Central America: Joe Biden releases $ 4 billion.

Climate change and rising temperatures are causing severe droughts that hit Central American farmers hard. The United States has identified these phenomena as one of the serious causes of population movements towards the United States. Migrants are flocking in large numbers to flee increasingly harsh living conditions. As US Vice President Kamala Harris aptly reported, “If parents and children literally can't eat, if they don't have access to the essentials that everyone needs to eat. live, of course they will flee ” .

With this in mind, Joe Biden once again takes the opposite view of his predecessor. He leaves aside the repressive policy to adopt a more concerted and economic line in order to attack the roots of the problem. This is what Roberta Jacobson, White House coordinator for the southern border, explains in substance: " We are looking at all the productive options to respond to the economic reasons that push people to migrate, as well as the reasons for protection. and security "

Recall that the American President, Donald Trump, had suppressed, during his madat, financial aid to Guatemala, Honduras and Salvador in retaliation. He accused the governments of those countries of failing to effectively prevent their citizens from migrating. He said at the time: “We have already given them huge sums of money, and we will no longer fund them because they did nothing for us. "

Today, the Biden administration has therefore decided to ask the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to release an envelope of $ 4 billion (3.3 billion euros) to help farmers from Central America. The objective is twofold. On the one hand, it is a question of improving local infrastructures in order to allow farmers to face the vagaries of the weather and on the other hand, thus contributing to drying up the migratory flow to the United States, which continues to increase. for the past 15 years.

This more “human” approach to migration, as the Biden administration has described it, will be discussed by Kamala Harris during a virtual meeting that she will lead, on May 7, with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, President of Mexico. , and Alejandro Giammettei, President of Guatemala.

Kamaha Harris explained on CNN that: "The US Department of Agriculture will direct our attention and resources to help farmers in this region which has been devastated by climate and drought crises."

As might be expected, these measures are not to the taste of the Republican camp, which hastened to oppose the idea of cash transfers, in the person of Kevin McCarthy, leader of the Republican minority in the United States House of Representatives, saying, "This is insulting to the millions of Americans who are unemployed or facing despair in our country."