The following excerpt is from a March 3, 2010 article published by Relief Web. To read the article in its entirety, click here.
Siriaco Mejia is an optimist. His friend Gloria Gonzalez says he is always smiling, even when he is in trouble. He just has a positive outlook.
But even Mejia was unable to put a favorable spin on his situation at harvest time in late 2009: after he’d planted his corn and beans in his field high above the languid Chixoy River, now flowing at a very low level, his crops had failed, owing to lack of rain. Most years he can grow 22 quintales (about 2,200 pounds) of corn. This year, Mejia says he got about a tenth of that.
“We could see the corn cobs, but when we opened them up, many were totally empty,” Mejia says, standing in his field. “We got almost nothing this year.”
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This food shortage is occurring in a country of luxurious green that exports millions in sugar cane, pineapples, bananas, and coffee. Despite this abundance, poor Guatemalans, who are mostly indigenous Maya people, regularly face chronic food shortages. There is plenty of food in stores, but poor people can’t afford it.
Since the Spanish colonization of Central America, indigenous Maya people have been systematically moved off the most productive farmlands to arid areas and steep hillsides. In Mejia’s case, his community and several others were originally in the Chixoy River valley but were involuntarily relocated in the 1980s to make way for a hydroelectric dam. Most of the flattest, best land is used to grow export crops like coffee and sugar cane and, more recently, biofuel crops…
Click here to read the rest of the article, or here to read more articles about the Food Crisis.
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