For smallholder farmers across the Global South, climate shocks are not discrete events. They are a slow erosion of the conditions that made farming a viable life. A drought that lasts a little longer than the last. Flooding that reaches fields it never used to reach. Harvests that come in smaller, less predictable. According to the World Bank’s Groundswell report, climate change could force up to 216 million people to move within their own countries by 2050, with the majority of that movement flowing from rural agricultural areas into cities1. People do not leave all at once. They leave after one too many seasons of failure, when staying no longer makes sense. Youth move to cities because of the fear these trends will make it impossible to sustain themselves in their rural communities. 

Three regions show what this looks like on the ground. 

In Central America’s Dry Corridor, which stretches across Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, repeated drought cycles since 2014 have devastated smallholder farmers who depend on rain-fed maize and beans. A 2019 FAO and World Food Programme survey found that 8 percent of families in the Dry Corridor, many of them small-scale farmers, planned to migrate in direct response to those conditions2. As agricultural production becomes untenable, many Indigenous youth are forced to move, and their departure weakens the social fabric of rural communities, reducing agricultural productivity further and creating a cycle of poverty and migration3. In the drought-prone highlands of Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, Food First ecosystem ally Asociación Qachuu Aloom — featured in our November 2025 spotlight — has been working against this pattern.. Founded by Maya Achí farmers, Qachuu Aloom has spent over two decades recovering native seeds, rebuilding traditional milpa systems, and teaching agroecological practices that help member families weather droughts that devastate their neighbors. During a 50-day drought that destroyed corn crops across the region, families using Qachuu Aloom’s organic composting methods reported significantly better harvests. Their work is evidence of what remains possible when community members work together to find viable solutions, and a reminder of what is lost when they cannot. 

In Bangladesh, the pattern is different in form but similar in consequence. Rural populations migrate to urban centers like Dhaka due to flooding and salinity intrusion4 driven by sea-level rise and increasingly erratic monsoon cycles. An estimated 80 percent of farmers in affected areas report that crop and livestock production are suffering from unseasonable rain, limited availability of surface water, and depletion of groundwater5. For many, migration is not a choice but a slow-motion necessity. 

In the Sahel, prolonged droughts and desertification are driving migration and heightening competition for scarce resources6. Communities that have farmed the same land for generations find the conditions that sustained that relationship no longer reliable. What changes is not just the harvest, but the entire basis for staying. 

The people who leave are often young. And when young people leave farming, the loss is not only one of labor. It is a loss of living knowledge: which seeds perform well in dry years, how to read soil before it fails, when to plant based on signals that no weather app can replicate, how to combine crops in ways that protect the land and the harvest at once. This knowledge is not written down. It is carried, practiced, and passed between generations in the act of farming together. 

Food First’s own Amplifying Grassroots Voices in Food Justice graphic novel captures this reality firsthand, through the stories of farmers, organizers, and food justice leaders who are navigating exactly these pressures. Their experiences make visible what aggregate data can obscure: that behind every statistic on rural outmigration, which is leaving one place, often your home, to settle somewhere else, is a person who learned something from someone who will not be replaced. 

Cities are not absorbing this movement. They are straining under it. Rural-to-urban migration driven by climate and economic pressure concentrates food-insecure populations in urban areas that lack the infrastructure, housing, good paying jobs and food systems to support them. Informal settlements expand. Urban food insecurity deepens. The pressure that began in the field arrives, transformed, in the city. And the need to send money home to help those left behind continues. 

This is not a problem that begins in cities, and it will not be solved there alone. Organizations like the Climate Justice Alliance, whose resiliency hubs are profiled in this issue, are working to build urban food infrastructure that is rooted in community governance and food sovereignty. But that work is made harder every year that the conditions driving people off the land go unaddressed. 

Here is the deeper contradiction. The knowledge leaving rural communities is not incidental to climate resilience. It is foundational to it. Agroecology, which is increasingly recognized as one of the most promising pathways toward sustainable food systems, is built on precisely the kind of traditional, place-based, intergenerational knowledge that rural hollowing erases. We cannot build the food systems we need for a changing climate while continuing to allow the conditions that drive their knowledge keepers away. 

Climate migration is not a side effect of the crisis. It is the crisis making itself legible.