The following investigative report points to the sugar cane industry as a key culprit.  That’s why EcoViva´s local partner organization, the Mangrove Association, launched the Movement to Defend Life and Natural Resources.  Their goal is to regulate the agrochemicals used on sugar cane, which also contaminate all local water sources. With support from EcoViva, the movement introduced regulatory legislation into five local governments this year, but the legislation is currently on hold due to pressure from the growers. We will work in 2012 to keep up the pressure on local government councils, and the Ministry of the Environment, to regulate this toxic industry and protect local citizens.

Read the full article below:

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/12/12/7578/thousands-sugar-cane-workers-die-wealthy-nations-stall-solutions

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A mysterious epidemic is sweeping Central America – it’s the second biggest cause of death among men in El Salvador, and in Nicaragua it’s a bigger killer of men than HIV and diabetes combined. It’s unexplained but the latest theory is that the victims are literally working themselves to death.

A sugarcane worker in Nicaragua (Photo: Anna Maria Barry-Jester)

In the western lowlands of Nicaragua, in a region of vast sugarcane fields, sits the tiny community of La Isla.

The small houses are a patchwork of concrete and wood. Pieces of cloth serve as doors.

Maudiel Martinez emerges from his house to greet me. He’s pale, and his cheekbones protrude from his face. He hunches over like an old man – but he is only 19-years-old.

“The way this sickness is – you see me now, but in a month I could be gone. It can take you down all of a sudden,” he says.

Maudiel’s kidneys are failing. They do not perform the essential function of filtering waste from his body. He’s being poisoned from the inside.

When he got ill two years ago, he was already familiar with this disease and how it might end. “I thought about my father and grandfather,” he says. Both died of the same condition. Three of his brothers have it too.

All of them worked in the sugarcane fields.

(Graphic: BBC)

Kidney disease has killed so many men here that locals now call their community not simply La Isla – which means “The Island” – but La Isla de las Viudas – “The Island of the Widows.”

The epidemic extends far beyond Nicaragua. It’s prevalent along the Pacific coast of Central America – across six countries.

“It is important that the chronic kidney disease (CKD) afflicting thousands of rural workers in Central America be recognized as what it is – a major epidemic with a tremendous population impact,” says Victor Penchaszadeh, a clinical epidemiologist at Columbia University in the US. He is also a consultant to the Pan-American Health Organization on chronic diseases in Latin America.

El Salvador’s health minister recently called on the international community for help. She said the epidemic is “wasting away our populations.”

 
Heat stress

At a health clinic in El Salvador, in the farming region of Bajo Lempa, Dr. Carlos Orantes recently found that a quarter of the men in his area suffered from chronic kidney disease.

What’s more, he says, most of the men who are ill show no signs of high blood pressure or diabetes – the most common causes of CKD elsewhere in the world.

“Most of the men we studied have CKD from unknown causes,” he says.

What the men in the area have in common is they all work in farming. So Dr. Orantes thinks a major cause of their kidney damage is the toxic chemicals – pesticides and herbicides – that are routinely used here in agriculture.

“These chemicals are banned in the United States, Europe and Canada, and they’re used here, without any protection, and in large amounts that are very concerning,” he says.

But he’s not ready to rule out other possible causes. For instance, the overuse of painkillers can damage the kidneys, and so can drinking too much alcohol. Both are major problems here, he says.

In Nicaragua, the disease has become a political issue.

In 2006, the World Bank gave a loan to Nicaragua’s largest sugar company to build an ethanol plant. Plantation workers filed a complaint, saying the company’s working conditions and use of chemicals were fueling the epidemic. They said the loan violated the bank’s own standards for worker safety and environmental practices.

In response, the bank agreed to fund a study to try to identify the cause of the epidemic.

“The evidence points us most strongly to a hypothesis that heat stress might be a cause of this disease,” says Daniel Brooks of Boston University, who is leading the research.

His team has found it’s not just sugarcane workers who are falling ill. Miners and port workers also suffer high rates of kidney disease, yet they’re not exposed to farm chemicals. What these men have in common, he says, is they all work long hours in extreme heat.

“Day after day of hard manual labor in hot conditions – without sufficient replacement of fluids – could lead to effects on the kidney that are not obvious at first but over time accumulate to the point that it enters into a diseased state,” says Brooks.

“This has never been so far shown to cause chronic kidney disease, so we would be talking about a new mechanism that has not so far been described in the scientific literature.”

But Brooks says a new preliminary study bolsters this hypothesis. His team tested blood and urine from sugarcane workers who perform different jobs. The scientists found more evidence of kidney damage in the workers who have more strenuous jobs outside.

Professor Aurora Aragon of Nicaragua’s National University in Leon says this explanation makes sense. She’s long suspected that part of the problem is the way sugarcane workers are paid – receiving more money the more sugarcane they cut.

“This way of working forces people to do more than they are able to do, and this is not good for their health,” she says.

 
No alternative

“Working in the field made us feel dizzy and nauseous,” says Jose Donald Cortez, who cut sugarcane for 18 years. “We often had fevers.”

Cortez now has kidney disease and heads an organization of sugarcane workers in Nicaragua who are ill. He’s convinced that something on the sugar plantations is causing the sickness.

Whatever it is, he says, those who are ill need treatment with dialysis – which can keep them alive when their kidneys fail. But few can get it because dialysis is extremely expensive and rarely available.

“If you ask the ministry of health they say they don’t have the money. If you ask the sugar company if they are responsible, they say no.”

For their part, the sugarcane companies say they’re not convinced that farm chemicals or working conditions on their plantations are to blame for the epidemic. Still, they say, they are trying to protect their workers’ health.

One conglomerate that owns several sugar plantations in Central America – the Pellas Group – says it’s started giving workers an hour-long lunch break and now employs staff to make sure the men drink water. The company also routinely tests its workers’ kidney function.

Company spokesman Ariel Granera says if a worker is found to have kidney disease, he is let go – out of concern, says Granera, for the worker’s well-being.

But the sick workers who have been dismissed say what they receive from the companies and from social security isn’t enough to live on – and when they lose their jobs, they lose the right to be treated at company clinics.

In La Isla, and many other villages like it, the men often seek new employment with contractors who do not check for kidney disease yet send the men to work in the same sugarcane fields.

“There is no alternative,” says one woman who recently lost her father. “No other way to support a family.”

________________________________________________________________

PRI’s The World looked into this story with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a project of The Center for Public Integrity.

Learn how the United States promoted sugarcane production in Central America and resisted global attention to the CKD epidemic in this ICIJ story by reporters Sasha Chavkin and Ronnie Greene.

Herman Rosa Chávez, Ministro de El Salvador de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (MARN), dio este fuerte discurso en la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Cambio Climático, que se celebro del 28 de noviembre hasta el 11 de diciembre en Durban, Sudáfrica. Para ver el discurso original en español, clique aqui.

Speech by Herman Rosa Chávez Minister of Environment and Natural Resources in the High Level Segment of the COP17/MOP7 Durban, December 8, 2011

Mr. President, your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Our climate system has been severely disrupted and many countries are paying a high and only growing price because of it.

Grassroots social movements demanding real solutions in Durban (Photo: ALEXANDER JOE, AFP PHOTO)

Mr. President, allow me to illustrate what is happening in my own country with a graph – which is being distributed – that shows how, over the past 50 years we went from being hit by one extreme hydrometeorological event per decade in the 1960s and 1970s, to nine in the last ten years.

The Tropical Depression 12E that struck El Salvador two months ago was the last in this terrible and destructive sequence.  For ten days, it dumped up to 1.5 meters of rain.  Among other effects, we experienced landslides, flooding of one-tenth of our territory, and huge losses of infrastructure and agriculture.

While in comparison to previous events, we did manage to reduce the number of lives lost due to a fairly strengthened civil protection system, 40 people still died.  Moreover, we could not avoid the economic losses that totaled $ 840 million – 4% of our GDP.

Our country received a little over $ 6 million in emergency assistance, and my government is grateful for the solidarity of the United Nations, our regional banks, Norway, Taiwan, Switzerland, Canada, USA, Korea, Spain, Japan, and Brazil among others.

We were especially moved by Guatemala, who was also affected by Tropical Depression 12E, but nevertheless decided to share with us some of the emergency relief that their country had received.

It is precisely this spirit of solidarity and shared responsibility that we have to bring to our negotiations here in Durban.  Do not make the mistake of thinking that there are currently other crises that are more important than the disruption of our climate system.  We can all make a difference here in Durban.  Thank you, Ms. President, for the respect you have shown to all of us, listening to all of our voices and not just those that seem to be more important.  The truth is that we are all important here in Durban.

Mr. President, we often hear that we need to achieve a ‘balanced package’ of decisions.  But what does this mean for the people who are already so affected by global climate change that they are seeing their hopes for a better future be cancelled by our persistent collective inability?

I believe that there are at least three essential elements in this balanced package:

First of all, we need to make very clear and specific decisions about funding.  All vulnerable countries need funding to support their actions for urgent adaptation.  That is why we must decide here the immediate operationalization of the Green Climate Fund, with all of the essential elements that we have been discussing under the leadership of this Presidency, including a significant initial capitalization so that we will not be starting with an empty shell.

A significant expansion of our adaption efforts and related resources is the second essential element of the balanced package.  If we don’t do it, the losses and damage will increase much more in the near future and many of our countries will face increasing threats to their stability.  Massive internal displacement and emigration would be an almost certain result.

The third essential element has to do with the serious mitigation commitments that are required from developed countries and principal emitters, as this is essential to moderate the growing destabilization of the global climate system.  Even so, we must make sure that they are fully respected.

We must assure the right to an equitable access to sustainable development and the principle of historic responsibilities.

Mr. President, even though our contribution to global emissions is negligible, we want to contribute, too, by seeking synergies between adaptation and mitigation, as in the case of our National Program for the Restoration of Ecosystems and Landscapes that we hope to put into action next year.

This initiative, if it meets sufficient external support, will transform our degraded landscapes and agriculture, increasing our ability to adapt to phenomenal climatic extremes.  We will try to achieve this through the massive expansion of agro-forestry systems and sustainable agriculture.  In this manner, we will be able to improve biodiversity, while at the same time capturing carbon in the ground, vegetation, and trees.  This model of “mitigation based on adaption” is also the base of our REDD+ program, thus it is what makes sense for our needs and circumstances.

Mr. President, you can count on our support.  Under your knowing guidance, we hope that the Final Document of Durban will send a powerful message of hope to our people who have been disappointed for so long.  We cannot and we must not disappoint them again.

Thank you.

Please watch and share this 30 second video showing the incredible ways our partners are using community organizing to cool the planet.

Through years of grassroots organizing, our partners La Coordinadora del Bajo Lempa and the Mangrove Association are finding ways to overcome the worst impacts of climate change now.

They have been working with local farmers to implement climate-smart agriculture to overcome extreme droughts and rainfall. They are pioneering community-led solutions to protect and restore the most pristine mangrove forest left in Central America, which store up to four times the carbon that tropical rainforests do.

Please support EcoViva’s work by sharing the video on Facebook or making a tax-deductible donation today.

Video produced by Spencer Stoner.

El Salvador’s growing sugar cane industry, dominated by a small network of giant sugar cane mill companies, is one of the clearest threats to environmental health and well-being faced by our partners in the Bajo Lempa region.  And it isn’t just thanks to the incredibly toxic chemicals they use and the severe environmental damage caused by sugar cane burning.

While most local families grow corn for subsistence, the landscape is dominated by sugar cane plantations.

On my trip to El Salvador last week, I learned a lot about the way that El Salvador’s sugar cane industry is also contributing to increased flooding in some communities in the Bajo Lempa.

Two of the communities that faced the most severe flooding during October’s record-setting rains—Nueva Esperanza and Salinas del Potrero—had experienced very little flooding since Hurricane Mitch in 1998—that is, until last year.

Recently, new sugar cane fields were created in a wetlands area near these communities.  The sugarcane growers drained the wetlands and created a culvert that now channels all the water towards those communities.

Nueva Esperanza is located 6 kilometers (about 3 miles) from the Lempa River.  Since they had experienced very little flooding in the past, when the community was told to evacuate many people didn’t bother—at that point it wasn’t raining and the ground was dry at the time.  Who would think that water released from the dam could flow 3 miles to an area that had barely ever flooded before?

One of dozens of trucks taking the cane harvest to the mill. The sugar mill owns the trucks.

When the water arrived it rushed in as a gigantic wall.  The people of Nueva Esperanza told me that they heard a massive roaring sound as it approached and it came crashing through the community, catching them by surprise.   The tremendous power of the flood pushed away cars, trucks, animals and appliances.  Those who hadn’t evacuated had to climb onto rooftops and up into the church bell tower to survive.

This is just one problem of the many caused by sugar cane’s growing dominance in the area.   Many local people live essentially as sharecroppers, as used to be the case amongst African American farmers in the US South.  The largest sugar mill—reportedly owned by the Regalado family, one of the wealthiest families in El Salvador—controls much of the local economy.

I was told that the mill provides the fertilizers and pesticides for growing the cane on loan, and then subtracts that from the amount the growers receive at the harvest.  The mill decides when and what to pay the farmers. The mill also mandates what chemicals must be used and when.

And those chemicals can be deadly.  I learned that in La Papalota, dozens of people were taken to the hospital in 2009 after a crop-dusting plane accidentally sprayed their houses and poisoned them.  I can only imagine the long-term health impacts to those families.

A sign for a kidney treatment center in the city of Usulutan, an hour's drive from most villages of the Lower Lempa.

What we do know is that there is an epidemic of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the area.  Many of the families I met have at least one person dying of the disease, and the government has pledged to build a dialysis clinic in Ciudad Romero.  -

A recent study in Nicaragua linked the chemicals used to grow conventional sugar cane to CKD.   This is why we are supporting a local movement to regulate the spraying of pesticides, led by our partners at the Mangrove Association, with the support of five of the municipal governments in the Bay of Jiquilisco area.

Additionally, our partners at the Mangrove Association have been fostering viable economic alternatives for local farmers.  They’ve been working with the Ministry of Agriculture to encourage farmers to grow seeds for basic staple crops instead of cane. The Ministry’s Family Agriculture Plan buys the seed and distributes them to thousands of farmers around the country in a major initiative to reduce the country’s reliance on Monsanto and other giant agribusiness companies.

Our partners convinced 450 farmers in the Lower Lempa region, many of whom were previously growing sugar cane, to grow corn seed for the Family Agriculture Plan this year.  Those farmers received three to four times more for their crop than they typically receive for sugar cane—a win-win for all involved.

But now, I’ve been told, some of these farmers face the vengeance of the sugar cane industry.  The mill has threatened to not repay them money owed from last year’s harvest, not unless they get back into growing sugar cane next season–an act of blackmail which is both illegal and outrageous.

I returned this week from visiting Ciudad Romero and other flood-ravaged communities in the Lower Lempa region of El Salvador.

Having watched videos of the massive floods that occurred after the levees on the Lempa River broke, and having been in close contact with our partners as events unfolded, I had envisioned an apocalyptic scene.   Hundreds of farm animal carcasses strewn about, jumbles of lost belongings covered in sewage, families devastated…

What I found instead was tremendous resilience.

At least at first sight, there was very little indication that the largest flooding disaster in recent history had taken place only weeks before.  How could this be?

After returning from flood shelters, the affected families worked alongside our partners and brigades of hundreds of youth from the FMLN political party to conduct a massive clean-up, singlehandedly preventing outbreaks of illness from bacterial diseases.  With brooms and shovels and tremendous effort, they cleaned up all 40 villages in only 2 days.

Now these families are working where possible to replant their lost crops, to pick themselves up and start over.  Thanks to their organizing efforts, they were able to avert a major loss of human life and a potential public health crisis.

Women are playing a lead role in distributing food to families who lost all their crops in the recent floods.

However, the massive loss of crops just before the harvest presents a serious threat of hunger.  The need for food is very real.  With our partners’ support, the UN’s World Food Program has begun distributing food to families in need.

They are battered psychologically, they face great hardship economically, but they are not going to stop organizing.

On October 20th, our local partners met with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, who pledged to fix the levees, improve drainage systems and rebuild local infrastructure.  We plan to hold him to this pledge, and to work together with the Salvadoran government to prevent future floods.  This week we are taking a group of engineers to El Salvador to assess the dams, levees and drainage systems in the Lempa River watershed.  They will present their recommendations to top government officials.

Meanwhile, we will provide support to families to replant their crops, gain access to clean water and rebuild latrines that were destroyed by the floods.

Easy Ways to Support our Work

You can help support community self-sufficiency today by:

Joining our Facebook Challenge

Unisex style shirt

A generous donor has offered to give EcoViva $5 for every new person who likes our Facebook page over the coming month, up to $2,500 in total!  With just one click you can help EcoViva raise money AND spread the word about our work. 

Shopping Organic for the Holidays

You can also help EcoViva while purchasing a great socially-conscious holiday gift.  Zelaya Design, a Berkeley based sustainable clothing company, will donate $25 to EcoViva with each purchase of one of their 100% organic cotton shirts featuring a hand-stitched mangrove tree leaf applique !  Shirts come in either Scoop Neck or Unisex styles.  Click here to order.

And as always, you can donate to EcoViva directly to support locally-led sustainable development.

Thank you for your support,

Yael Falicov
Executive Director

Below this article from the Washington Post covering the first lady’s visit is a letter submitted to the Congresspeople participating in the delegation on behalf of the Washington Office on Latin America and EcoViva, which emphasizes the importance of flood mitigation measures and sustainable agriculture . 

By Luz Lazo, Published in the Washington Post on November 4

Failure to help the victims of last month’s floods in El Salvador could lead to poverty, violence and more immigration to the United States, according to El Salvador’s first lady and secretary of social inclusion, Vanda Pignato.

Pignato visited Washington last week to plead for humanitarian aid for her rain-battered country.

“If we don’t respond immediately to those families, helping them rebuild their homes, giving them food and assisting them with preparing the land for new crops, they will leave,” she said. “They won’t have another alternative than to migrate. . . . We need to stop that now.”

Ten days of heavy rains in October destroyed crops and towns in Central America, hitting El Salvador particularly hard. The Associated Press reported that 105 people were killed in the deluge, which topped 60 inches.

A tropical depression affected more than 300,000 Salvadorans and about 70 percent of the country, damaging 80 percent of the country’s roads and destroying 250,000 acres of crops, according to government officials there.

Salvadoran officials say the rain was twice the amount of that brought by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Thirty-four people have died in El Salvador, they said.

On Monday, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes reported that the losses totaled $840 million, or 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The Salvadoran government estimates the cost of reconstruction at $1.5 billion.

“We can’t deal with this alone,” Pignato said in Spanish. “We need the international help.”

Pignato, a native of Brazil who moved to El Salvador in 1992, leads the country’s Department of Social Inclusion, which watches over family and human rights.

Known as a promoter of gender equality, Pignato said her mission in this crisis is to inform the world about the devastation in El Salvador.

During her visit last week to members of Congress, she asked them to consider making an allocation in the 2012 budget for her country’s rehabilitation. As a result of her visit, a bipartisan congressional delegation is expected to visit El Salvador this week to see the damage and meet with Funes.

Pignato has also recently met with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former president Bill Clinton and various corporate officials to request help.

Pignato said El Salvador needs more than money, including machinery such as helicopters, tractors and speedboats. She also encouraged Salvadoran natives in the United States to lobby government officials for help.

In the Washington region, the Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran communities have been collecting cash, new clothes and medicine to help flooding victims in Central America.

The United Nations, the United States and other countries have responded with emergency aid.

The Salvadoran government last week made a request to the State Department for $50 million to provide humanitarian aid to farmers and small businesses affected by the flooding and to relocate families in high-risk areas. The Central American countries as a region have also requested aid from the United States.

In addition, El Salvador has asked the United States for an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans who are in the country illegally. The government wants the Obama administration to reduce the number of deportations to El Salvador.

The country is moving toward recovery, Pignato said, but she fears the devastation could hinder the country’s progress — and some of her initiatives.

Pignato proudly talks about Ciudad Mujer, a center where women get specialized services, including health care and financial coaching. It opened in March. She has been recognized by the international community for that effort, and her goal is to open six more centers across the country before her husband’s tenure ends.

But that might be slowed down, she said, lamenting the current need to fix the country’s infrastructure and agricultural base. The tragedy, she said, has exposed El Salvador’s environmental, economic and social vulnerabilities.

“Together those three can be more devastating than the war,” she said.

About 75,000 people were killed in the Salvadoran Civil War, which lasted from 1980 to 1992.

_______________________________________________________________

Letter to Congresspeople participating in delegation to El Salvador from WOLA and EcoViva

Dear Congressional representative,

This week you will travel to El Salvador to see first-hand the devastation wrought by Tropical Depression 12-E. As you know, the storm poured over 55 inches of rain in a one-week period causing an estimated US$840 million in losses. The Salvadoran government estimates that it will cost $1.5 billion to rebuild the country.

The most affected sector is agriculture, with losses estimated at more than $300 million.  Approximately 277,000 producers, principally small farmers, have lost or are at risk of losing their crops of corn, beans, and rice—all staples of the Salvadoran diet. Already a food-insecure country, El Salvador faces an immediate and long-term food crisis because of the damage to this sector. We offer the following suggestions for helping El Salvador rebuild.

While levees and roads will have to be rebuilt, El Salvador desperately needs to invest in sustainable agriculture that favors small, rural producers. Studies have shown that investing in small-scale, sustainable agriculture increases a country’s resilience to extreme weather events, increases food security, and contributes to economic development in the rural sectors. (Lack of economic opportunities is one of the driving forces for out-migration to San Salvador or the United States). In her visit to Congress last week, First Lady Vanda Pignato stressed the need to restore El Salvador’s agricultural base along with rebuilding infrastructure.

Furthermore, the Obama administration’s “Partnership for Growth” initiative signed with the Funes government just last week must prioritize building resilience to disasters. Officials in El Salvador are attributing the recent deluge to climate change. Raul Artiga of the Central American Commission on Environment and Development recently stated, “Climate change is not something that is coming in the future, we are already suffering its effects.” Increasingly, severe weather events pose serious constraints on El Salvador’s potential for economic growth; President Funes has stated that 4 percent of G.D.P. has been affected by this latest climate event.

El Salvador’s minister of the environment, Herman Rosa Chávez, is calling for a reconstruction process that takes the changing weather patterns into account, in order to mitigate the effects of future disasters and prevent the waste of limited financial resources. Investing in small-scale, sustainable agriculture can do this.

Finally, what you will see in El Salvador will be a stark reminder of why U.S. foreign assistance in terms of emergency and development aid must not be reduced any further. In FY 2011, the International Affairs Budget absorbed nearly 20 percent of the total spending cuts. Any additional cuts will limit the United States’ ability to support sustainable, long-term development for one of our closest neighbors.

If you have any questions on the importance of sustainable rural development in confronting the numerous challenges facing El Salvador, please do not hesitate to contact any of the signers below.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Vicki Gass, WOLA
vgass@wola.org

Nathan Weller, EcoViva
Nathan@eco-viva.org

JIQUILISCO, El Salvador – As thousands of Salvadorans return to their homes and begin to rebuild their lives after last week’s historic rain and floods, many officials and civil society organizations in the region are blaming climate change for the catastrophe and calling upon the government to respond appropriately.

Last week, Tropical Depression 12-E and weather from Hurricane Jova poured more than 55 inches of rain over a seven-day period on Central America, far eclipsing Hurricane Mitch in 1998, the storm by which all others had been compared.

Though last week’s rain and flooding were more severe, local and national preparedness has improved dramatically since 1998, limiting the number of deaths in El Salvador to 34, compared to the 289 lives claimed by Hurricane Mitch.

Officials throughout Central American have attributed the extreme rain totals to climate change. Raul Artiga of the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD) stated, “Climate change is not something that is coming in the future, we are already suffering its effects.”

Herman Rosa Chávez, El Salvador’s Minister of the Environment, elaborated that the frequency of extreme rainfall events, defined by more than 100 millimeters (4 inches) in 24 hours, or 350 millimeters (14 inches) in 72 hours, in El Salvador has increased continually since the 1960s. Chávez said that until the 1980s, El Salvador “had never been affected by a Hurricane in the Pacific.” Since then, several of the worst weather disasters have resulted from Pacific weather patterns, including Hurricane Paul in 1982, Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and now Tropical Depression 12-E.

According to a recent report by The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), climate change is expected to take a greater toll on the region in the future. “Studies agree on the upward tendency of costs,” says the report, “whether defined as damage to well-being or as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”

According to Roberto Valent, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in El Salvador, damages from last week’s extreme rain may reach more than US$1 billion.

The Lower Lempa region of San Vicente and Usulután has been one of the hardest hit in El Salvador. The region is supposed to be protected by earthen levees that line the banks of the Lempa River, the largest in the country. The levees, however, burst when an upstream dam released 9,500 cubic meters of water per second, for more than 12 hours – three times the flow the levees were built to withstand.

While community leaders in the Lower Lempa agree that climate change is responsible for the extreme rainfall, they have long argued that the Hydroelectric Executive Commission of the Lempa River (CEL, for its name in Spanish) mismanaged the dam and corresponding reservoir, prioritizing the generation of electricity over mitigating the risk of flooding downstream. In February 2011, Rigoberto Herrera Cruz, the Deputy Mayor of Jiquilisco, stated that

“We believe the CEL [Lempa River Hydro-electric Commission] who runs the dam do massive water releases because to allow the water out little by little means they would earn slightly less profit,”

On October 20th, El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes met with leaders in the Lower Lempa and promised support for reconstructing communities and local agriculture. Jiquilisco Mayor David Barahona stressed that the Central Government must also reconstruct the levees and restore the drainage system that helps channel floodwaters out of the region. Local development organizations have joined in this call, adding that the CEL must also manage its hydroelectric dams in a manner that prioritizes the safety of the communities downstream over their desire to maximize electricity production.

Minister Chávez added to the reconstruction conversation, “we cannot rebuild in the same vulnerable way. If we do not take the [changing weather] phenomena into account, we will be throwing that investment away.”

The undersigned group of international organizations works in partnership and solidarity with various organizations, government officials, and community boards in the Lower Lempa. We echo the concerns and demands expressed by our local partners and Minister Chávez, and will support them in the days, weeks, and months ahead as they advocate for their communities.

Signed:

EcoViva – http://eco-viva.org/  (Contact: Nathan Weller, nathan@eco-viva.org)

Voices on the Border – http://votb.org/ (Contact: Rosie Ramsey, rosie@votb.org)

The Share Foundation – http://www.share-elsalvador.org/ (Contact: José Artiga, jose@share-elsalvador.org)

U.S. Sister Cities – http://elsalvadorsolidarity.org (Contact: sistercities.elsalvador@gmail.com)

SAN SALVADOR – The continuous rains in Central America on Monday that left 80 dead, thousands of people in health risk, and huge material losses are the direct effect of climate change on vulnerable countries in the region, said one expert consulted by the AFP.

A combination of atmospheric phenomena has resulted in El Salvador exceeding the record in cumulative rainfall (1,200 mm in one week), something without precedent—not even seen with the passage of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which resulted in 860 mm in rainfall, making experts take notice.

“Climate change is not something that is coming, we are suffering through it now, this (the weather condition) is further evidence of the vulnerability that is leading to unsustainable levels of impact, with which our societies are going to have to live,” said Raúl Artiga, the official from the Central American Commission for Environment and Development (CCAD), to AFP.

Artiga, coordinator of the Climate Change and Risk Management Unit in the CCAD, based in San Salvador, believes that the current situation already exceeds the levels of impact that the Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and other organizations had been expecting to see within ten years.

A recent ECLAC study entitled “The Economics of Climate Change”, warned that in fiscal terms, its impact is a liability that “will affect public finances for several generations.” The estimated cumulative cost by 2100 “is equivalent to $73,000 billion current dollars or $52,000 million at 2002 prices, approximately 54% of regional GDP in 2008,” the report said.

The present emergency in Central America, which according to Salvadoran meteorologist Lorraine Soriano is a product of atmospheric phenomena that are being formed at “a lower altitude than historically seen” in the Pacific, destroyed bridges, thousands of kilometers of road network and left millions in losses to agriculture of subsistence basic grains, in addition to causing 80 deaths,.

“What we are showing with reports from all countries is the rising of such (weather) events in the last decade and this gives us an indication that indeed climate variability associated with climate change is just one element to which we will be subject, “said Artiga.

The Central American coordinator of the Global Water Partnership (GWP), Maureen Ballestero, warned that the outlook is worrying. According Ballestero, what is happening is a “mixture of climate variability and climate change that is worrying. There are many impacts from the effects of climate change. We cannot close our eyes. We are living the effects in Central America.”

For El Salvador’s Minister of the Environment, Herman Rosa Chavez, the torrential rains caused by weather phenomena originating in the Pacific Ocean “are part of the extreme events,” with the danger that “the frequency with which they are occuring is increasing.”

“We have disorder in the climate; in the the 60s and 70s we were impacted by atmospheric phenomenon once every decade, then in the eighties there were two, in the 90′s four, between 2000 and 2010 there were seven events and in this new decade we have the first event and the question is how many are there going to be? “said Rosa Chavez.

Given the costs of adapting to climate change, Rosa Chavez appealed to access the Green Fund, which under the principle of “shared responsibility”, is endowed by contributions from countries that emit more greenhouse gases.