Uprooted: How climate change is reshaping migration from Honduras

LAGUNAS LA IGUALA, Honduras — To reach the Pérez family's farm, you have to drive on miles of narrow dirt roads in the mountains of western Honduras, up and down steep slopes lined with row after row of dark green coffee plants.

Not all of those plants are thriving, and neither are the farmers who tend them.

"When it comes to coffee, it needs water to flower," says Francis Pérez, who grew up picking coffee on his family's farm here. The fruit of the coffee plant starts out green, he explains, before turning to yellow and red as they ripen. But erratic rainfall is hurting the crop. "Often, it flowers but it doesn't grow berries — that's a big loss."

Pérez is 19 and skinny, with a light mustache. He loves working his family's land. But he's worried that he won't be able to support himself in farming like his parents did. So he's thinking about following hundreds of thousands of other Hondurans and migrating to the U.S.

"I feel that I'm stuck," he says in Spanish. "I don't feel like I can build the future I want here."

More people around the world are on the move than ever before, and the changing climate is one reason why. In Honduras, climate change is making it harder to live off the land. For the Pérez family and countless others, that's making the already difficult decision about whether to migrate even more complicated.

Central America was pummeled by back-to-back Hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020, fueled in part by warming oceans. Extreme weather events like hurricanes are the most obvious way that climate change has hurt farmers here. But there's also the slow-moving catastrophe of erratic rainfall and drought that is gradually undermining traditional agriculture.

Since the beginning of 2021, U.S. immigration authorities have encountered more migrants from Honduras at the southern border than any other country except Mexico. Some of the reasons are familiar: violence, corruption and a lack of economic opportunity, exacerbated by the pandemic.

Now climate change is adding one more pressure to the list. Experts told us that climate disruptions are making younger Hondurans, and particularly young women, more likely to migrate to the U.S. in search of a better life.

These are often wrenching decisions for families that are separated by migration. Children and parents are acutely aware of the dangers and costs of the journey, and they agonize about the risks and whether the potential reward is worth it.

NPR talked to dozens of people in rural towns and villages in the mountains of western Honduras who are wrestling with the difficult decision about whether to migrate. Some are trying to adapt to the changing reality of erratic rainfall and extreme weather, while others are simply waiting for the right moment to leave.

Young people don't see a future in agriculture

Farmers in rural Honduras have traditionally depended on rainfall to water their crops. That worked well when weather cycles were easier to predict. But Roberto Pérez, Francis' father, says that's no longer the case.

"It's really hard to guess what's coming," says Pérez, who grew up working this land alongside his own parents. Now 64, he's wearing a cream-colored cowboy hat and says he feels naked without it. Pérez says it's gotten more difficult to make a living because the weather is more erratic.

"It impacts crops a lot in terms of production," Pérez says. "When you expect winter, summer sets in and the other way around."

Scientists have seen it, too. This region of Honduras is part of the so-called Dry Corridor that stretches from Nicaragua to southern Mexico. Until recently, climate scientists say the weather patterns here fell into a predictable rhythm: rains in the spring, followed by a few months of drier weather, followed by a similar cycle in the fall.

But that familiar pattern has broken down.

"What is happening clearly is that temperatures have gone up and rain patterns are irregular now," said Josué León, a climate scientist at Zamorano University in Honduras. "The extremes are becoming more extreme. The dry season is becoming longer and the rainy season keeps shrinking, and they are more torrential. We get more rain in less time."

León owns a farm himself, in the western part of the country, a few hours from Francis Pérez and his family. León says a lot of young people don't see a future in agriculture anymore.

"When farming becomes too risky and you lose more than you invest, agriculture is no longer attractive to young people," León says. "There isn't much available to them and the only other option is to migrate."

The Pérez family has seen some of the worst effects of climate change up close. Catastrophic flooding from Hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020 destroyed their small store in town, and landslides swept away part of their coffee farm on a mountainside nearby.

For Anabel Pérez, Francis' mother, the memories are still raw. "Climate change has affected us deeply," she said in Spanish. Her eyes fill with tears as we sit and talk on her front porch. "The hurricanes lashed out," she says. "We lost our crop, and our farm was heavily damaged."

The Pérez family has done its best to rebuild after the hurricanes. Chickens and parrots squawk in the yard outside their one-story house. It's solidly built, with lime-green cinder-block walls and tiled floors.

"We began with one small room. We've lived here for 30 years, since we got married, and we've been adding to it," Anabel Pérez says. Her husband finishes her sentence. "You have to work hard and make an effort, otherwise you won't accomplish anything," he says.

The family is trying to build new businesses as well, so they won't have to rely completely on the coffee farm. There's a pig they're raising for slaughter and a tilapia pond where they're farming fish to sell. But Francis Pérez says it's hard to save money. "Here you work to cover your daily needs," Pérez says. "We don't have capital for an emergency."

At the same time, there's the pull of the United States. Migrants are an essential economic engine in Honduras: Remittances make up more than a quarter of the country's GDP, according to the World Bank, the highest rate in the Western Hemisphere.

You can see that clearly in Lagunas La Iguala, where the Pérez family lives — in the big, brightly painted homes with Spanish-style roofs, built with dollars sent back from the U.S.

"The nice homes near the church — all the children are working in the U.S. Our next-door neighbor's son is also in the U.S. The one across the street did the same thing," Pérez says. "Practically every household around here has someone working in the U.S."

Pérez has been talking to a family friend in Houston who says he can help Pérez get on his feet and find a job. He could save money and send some back to help his family. Pérez's father knows that, too.

"When you hear about how much you can earn and the strength of the dollar versus the [Honduran] lempira, you want to go!" Roberto Pérez says with a chuckle. But he knows it's not an easy decision to make.

Francis Pérez did well in school. He finished high school, where he studied health, agriculture and business administration. And he had a decent job in Honduras doing health care outreach for a nonprofit. But the job didn't pay enough to help the family save money or invest in the family's farm.

So he quit in December, partly to plan his trip north. Francis' former boss understands the pull of the U.S.

"It's unfortunate, because Francis is not the only case," said Patrocinio Sarmiento, who was Francis' supervisor. Sarmiento is a doctor who spends much of his time traveling around the countryside in western Honduras, where he has met a lot of young people who are weighing the same decision.

"We are a young country without access to jobs," Sarmiento laments. "Lots of unemployed young people, 19, 20, 21. Their best chance is to go to the U.S., work hard and come back to Honduras with capital to have a better future here."

The "feminization" of migration

Vitalina de Jesús Díaz welcomes visitors to her home on the side of a steep hillside in western Honduras, in a village called Los Ranchos.

Her house is tiny, just two rooms. One of them is made of adobe, and the floor is bare dirt. Roosters, chickens and dogs wander around the backyard. We sit down to talk next to a large wash sink, with clotheslines strung all around us.

The yard is also bare dirt and turns to mud when it rains. And sometimes, de Jesús says, it rains a lot.

"We have heavy rains and hurricanes here," she says in Spanish. "It's different now. The rainy season lasted three months and now we have heavy periods of rain. The weather has changed. It's not predictable anymore."

Coffee harvesting used to be steady work, de Jesús says. It helped her raise 10 kids on her own after her husband died. But she says that work isn't reliable anymore. That's why most have moved away, except for her youngest daughter, Jesús Santiago Díaz.

Santiago works picking coffee during the harvest season. She gets paid by how many gallons of fruit she picks, earning a little more than $2 per gallon. On a good day, she can pick enough coffee berries to fill 10 buckets. But those good days are rare.

"When berries ripen, they have to be harvested quickly. If not, they fall off," she says. "What happens is that coffee is ready to harvest and heavy rain comes down, forcing the coffee berries to detach from the bush, and it quickly rots on the ground."

Santiago has been working since she dropped out of school when she was 7. Now 23, she has tried to migrate to the U.S. twice already.

"I don't want to live like this forever. I want to grow, get a better, full-time job," she says. "I want a better future, a different future." Santiago's story isn't unusual. Experts say that the number of women and girls leaving Central America is nearly equal to the number of men, and some experts believe that climate disruptions are partly to blame.

"I would argue that it is mostly women and girls affected by climate change and extreme climate events," says Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian, who works on behalf of vulnerable populations at the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C.

Muñoz-Pogossian says climate disruptions fall especially hard on women and girls in rural Honduras, where generations of women with little education have depended on agriculture to survive.

"Climate change kind of adds up to the series of other factors that are present there that have to do with poverty, inequality, violence," Muñoz-Pogossian says. "I think climate change adds to the cocktail of reasons why people migrate."

Globally, women are also migrating in roughly the same numbers as men — a phenomenon that Muñoz-Pogossian and others call the "feminization" of migration.

This wasn't always the case — particularly at the U.S.-Mexico border, where the vast majority of migrants used to be men. But over the past decade, that has been changing. In 2012, only 14% of the migrants encountered at the border were women. That has grown to more than a third (35%) in 2019, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Those who leave rural villages in Honduras don't always head straight for the U.S. Often they migrate internally first, trying to find work in a bigger city in Honduras.

Santiago has tried that as well. She moved to El Progreso, in northern Honduras, several hours by bus from her home in the mountains. She worked at a banana processing facility, hoping to save money to help her mother.

But it didn't work out as she hoped. "It was a struggle because I had a lot of expenses, meals, housing, and transportation. And the pay wasn't great. I was breaking even," she says.

Santiago ended up back with her mother in Los Ranchos. Now she's picking coffee when she can, and she makes some extra money cleaning houses. But she says it's not enough. She's planning to try again to migrate to the U.S.

"I'd miss home. I'd miss it terribly," she says. "But I also want to get ahead."

The last time Santiago tried to migrate, she went with one of her brothers. They made it several hundred miles, as far as southern Mexico. But they were caught by immigration authorities in Veracruz and deported back to Honduras. Santiago says they were broken both financially and emotionally by the experience.

Santiago's mother has mixed feelings about her plan.

"It's sadness and pride, because she wants a better future, and I can't give it to her here," Vitalina de Jesús Díaz says. "I do hope she goes, because there is no hope here."

Tears welling up in her eyes, she says, "I tell God that she's going to make the journey, and she'll get there with a bright future awaiting."

Farmers try to adapt

The government of Honduras acknowledges that climate change is a serious problem, though it's unclear how much the country's leaders can do about it.

In the fall of 2022, Honduran President Xiomara Castro traveled to New York to speak to the United Nations General Assembly. She noted the irony that her country — one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere — has contributed relatively little to climate change, while suffering some of its most dramatic effects.

"The industrialized nations of the world are responsible for the serious deterioration of the environment," Castro said. "But they make us pay because of their onerous lifestyle."

The U.S. has pledged billions of dollars to fight the root causes of migration in northern Central America. The Biden administration has announced more than $4 billion in commitments from the private sector, on top of more than a billion dollars in aid. But only a small fraction of that money — roughly $54 million — is directly pledged to climate change projects, according to a report by the Root Causes Initiative, a network of faith-based organizations in Central America, Mexico and the U.S.

The needs in Honduras are huge. Almost 30% of the population works in agriculture, and the vast majority are small farmers. Agriculture experts say it's possible for farmers in Honduras to adapt to erratic rainfall brought on by climate change. But they warn that it won't be cheap, or easy.

"Adaptation requires investment," says Josué León, the climate scientist at Zamorano University. And the most critical adaptation, he argues, is access to water.

"When farmers have water, they can grow food all year round. Having water is an adaptation measurement that generates income," León says. "First, we need an irrigation system. No. 2, we need to learn how to use water more efficiently — a greenhouse is the way to do that. And it also helps with pest control."

But those kinds of investment are far beyond the means of most farmers in Honduras, who have limited access to banks or loans. The government has no insurance program for crops or livestock, so small farmers are largely on their own. And so far, León doesn't see much help coming.

"If the government organized farmers and spent some resources on this, if you have water, technical and market advice, if you ask me if all farmers can adapt? I'd say yes," León said.

In fact, León says, there's an example in his own family. His brother-in-law, Edwin Guillén, has built a complex of greenhouses where he grows tomatoes in a small town called San Jerónimo, Copán.

"It's protected from rains, winds, hurricanes and bugs. We also have a drip irrigation system and we use less chemicals here," Guillén explains.

Inside, Guillén shows off thousands of healthy-looking tomato plants growing in plastic containers and lined up in neat rows. Because he's not totally dependent on the weather, Guillén can grow all year round.

"We do staggered plantings and harvests," he says. "I don't want to saturate the market."

Guillén sells his tomatoes to local grocery stores. But he has dreams of someday exporting his crop to the U.S. and Canada.

Guillén knows that he's lucky: He has a steady source of water, thanks to a spring that was tapped by a project supported by the U.S. government. He was able to get a loan to pay for the greenhouses and the rest of his irrigation system. And he has some of his money to invest too — money he saved when he was working in the U.S.

Like many people in Honduras, Guillén is intimately familiar with migration and the toll it can take on families.

"We are a family that was torn apart by migration when my father migrated," he says.

Guillén says his father migrated to the U.S. when he was about 5 years old. "He stayed in contact with us for a year only," Guillén says. "It was hard not to have my dad here and not to have any contact with him."

Guillén went north to work, and to look for his father. He made it all the way to Baltimore.

"I found him," Guillén said. "But he didn't want to come back. He stayed in Baltimore. I had to come back because I'm the oldest, we are three brothers and we have land. I needed to farm our lands."

Eventually Guillén says he moved on, and he forgave his father. Now Guillén is a father of four himself, with a large house and a shiny new truck. And his greenhouses create year-round employment for more than a dozen workers. One of his main challenges is finding enough workers to tend his crops, because so many young working-age people have left.

Staying "rooted" to the land

Nearly everyone we met in Honduras knows someone who has migrated to the United States. Farmer José Dionisio Cordova Ruíz has six cousins who have moved to California. And they call often, he says, urging him to join them.

But he has stayed behind to farm. We asked Cordova why he stayed to work his family's land, when so many of his friends and cousins have left.

"Good question," he said with a laugh. He paused for a long moment before answering.

"I've been raised in agriculture," he said finally. "When I was a child, I remember my dad carried me on his shoulders to inspect the land and the crops. And it's rooted in me; it's who I am."

Cordova is dressed in a dusty plaid shirt that hangs off his lanky frame and a faded baseball hat. He's only able to work the land here part time, when he can get away from his day job.

It's late in the day by the time Cordova can make it to his family's farm in a tranquil valley in northwest Honduras. Geese honk protectively as he shows visitors around his fields in the fading dusk light. Cordova, who is 27 and single, teaches farming and water management at a technical school in the nearby town of Macuelizo, where he lives. He says things have changed a lot since his father worked this land.

"It's not impossible to stay in agriculture, but it's gotten complicated," Cordova says. "What I see is that old practices are not viable. We are forced to implement new technologies."

He and his sister are trying to keep the farm going, experimenting with different crops like yucca and watermelon that are more resilient to climate change and more tolerant of drought. But even these new crops are no guarantee of success, says Cordova.

"The problem was too much water," Cordova explains. "After we planted the yucca we had about a month and a half of very strong rains and after that, we never got rain again. I lost more than half of the harvest."

Still, the siblings are not giving up. They've taken out a loan to add irrigation. Those investments are expensive, and risky. When their crops fail, they have to spend money from their paychecks to keep up with the loan payments.

Cordova and his sister can afford to make those investments because they have relatively good jobs to fall back on. But most farmers in Honduras don't have that kind of safety net.

That includes Francis Pérez, the 19-year-old coffee farmer in Lagunas La Iguala. When we first talked to him earlier this year, Pérez said his plan was to work in the U.S. for a few years. When he'd saved enough money, he would move back to Honduras and invest his earnings in his family's land, to diversify their farm and make it more resilient to climate change.

But the family also knows that the journey is dangerous, and expensive. Anabel Pérez is struggling with her son's plan to migrate. She wants him to be happy and successful. But they'll have to borrow thousands of dollars to pay for a smuggler, and that's still no guarantee of a safe journey.

"He always talked about migrating, and we would say no, the journey is difficult, and we don't have money for that," she says. "He's been talking about it since he was 16. We've managed to keep him here but this time is different."

"We are afraid," Roberto Pérez adds. The thought alone fills his eyes with tears. "Many have died on the journey." When we talked to Francis Pérez again a few weeks ago, he no longer sounded so sure about his plans. His parents are getting older, and he's worried about them.

"It's a very difficult decision," Pérez says. "I'd be migrating looking for a better future. But I fear they'll feel lonely and even depressed. I'm evaluating the economic gain, versus my parents' feelings and health. I think about it constantly."

This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and Emily Silver and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our engineer was Maggie Luthar.

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