine what price he will be paid. The highest Pastrana has been able to achieve is 93. “To get good points you have to harvest the coffee when it’s not fully red, but when it’s turning red. If you harvest coffee and it’s mixed, if you have under-ripe beans mixed with over-ripe beans, they lower your points,” he explains.

“We’ve had three consecutive years of receiving the prize for highest quality in Nicaragua, but when it comes time to sell, they give us the same price as local market coffee,” Pastrana says. “They make a huge profit off of us.”

Despite the uncertainty, the company he sells to offers a better price than he’d get elsewhere in the area. Other businesses will only pay a flat rate for beans, Pastrana says, then separate the best coffee from the lower quality, market it and keep the profit.

The trade-off is that he doesn’t get paid up front, but only when the coffee is exported. He delivered his beans to the plant in April and when I met him in September he still hadn’t been paid. In 2015 he earned US$305 per hundred-pound bag, before taking out US$50 for taxes, transport, customs fees and insurance.

“Here the businesses will pay me $255 for a hundred-pound bag. But in Japan they resold it for $800 for the same market quality. If you look at the margin of profit they are making, most goes to the business. We are just left with a very small profit,” Pastrana says.

Pastrana keeps a portion of his harvest to sell roasted and ground to those in town. He sells it for five cordoba a bag (C$0.25), which makes eight cups of coffee.

While his high altitude coffee plants have been largely spared from the effects of the drought, he says the lack of rain is “a big problem” on his land at a lower elevation where he grows beans and corn. “Those are things we use in order to feed our workers and now we have to buy them because we can’t produce it.”

Conservation agriculture

Head 150 km southwest and you’ll arrive where Guillarmina Castro farms in Pavón, close to Somotillo. Here, Castro and her husband Hector Guevaro are facing problems similar to other farmers working in the country’s Dry Corridor — they cite the lack of rain as their No. 1 challenge — and yet, something different was happening on their approximately 38-acre farm.

Castro lived through the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and is now watching as another climate event plagues her community. She says that they’d only had two really good rains in the previous eight months. Nearby rivers that once flooded regularly have gone dry. Despite the hardships, a new way of farming has provided hope.

For the past three years Castro has been adopting conservation agricultural practices, with support from local and international aid groups, including the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. The three main practices — minimal disturbance of the soil, crop rotation, and soil cover — are seen as particularly useful in dry areas, trapping what precipitation does fall.

“We get better yields and can produce with less rain,” Castro says.

Castro’s husband Hector readily admits that it’s his wife who is the motor behind the farm and proudly shows off what she’s accomplished. On a tour of their garden (interrupted by a too-curious and hungry neighbour’s pig that had to be chased away), I’m shown the rich soil, mulch and planting stations with three corn plants in each. It was easy to forget how little rain there had been as we walked through the farm. There were no telltale signs of drought that I had seen in other farmers’ fields.

It is through donations to the Foodgrains Bank, primarily from rural Canada, that this work in Nicaragua is able to happen. “Growing Projects” across Canada see a group of farmers setting aside a piece of land, and planting and harvesting it as a community or a group of churches working together. Proceeds from the sale of the harvest are donated to the Foodgrains Bank and in turn are funnelled into work overseas, such as projects teaching conservation agriculture in Pavón. In 2015 there were 260 “Growing Projects” and other fundraising events across the country. Each project is unique, with some donating the proceeds of wheat and others pumpkins. It is farmers helping farmers.

Agronomists currently work with 187 farmers in the region to help them adopt conservation agriculture practices. While the amount of land each owns differs, by any measure, the farmers are small-scale and wholly dependent on the climate. Farmers are encouraged to first try the method with a portion of their corn or bean crop, but Castro has embraced the concept. In addition to corn, she’s growing pole beans, cassava, watermelons, tomatoes, and green peppers using the three conservation agriculture principles. So far she’s converted just under half an acre of her farm, with plans to increase it to three and a half acres.

“It’s more work. I can’t convert it all in one year. The hard part is making the planting stations,” Castro says. Previously, she would scatter seed on the land. She is now more deliberate, planting three seeds in evenly spaced stations.

As climate change causes an increase in extreme weather events, what was traditionally known as subsistence agriculture is fast turning into survival agriculture in some parts of the world, including Nicaragua. Farmers like Castro have had to adjust to an increasingly arid climate and try new practices. In an imperfect situation, she is adapting and finding reason to be hopeful.

When I ask what her neighbours think of what she is doing, Castro says, “Some laugh at you. Some like it.” But as soon as she learned about it she could see the advantages. In what appears to be the new normal in Nicaragua’s climate, she sees it in her own terms: “the only option for survival.”

This article was originally published as “A world in flux” in the February 16, 2016, issue of Country Guide

Stephanie McDonald is a senior policy advisor at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. She visited Haiti and Nicaragua in September to study the impact of climate change.

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