Extreme poverty remains especially high in Latin American countries like Guatemala, where more than half of the population lives below the poverty line. In fact, with a chronic malnutrition rate of nearly 50%, Guatemala is the most undernourished country in Latin America and the fourth highest in the world.
To address these issues, Cross International is in a long-term partnership with the Guatemalan ministry Hope of Life to improve the lives of vulnerable communities.
One of these communities is El Milagro — a village in eastern Guatemala composed of the Mayan Ch’orti’ ethnic group, who have a longstanding history of coffee farming. Unfortunately, decades of soil overuse and erosion have led to declining coffee production. The poor soil, adverse weather, and a countrywide economic downturn have resulted in severe food insecurity and malnutrition. Tragically, approximately 54,000 people in this region go hungry daily.
We’re now in the fourth year of a 5-year partnership with El Milagro to improve the lives of the villagers there. One of these villagers is Blanca Morales, a struggling coffee farmer.
Practical hope for Blanca’s pesky problem
As a coffee farmer, Blanca has a lot to fear — declining prices, coffee leaf rust, droughts and low yields, to name just a few. But her newest foe is the coffee borer beetle, known in Spanish as “la broca.” This resilient little pest bores into coffee cherries to lay its eggs and can decimate an entire coffee field in a matter of weeks!
Cross International recently worked with Hope of Life on a unique agricultural invention to trap these pesky beetles. Made of a large plastic bottle painted bright red like a ripe coffee cherry, these traps catch thousands of broca beetles each year.
The trap itself is made by taking a large red plastic bottle and cutting a rectangular hole in the side. Suspended inside the bottle is a little dropper full of alcohol along with used coffee grounds. The bottom of the trap is then filled with water. Tricked by the trap’s scent and bright-red color, the beetles believe it to be a big, delicious coffee cherry. They crawl inside and drown.
Innovations like these broca traps (shown in the photo below) have already made a world of difference for Blanca and her children.
Cross International currently has community transformation projects in 11 rural villages throughout Latin America, serving more than 6,000 children and family members. Although we currently cluster our community transformation efforts in Guatemala and Nicaragua, we expect our efforts to grow exponentially over the next five years to serve more than 60,0000 people. And we anticipate this growth to occur not only in Nicaragua and Guatemala, but also in other countries where Cross International works, such as Haiti, Honduras, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia.
