LatinNews Daily - 21 August 2023

* World Vision, an international Christian humanitarian organisation, has announced the launch of a climate action initiative “making Central America’s ’Dry Corridor’ green again” with a US$100m investment aimed at benefiting 10m people. The ‘Dry Corridor’ is the name given to an arid tract of land that runs 1,600 km along the Central American isthmus, where food scarcity has been a particular issue as crops fail and where over 60% of its 22m inhabitants live below the poverty line. The World Vision initiative covers four main areas: environmental regeneration and protection; water resource management; risk management and resilience; and food security. Jorge Galeano, the director of the Central American division for World Vision, has called for renewed support and collaboration from the private sector, cooperatives, academia, as well as local and national governments “to achieve both environmental and structural change on a societal level”. Research conducted by World Vision found that child malnutrition in the Dry Corridor was highest in Guatemala at 49%, reaching 80% in some indigenous areas.