The reason many Guatemalans are coming to the border? A profound hunger crisis.

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

The reason many Guatemalans are coming to the border? A profound hunger crisis.

By Kevin Sieff
April 1, 2021 at 5:36 p.m. EDT

PANZÓS, Guatemala — The team of nutritionists looked at 11-month-old Dilcia Cajbon, her ribs visible through her skin, and they knew immediately.

“Severe acute malnutrition,” said Stefany Martinez, the leader of the UNICEF team, as the child was lifted onto a scale.

Like many in this rural stretch of Guatemala, Dilcia’s family was down to one meal a day. Storms had flooded the nearby palm plantation, the biggest source of local employment. To eke out what little the family had to eat, Dilcia’s mother had held off on giving her youngest child solid food.

As more and more Central American families arrive at the United States’ southern border, the municipality of Panzós offers a stark illustration of the deepening food crisis that is contributing to the new wave of migration.

So far this year, more unaccompanied minors processed by immigration agents are from Guatemala than any other country. Analysts and U.S. officials refer obliquely to “poverty” as an underlying cause of that influx. But often the reason is far more specific: hunger.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/02/us-border-migrants-guatemala/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Dreadful details follow in the original article posted above:

Guatemala now has the sixth-highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world. The number of acute cases in children, according to one new Guatemalan government study, doubled between 2019 and 2020.

The crisis was caused in part by failed harvests linked to climate change, a string of natural disasters and a nearly nonexistent official response. Supply-chain disruptions then led to a spike in prices. The cost of beans in Guatemala went up 19.6 percent last year, according to the World Food Program.

In interviews with migrants preparing to leave Guatemala and others who have recently arrived in the United States, the majority mentioned food insecurity as a significant factor in their decisions to leave. In Indigenous communities in the country’s western highlands, where a disproportionate number of people are leaving, the chronic child malnutrition rate hovers around 70 percent, higher than any country in the world.