CAFOD blog

Last night I woke up and thought the world was coming to an end, but it was only another Bolivian rainy-season-style downpour. It’s just that with the amount of water that comes down in a very short space of time, the rain can be rather loud and scary.

On top of that, this year’s rains are more intense than ever. The rains have come with the weather phenomenon La Niña which is blamed for the floods affecting more than 56,000 families in Bolivia alone.

La Niña means “little girl” in Spanish and is associated to a temporary drop in equatorial ocean temperatures, as opposed to El Niño, a weather phenomenon named after the child Jesus, because it tends to come around Christmas every few years when equatorial ocean temperatures temporarily rise above average.

But with the destruction of many fields and homes, which were only just rebuild after last year’s flooding, people are also starting to talk about Climate Change.

With one extreme weather event coming only a year after the previous one, it is only natural to wonder what is happening to the climate.

However, the link between El Niño, La Niña and climate change is complicated. There is still no complete clarity around this issue, although there are many serious scientific bodies saying that climate change will make El Niño more frequent and intense.

In the case of the San Pedro municipality of Santa Cruz, however, where CAFOD partner CENDA is helping nearly 1,700 families with the floods, we don’t have to look to science or climate change to see the hand of humankind in adding to the disaster.

Santa Cruz is the new economic powerhouse of Bolivia, because of natural resources like gas and oil but also because of a boom in the production of soya, which is linked to the huge increase in demand for soya based products in the “North”.

In San Pedro there are many agro-businesses growing soya and other crops on an industrial scale. At the same time there are also many smallholders and indigenous farmers, growing rice, manioc and other staple crops mostly for their own consumption.

The large agro-business farms were prepared for the floods; they have dug huge drainage channels protecting their crops from flooding.

But while protecting the crops of the powerful soya farmers, these channels added only more water to those floods destroying the homes and crops of the poor smallholders and indigenous farmers.

So, in Bolivia, which is one of the most unequal countries in the world, inequality has not only meant that some were more prepared and protected to deal with the floods. It has meant that in protecting their wealth and profits, rich farmers have actually exacerbated the disaster for those who were already very vulnerable.

Posted by KarenL

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