Protesters, led by the Emergency National Coordination of Farmers, gathered in Asunción yesterday to demand an extension to the national emergency food assistance scheme.

The programme, initiated by the government in January, follows an eight month period of drought which has seriously affected the agricultural sector.

The protesters have demand the extension of the initiative by six months to support rural families. The provisions include the delivery of seeds, food and credits to affected farmers. However, protesters have criticised the government for not effectively implementing the procedure.

“President Fernando Lugo declared three months of emergency food until April,” said Luis Aguayo, the secretary of the left-leaning Coordinating Board of Famers Organisation, in an interview with Associated Press.

“But he did not fully comply with the programme because the seeds intended for subsistence farming were not delivered; food donation was partial; and they have not refinanced loans granted by the Formentos National Bank to advance the planting of small farms and other benefits promised by the government.”

Around 215,000 poor rural families occupying land of up to 20 hectares still await aid.

Aguayo stated that “mobilisation is the first part of the protest to raise government awareness. If they do not respond, we will implement the second part: forceful measures such as the partial or complete blockage of national roads.”

Three hundred labourers temporarily closed parts of the motorway 36 kilometres to the south of Asunción on Tuesday.

In response, the Ministry of Agriculture stated on its website that the aid was centralised in indigenous communities in situations of extreme poverty. In addition, it admitted that the supply of seeds for subsistence farming and other benefits had not been fully met and that assistance would continue in May.

According to government statistics, 34% of Paraguayans are below the poverty line, 20% of whom live in extreme conditions.

After days of temperatures in the high 30s, severe storms are scheduled to hit the city of Buenos Aires and the central and northern regions of Argentina tonight.

The National Weather Service forecast states that strong winds, heavy rains, lightning and hail are expected to hit the country this evening.

Today’s temperatures were set to reach a maximum of 35 degrees today, with humidity sitting around 78%. The humidex was 38.8 degrees.

As well as the city of Buenos Aires,  severe weather warnings are in place for Buenos Aires province, Córdoba, northwest of La Pampa, Mendoza, San Luis, Santa Fe, Catamarca, Jujuy, La Rioja, Salta, Tucumán and Río de la Plata.

Last week, a storm hit the capital, knocking out power in some neighbourhoods and flooding three subway lines. Earlier in the week, the province of Córdoba suffered flooding, leaving two people dead and 15 injured.

The heavy rains come after months of drought, which affected soybean and corn crops in Argentina.

Argentine government officials arranged for $2.3bn in loans to aid drought-stricken farmers using funds provided by banks on 26^th January.

The funding announcement comes on the tails of another $500m in loan money that Agriculture Minister Norberto Yauhar granted as part of the Agricultural Emergency fund.

A drought has struck several countries in South America including Argentina, and Argentina Agrarian Federation president Eduardo Buzzi said the loans include $1.5bn coming from the Banco Nación and $800m from the Banco Provincia de Buenos Aires.

“This will be insufficient because the losses are much greater,” Buzzi said, according to La Información.

In its 26^th January survey, the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange stated that although recent rains will help farmers, they won’t entirely stem the agricultural impacts of drought in the country.

The non-profit civil association released numbers stating that the country’s soybean production is expected to be around 46.2 million tonnes during the 2011/12 farming year. While last weekend’s rain did help push the number up, the estimate is still below last year’s harvest of 49.2 million tonnes.

“Both seasons experienced extreme conditions during December, with the difference that the 2010/11 campaign managed to catch up at the end of January under better conditions, with more frequent rains, more even distribution and more millimetres of water,” the report said.

Argentina is one of the world’s leading producers of soybean.

The country’s corn – another product that Argentina excels at exporting – is also at risk. The report noted that the rains during the last seven days gave relief to most productive areas of our country, but other were left dry.

“Just the southwest of Córdoba, the northeast San Luis and the western part of Santiago del Estero have had low rainfall to none, complicating the summer crop conditions,” the report noted.

Over the past two months, the La Niña weather pattern has caused a prolonged drought in Argentina, as well as Paraguay and Brazil, which is estimated to yield ten million metric tonnes less of corn crops than previously estimated, and four million less of soybean crops. If rains do not pick up, the damage is predicted to be irreversible.

“The situation is disastrous and the loss is enormous” Martin Fraguio of Maizar, an Argentine corn farming group, told Business Week.

The soybeans are in “intensive care” added Miguel Calvo, head of Argentine soybean association Acsoja.

Farmers’ representative groups are blaming President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s policies for their insufficient protection in such circumstances. The president has been criticised for her lack of financial help – refusing requests for increasing the state security fund in the case of drought, and refusing an overview to relax the tax burden for farmers.

Temperatures are forecast to remain around 35 degrees Celsius throughout January, with the Buenos Aires province set to have “scarce or no rain,” according to the Buenos Aires Cereals Exchange.

Satellite images of the Space Agency of the United States (NASA) revealed that in 2010 the green surface of the Amazon rainforest decreased by an area equal in size to three and a half times the state of Texas.

Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of extreme droughts in the future.

The Amazon, which is considered to be the green lungs of the planet, suffered one of the most extreme droughts to date in 2010. This resulted in a reduction of 1.5 million square kilometres of vegetation, more than four times the area affected by the severe drought of 2005.

The findings came out of a study by scientists who have been investigating the behaviour of the ecosystem over the past decade. The study is supported by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellites of NASA.

“Data from MODIS satellite spectrometer on green vegetation suggest a broader impact, severe and long lasting in the Amazonian vegetation which can be deduced based solely on rainfall data,” said Arindam Samanta, co-author and researcher of the Environmental Atnopsheric Research, in statements reported by the Centre for Sustainability in Spain (OSE).

The study, published in the journal of the American Geophysical Union, also shows that the phenomenon affected the water levels in rivers in the Amazon basin, which began dropping in August 2010, reaching unprecedented levels in late October.

The work was done in collaboration between the University of Boston, Federal University of Viçosa in Brazil, and Atnopsheric and Environmental Research, among others.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez signed a decree on Monday declaring an “electricity emergency”. Speaking from his new radio programme, Suddenly with Chávez, he said that Venezuela was facing its worse drought in years, he said: “Today it fell another 13cm. It hasn’t rained the whole year; it’s Venezuela’s worst drought in 100 years.” But, critics claim that poor infrastructure and bad management are to blame for the problems. Chávez rejected these claims and said that the drought plus increased demand was to blame.

Venezuela depends heavily on hydropower to supply electricity to the country. Although the country has large oil reserves, 70% of its power is supplied by the Guri Dam complex on the Orinoco River, which has fallen more than 9m below normal levels.

Under the decree, energy users who consume more than 500 kilowatt-hours per month, must reduce their consumption by at least 10% or face a 75% price rise. Industrial users will also have to cut their usage by 20% or face sanctions. Blackouts are already underway in parts of Venezuela and have sparked violent protests in the capital, Caracus.

 Earlier this month Chávez announced that Cuban vice-president Ramiro Valdes would head a committee to tackle the power shortages. Yesterday he also announced that a team of Argentine experts would be arriving on Thursday to help devise new plans to combat the power problem.

After weeks of pressure, president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner yesterday signed an agreement declaring Argentina in a state of ‘national agricultural emergency’.

The announcement follows a period of low rainfall during 2008 and this year, the lowest rainfall in the last 100 years according to the Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA), which has caused the worst draught Argentina has seen in the last 50 years.

The agreement means that all agricultural producers will be allowed to delay paying agricultural taxes for a year. The ‘carta de porte’, a licence that authorizes the transport of cereals on the roads of Argentina, will also be made free.

The agricultural unions still consider this insufficient help.

It is estimated that, without water for irrigation and feeding, there will be a 30% reduction in grain and a loss of 1.5m heads of livestock.

While the drought has affected the whole country, the provinces of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos and Santa Fe have been worst hit. In Santa Fe alone 300,000 cattle have died and those that remain are in a weak state.

According to the organisation Confederaciones Rurales Argentinas (CRA), this year’s harvest of wheat, maize, soy and sunflower will be down by 30m tonnes on last year’s production.

With little rain forecast over the next week and the agricultural producers unhappy with the president’s intervention, the fortune of a land once dubbed ‘the world’s granary’ is very much hanging in the balance.

Uruguay yesterday declared emergency measures to be taken by the government for farmers due to a nationwide drought on important beef and dairy producing land.

Livestock Minister Ernesto Agazzi announced that the government will provide farmers with cattle feed at interest-free, deferrable prices, help with the drilling of wells and the creation of water reservoirs, and extended deadlines on energy bills as well as tax and social security payments.

The lowest reported rainfall in three decades comes at a testing time for troubled farmers who are also struggling with falling demand and lower prices for their produce due to the global economic crisis.

The drought has limited crop produce, killed livestock in overcrowded paddocks with insufficient pasture and water, and scorched land. Uruguay’s annual average rainfall usually ranges between 1,000 and 1,200 millimetres but in the year it has been 700 to 750mm.

Agazzi today announced that there was serious drought in “more than the 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) that I reported a few days ago.” Uruguayan president Tabare Vazquez admits that the situation is “far worse” than officially reported only a week ago. Both Agazzi and Vazquez have been accused of downplaying the intensity of the prolonged drought.

At the start of the year (the hottest summer months in Uruguay) the government banned the use of hosepipes to water gardens, wash cars or fill swimming pools in order to try to conserve the little fresh water available. The National Emergency System also offered over 200 water tanks, of up to 2,000 litres each, to the country’s 19 departments.

The drought is also affecting neighbouring Argentina, where farmers have requested emergency aid as the harvest of their soy, wheat and corn produce is threatened.