CANTERA: Helping Communities in the Dry Tropics of Nicaragua

I’m travelling with Cantera’s agricultural support team. We drive into the mountains through a landscape of mountain ridges, dense forests and green fields to visit five communities supported by SCIAF. After heavy rains, stretches of the road have become pools of churned up mud and we struggle to get through.

Crops of beans are being harvested and families are beginning to pick their maize. Along the roadside children collect the abundant mangos falling from the trees.

But here, in the mountains of Mateares – the dry zone of Nicaragua, it only rains for half the year. From November onwards, water becomes very scarce and little can be grown. Families who subsist on their small plots of land depend on getting a good harvest – one that will last them six months.

The soil here is sandy and of poor quality. If there is too much rain, or too little, the harvest can be badly affected, causing hunger for whole families.

As incomes here are generally below two US dollars a day, most families can not afford to buy nutritious foods to complement their diet of maize and beans and children are often under-nourished. It is a fragile existence in the mountain villages, where so much depends on the weather being kind.

Over the last two years, Fernando, a young agricultural promoter, has been trained by Cantera and is now working with individual families, helping them to branch out and grow alternative crops to add to the traditional maize and beans. By diversifying what they grow, families can reduce the risk of a failed harvest.