In Honduras, hard hit by drought, authorities hope to make it rain using contentious tactic

NUEVA CONCEPCION, Honduras (AP) — Victor Torres is on the hunt for clouds as he flies over parched corn fields ravaged by months of drought in the rugged Honduran mountains. “We’re seeing strong cloud cover over here,” the pilot says, pointing to a map on the dashboard as he banks the small plane sharply into a patch of dark gray. Behind him, a technician cranks the knob of a large metal tank, which hisses as it sprays yellow silver iodide particles into the skies.

This “cloud seeding” is a gamble by the Honduran government, aiming to induce enough rain over enough fields to help farmers and their crops survive. The El Niño climate pattern, scrambling weather worldwide and now exacerbated by warming seas, has devastated communities across the Central American Dry Corridor, an arid region from southern Mexico through Panama. The effects are particularly acute in the dry forests of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, where corn and bean crops have dried up, leaving subsistence farmers without food.

Cattle have either died or been sold off. Coffee plantations have withered and shrimp farms have lost production. “Families are going to bed with one or two meals a day, and that’s after turning to other survival strategies like selling off their animals, their tools … just to get by,” said Aníbal Zúñiga, who coordinates World Food Program aid distribution in Nueva Concepcion, a 250-person village tucked in the mountains 90 minutes north of Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa.

The WFP estimates that nearly 50 million people globally could be pushed into acute food insecurity now that El Niño is expected to last into 2027. Central America is among the places to be hit the hardest. Meteorologist says cloud seeding is an expensive ‘experiment’ In Honduras, where one in five people already face some level of food insecurity in a normal year, the government has paid a Mexican company $750,000 for 20 flights to trigger rainfall.

Meteorologists have routinely cast doubt on cloud seeding, saying weather modification is no solution to long-term drought. Some religious rural farmers see it as trying to play God with the weather. “This is an experiment,” said Nabil Kawas, a meteorologist and former dean of sciences at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.

“Now if you ask me whether I would have taken that $750,000 and invested it in an irrigation project or w… Central America is among the places to be hit the hardest.Meteorologist says cloud seeding is an expensive ‘experiment’In Honduras, where one in five people already face some level of food insecurity in a normal year, the government has paid a Mexican company $750,000 for 20 flights to trigger rainfall.