More than 10 million people across Central America's Dry Corridor are living through extreme heat and water shortages this month. An El Nino-driven drought is cutting into the region's maize and bean harvest. The corridor spans Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Forecasters expect the current El Nino to peak by the end of 2026, with effects running into 2027.
Guatemala's food-security secretariat, known as SESAN, projects that 3.2 million people, or 17% of the population, will face acute food insecurity between July and September 2026. In Honduras, the national university's food-security observatory, UNAH, puts the current figure at 1.8 million people. That number is expected to rise to 2.2 million by the end of the year. Honduras's emergency agency, COPECO, has placed 75 municipalities on yellow alert and a further 49 on green alert.
Temperatures in neighbouring El Salvador have reached 42 degrees Celsius, according to regional reporting in mid-September. In San Lorenzo, in southern Honduras, resident Lidia Ochoa says the situation has become difficult enough that families are struggling to afford food. More than 400 cattle have died across southern Honduras in recent months, including around 100 in San Lorenzo alone.
Corn harvests at risk before they are planted
In northern Guatemala, Indigenous leader Elvira Pasa says communities are anticipating total losses of their corn harvest this season. Residents already pay substantially more for basic foodstuffs, she says, as local supply tightens ahead of the usual autumn harvest window. Child malnutrition, already a documented concern in Guatemala, is expected to worsen if the maize crop fails as feared.
The UN World Food Programme estimates that El Nino conditions could add 49 million people to acute hunger worldwide by the end of 2027. More than 16 million of those are expected to be in Latin America and the Caribbean. The famine early warning system FEWS NET has flagged the Dry Corridor as a priority concern zone for the coming months. It cites erratic rainfall arriving too late, or too heavily, for maize planted earlier in the season to recover in time for harvest.
A coffee belt already under strain
The drought lands on a coffee sector already facing a difficult season. Analysts at the trading firm StoneX describe Central America's coffee belt as entering a critical season this year. They cite weather risk, labour shortages and regulatory pressure on farms across Guatemala and Honduras. Many of those farms depend on the same rain-fed water sources as nearby subsistence maize plots. A poor coffee season and a poor maize season often arrive together for the same rural households.
Government agencies in both countries say they are scaling up emergency food distribution and water trucking to the worst-affected municipalities. Neither SESAN nor COPECO has yet published a full costed response plan for the coming months. Humanitarian agencies working in the Dry Corridor say funding for anticipatory action remains well short of what current forecasts suggest will be needed by early 2027. Anticipatory funding pays for cash transfers and water access issued before a harvest fails, rather than after, when the same aid costs more and arrives later.
The same El Nino pattern is complicating forecasts thousands of kilometres away, where Morocco is watching its own drought-to-flood whiplash. Farmers in the region have weathered repeated dry seasons over the past decade. Aid workers say this year's combination of an unusually strong El Nino and thinning household savings leaves less of a buffer than in previous droughts. Whether the region avoids a repeat of past food crises will depend heavily on whether rains return before the main planting window closes in the coming weeks. For families like Lidia Ochoa's in San Lorenzo, that window is already narrowing. Elsewhere in the region, Hispanic Heritage Month is drawing attention to Latin America’s own African food roots.
