By Victoria Torley
On the western coast of Costa Rica, and inland to
Cañas* and other cities,
people are looking to the sky, waiting for rain.
This coastal area of the nation is part of the
Central American Dry Corridor (CADC) a phrase
coined in the early 2009 to focus attention on the
area’s weather vulnerability. The Dry Corridor
begins at Chiapas*, Mexico on that
country’s the Pacific coast and extends south
through Guatemala*, El Salvador*, Honduras* and Nicaragua* (the four most
vulnerable countries) then down through Costa Rica
and into Panama*’s western provinces.
The area is covered by what ecologists call a dry
tropical forest.
In climatic terms, the Corridor is known for
vulnerability to extremes. El Niño brings drought
and heat waves to the Corridor and precipitation
drops by 30-40 percent. As the other extreme there
can be periods of intense tropical storms with
torrential rainfall. Both these conditions are
moderated or intensified by the Atlantic
Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).
In 2017, the rural population in the CADC was
about 18 million and included subsistence farmers
and 1.9 million small producers of market crops.
In Costa Rica, it includes large farms that
produce crops that are heavily dependent on
irrigation, rice and sugar cane among them. These
large farms are often owned, wholly or in part, by
the nation’s wealthiest families.
As the country looks at its water resources, the
government should begin to take into account the
amount of water needed to grow the crops that are
currently planted in the CADC. It takes 2,500
liters of water to produce one kilo of rice and
between 1,500-2,000 liters of water to produce one
kilo of sugar from sugar cane.
While it makes economic sense for a nation to
produce what it consumes, it makes little sense to
continue to grow water-dependent crops in an area
that is subject to severe drought when there are
communities where water is provided only a few
days a week and is delivered to cisterns by truck.
Costa Rica is dependent on tourism for 6-7 percent
of its GDP. Many of these tourist dollars are
spent in coastal areas. A new large tourist
facility, complete with manmade lakes, is still
planned for the area near the airport in Liberia.
The question is, can the nation afford the water
this type of complex will need?
Somewhere there needs to be a balance. Grow rice
and sugar cane and support lush lawns and manmade
lakes or provide clean water to cities and rural
areas?
These are hard choices in the Dry Corridor. The
hard answers? The new tourist complex builds a
desalination plant and provides for its own needs
then they Xeriscape their properties. The rice and
sugarcane growers? They switch to crops that
demand less water.
Water is basic. Costa Rica is wasting a valuable
natural resource.
Editor's note: For more information or comments on
this article, Ms Victoria Torley can be reached at
victoriatorley1@gmail.com
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The views or
opinions expressed by the author are the sole and
exclusive responsibility of the sender and do not
necessarily represent the opinion of A.M. Costa
Rica. Therefore, the newspaper does not accept
liability for the article content.
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