Two consecutive years of severe drought decimated crops and exacerbated hunger among the poor in Central America.  The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says around 2.8 million people in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are relaying on food aid to survive.

"We have one of the worst drought in decades," said the FAO's Anna Ricoy, a risk reduction specialist.  "It's a recurrent drought that year after year is slowly eroding the livelihoods of small farmers.  It's a silent disaster," she added.

These prolonged dry spells were caused, in part, to the El Nino weather phenomenon and have caused immense hardship among subsistence farmers in Central America's "dry corridor" running through those three countries.  Water wells have gone dry as crops withered and the soil dried and cracked, and it's forcing people to give up nutrition.

"People are and have been selling their assets to survive, selling land and seeds, reducing the number of meals a day and reducing their amount of protein intake," said Gianni Morelli, disaster response advisor for Central America at the U.N. humanitarian agency (OCHA).  "Right now the situation is very serious, and it's fragile," he said.

Relief doesn't appear to be on the way.  The rainy season started a month late, and rainfall has been erratic at best. 

And across the Caribbean Sea, the drought has ravaged the poorest country in the Americas:  Half of all crops in Haiti are lost due to poor harvests last year, according to the UN World Food Program.  It has "resulted in a drastic deterioration of the food security situation", driving people deeper into poverty and hunger.