When Crops Fail, Migration Becomes Survival in Rural Guatemala 

At 4 a.m. in Xöconilaj , women gather in the dark with plastic tubs balanced on their hips, waiting their turn at the only well still holding water. By 6 a.m., the well will run dry. 

Twenty years ago, there were several rivers where the women could draw water. Now, they walk for hours with their children to wash clothes, fetch water for their animals, and haul enough back to cook the day’s meals. 

Climate change is not the  main reason people leave Guatemala. But in villages already grappling with poverty, limited access to basic services, insecurity, and lack of opportunities, it is the stress multiplier. It takes daily responsibilities (such as putting food on the table, earning money for school fees, fetching water to drink) and makes them harder to bear until migration becomes the only perceived escape. 

Our team spent a month in four rural Guatemalan communities – Chisnan, El Rincón, Las Uvas, and Xöconilaj – to understand how climate extremes deepen existing hardships and shape decisions to migrate. These communities, spread across four departments, face some of the country’s highest rates of irregular migration to the U.S., compounded by climate risks and security challenges, including gender-based violence. 

A Country on the Move 

Migration has long been woven into the fabric of Guatemala. For some Guatemalans, especially youth, migration is seen as a way to fulfil new aspirations, desires and personal interests that act as pull factors. For families in rural areas, the wage gap between what can be earned at home and what they can earn abroad is staggering. Remittances help families to build a modest home, cover hospital bills, or send children to secondary school, without which life is often reduced to making ends meet Nearly 20 percent of Guatemala’s GDP now comes from remittances, mostly sent by family members working in the United States.  

But climate shocks have narrowed the margins that once allowed families to get by. The same families who once scraped by on small harvests and occasional construction work now find both sources of income unreliable.  

Stress Multiplying Across Daily Life 

In Chisnan, farmers say their maize  and coffee yield 10 to 20 percent less than just a decade ago. Livestock suffer heat stress, while chickens and turkeys are plagued by pests that never used to appear. “Heat harms the animals,” one man explained. “Then come the pests. We’re used to having to inject them now. It wasn’t like that before.” 

When crops fail, families lean on construction jobs to make ends meet. But even that lifeline is fragile. In Chisnan, heavy rains make it impossible to build adobe houses while in Las Uvas and Xoconilaj, water scarcity drives up construction costs, as workers must buy water rather than draw it from rivers that no longer flow. 

For women, the pressures are magnified. Droughts mean longer journeys for water, time that could be spent on farming, childcare, or paid work. Domestic violence rises when men, facing crop losses and shrinking wages, turn frustration inward. One woman’s phrase lingers: “When the cornfield dries up, love dries up.” 

Less income also means fewer people can hire laborers, buy goods, or contribute to local projects.  

Breaking Points 

It is in these conditions that migration transforms from aspiration into survival strategy. In El Rincón, men take out loans to plant potatoes. If the rains fail, debt mounts and the only option is to leave. “People get desperate and head to the United States,” a farmer in El Rincón said. 

But leaving is expensive, often costing thousands of dollars paid to coyotes for safe travel across the border. Many never arrive. Some are deported after selling off everything to fund the trip. Others vanish altogether, their families left without answers. 

For those who cannot migrate such as the poorest households, many Indigenous families, and women trapped in violent relationships, the desperation deepens. One young man described the crushing cycle like this: It’s like if I got into farming, such as planting vegetables, maize, potatoes… I invest my capital, having faith that it will work out, that I’ll make something from it. If things don’t go as expected, how am I supposed to handle that debt? Then all sorts of thoughts start creeping into your head… not just about migrating, but sometimes I start thinking about ending my own life.” 

When U.S. migration is out of reach, mainly because of the lack of financial resources, families turn to seasonal work on coffee plantations. As stated by one man in Chisnan: “The crop was ruined and they lost what they had invested; that’s when we saw the trips to the coffee plantations.” Entire households including parents and children, migrate within Guatemala to pick coffee beans. Owners tolerate child labor, allowing families to bring their kids into the fields.  

This coping mechanism keeps families alive, but at a steep cost: children have to work and miss school, health suffers from long hours and poor food, whilefamilies remain trapped in cycles of poverty. 

Community Solutions 

From the fieldwork, it was clear that communities are not passive in the face of climate stress. In Las Uvas, many have shifted from farming to city jobs in El Progreso, while in the Western Highlands, women rear small livestock to boost food and income. These coping strategies, however, depend on resources, spatial connectivity and knowledge available locally. 

Communities also proposed longer-term, collective solutions that tackle root causes. These include small scale water projects to steady harvests, climate-smart farming techniques that narrow the gap between men and women’s incomes, fruit trees planted in home gardens to withstand heatwaves and strengthen diets. In Chisnan, for instance, women suggested planting fruit trees adapted to droughts and heatwaves, building on their existing home gardens. Such solutions address multiple risks at once from food insecurity to domestic violence and give women greater agency. As community members stressed, because the risks are interconnected, the solutions must be as well. Bottom-up approaches remain their strongest path to resilience. 

The Choice Ahead 

At dawn in  Xöconilaj, women still gather at the well, hoping for water before it runs dry. Their daily reality is not defined by climate change alone, but climate change ensures their burdens are heavier. For families already stretched thin, climate change is the accelerant that turns bad years into unbearable ones until leaving feels less like ambition and more like the obvious choice for survival.  

However, these same voices have ideas on how to move forward such as water projects, climate smart agricultural practices, and training in trades and alternative livelihoods, new ways of holding families together. The question that remains is whether these solutions will be nurtured, or whether the line at the well will become the prelude to another kind of departure; a slow emptying, not of water, but of people. 

Read more about our findings here.  

Authors: Charlotte Penel, Ignacio Lopez-Madurga Ibukun Taiwo, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. Photo Credit: Daniela Arce.

This work is carried out with support from the CGIAR Climate Action Science Program (CASP) and the CGIAR Food Frontiers and Security (FFS) Science Program. We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/