Mitch in Honduras: A Disaster Waiting to Happen
Boyer, Jeff & Pell, Aaron
The tragic tale of Honduras strongly suggests that decades of unsustainable development and the physical impacts of this terrible hurricane have fallen most heavily on the poor. The winding...
...Kawas' martyrdom helped spark Honduras' environmental movement and the creation of a private nonprofit organization charged with protecting the park...
...La Prensa (San Pedro Sula), January 5, 1999...
...Centro de Documentaci6n de Honduras (CEDOH), 1991...
...8-11...
...and Conroy et...
...Authors' interview, Ines Fuentes, June 1999...
...of the plantation wo For at least the past 20 years in this area, most fam- Oriented toward the ilies have had insufficient lands on which to produce tion, the Sula Valley at subsistence levels...
...2 8 It frequently runs "scare" articles in the national tabloids on "ecoterrorism" to divide the environmental movement...
...3 1 As he and so many Hondurans reminded us, the dominant neoliberal policies, corporate practices and consumer patterns of the United States must also change before Central American governments feel compelled to change...
...36REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA A cross, partially buried by mud, in a Choluteca cemetery...
...4 carved a fundamental sense of Looking across the vulnerability deeply into mountains and valleys in the foreground, we esti- people's psyches...
...No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999 once a lush tropical ecosystem with small, self-sustaining peasant communities...
...Fuentes is the founder of a multiple service cooperative that supports 14 cooperatives with tractors and other equipment on the rich soils of the Negrito Valley...
...Indigenous fisher families have bitterly protested their own displacement from the coastal estuary and the environmental destruction of mangroves by the shrimp corporations...
...1 With power, streets and bridges out, the usual half-hour trip across town was taking half a day if it could be made at all...
...Authors' interview, Brenda Avila, PROLANSATE official, Tegucigalpa, June, 1999...
...On heavy pesticide use, poisonings and contamination in the cotton and melon industries, see Stonich, "Development, Rural Impoverishment and Environmental Destruction...
...26...
...The Mosquitia, with Honduras' largest forests, sustained very high rates of loss in the 1980s, possibly higher than the cited figures...
...Approximately two-thirds of the hillsides and valleys two U.S.-based comp in front of us were eroding cattle pasture...
...Mitch in Honduras: A Disaster Waiting to Happen 1. New York Times, November 9, 1998, p. A8...
...Authors' interview, Juana Lainez, El Corpus, June 1999...
...retail chains like K-Mart, Burger King and Radio Shack...
...See also MacEoin, "Honduras...
...They have also promoted the replanting of native subsistence crops for local consumption and to preserve these now perilously scarce genetic materials.13 With the help of outside technical assistance, often from NGOs or religious organizations, it is possible for the peasants to reduce or end their need to presell their crops to coyotes...
...6 The region's colonial land-use pattern generally consisted of cattle ranches occupying the coastal plains and a few peasant communities in the highlands to the north and east...
...3 The tragic tale of these two cities strongly suggests that decades of maldevelopment and the physical impacts of this Class 5 hurricane have fallen most heavily on the poor...
...See also Howard Rosenzweig, "11 Sagni Relief Project Conducts Survey in La Mosquitia," Honduras This Week (Tegucigalpa), January 9, 1999...
...3 0 In the weeks immediately following the hurricane, there was palpable optimism across Honduras that somehow this great disaster would catalyze widespread rethinking about the dominant development model and that sensible alternatives would emerge...
...It has beautiful coral reefs, marine and lagoon ecosystems and tropical forests in the background and is home to Garffuna villagers of African and Carib descent...
...Such policies must guarantee Sula and then north a modicum of land security for peasant farmers and "export artery"-whi be accompanied by sustainable practices...
...115-159...
...for mountain permaculture...
...14...
...They could follow the slash-and-burn cycle for two years and then fallow it for three or four years, allowing secondary growth to return...
...Agricultureco-exist with hundreds of newer he global assembly line, mostly an maquilas that employ 50,000 wages...
...In the beds, milpa crops are inter- based industries now planted with a variety of fruits, vegetables and medic- finishing plants for t inal plants...
...Over the past decade, the farmers involved with United Communities have helped each other secure their production of maize, sorghum and beans...
...And now with the rains returning," she said, anticipating even heavier rains from September to mid-November, "we are becoming islands once again...
...4. "1998: Hurricane Mitch (Category 5)," Intellecast at <http://www.intellicast.com/>, June 4, 1999...
...Authors' interview, Venancio Montoya, El Corpus, Choluteca, January 1999...
...The winding Choluteca River connects the wide and fertile valleys of Honduras' central mountains with the southern mountains along the Pacific slope...
...1 (1990), pp...
...He paused...
...1-22...
...La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa), January 3, 1999, p. 2. 2. New York Times, November 9, 1998, p. A9...
...See Ingemar Hedstrom, Volveran Las Golandrinas...
...It is now an agro-industrial landscape, transformed by the predominance of United Fruit and Standard Fruit since 1915, when these anies consolidated their banana . The land was made to produce homogeneity, typically bananas Im oil trees...
...Writing from Costa Rica in the late 1980s about the environmental destruction occurring throughout Latin America, Ingemar Hedstrom attempted to answer the provocative question posed in his book's title: "When will the swallows return...
...Aaron Pell is a graduate student in Latin American history at Appalachian State University...
...2 6 Part of Juana Lainez's frustration at becoming an island again is that she knows that the bridges linking the El Corpus highlands to Choluteca will not be rebuilt anytime soon...
...Several years of low harvests and indebtedness often forces peasants to sell their land, often to cattlemen ready to convert the farmland to a pasture...
...By the 1980s the timber industry, cattle ou-year-oia Misquito compared Mitch's mud-filled floodwaters with the clearwater flooding of another hurricane 70 years ago, testimony to the erosion-producing deforestation that has resulted from the heavy logging and agricultural activity of recent years...
...fruit companies since the early 1900s...
...For analyses of southern Honduras see Jeff Boyer, "From Peasant Economia to Capitalist Social Relations in Southern Honduras," South Eastern Latin Americanist, Vol 27, No...
...There are steep places with forest cover up to the ridge top that slumped and started a slide...
...In January, Flores argued that since it would take four Mitch has made the Honduran government's priorities abundantly clear: to support large, corporate interests that generate foreign exchange for debt repayment and ever-greater consumption for the wealthy...
...The scrub trees would be cut next year for the milpa, especially for Potreritos' prized red beans...
...Stonich, "Development, Rural Impoverishment and Environmental Destruction," discusses the environmental politics surrounding the gourmet shrimp industry...
...8 But southerners have consistently challenged the export agriculture model...
...2 5 Then there is the question of priorities...
...Moving regions like southern Honduras back political or military from the deep human and environmental crisis that has initial force to stop lo beset the country requires government dedication to dent Carlos Flores wa implementing sound environmental and agricultural- the highway connect ly sustainable policies...
...This watershed links Tegucigalpa, once a tiny colonial mining town in the central mountains and now a bustling capital city of 800,000 inhabitants, to Choluteca, the major city on the southern coastal plain with a population of over 110,000...
...Authors' interview, Ines Fuentes, Tegucigalpa, June 1999...
...A recent study centers of fruit comp by World Neighbors/Honduras has confirmed that this Lima and El Progreso type of hillside permaculture retained more soil and Mitch's initial win sustained fewer landslides than conventional hillside from discharging as i farms during Hurricane Mitch.1 6 But Nacho also ques- rains...
...1 5 ers, losing their cult Nacho took us to the farm of a neighbor, Mamerto agriculture and to ni Guill6n, who has transformed his farm into a model against fruit compan...
...For two weeks we were cut off from the city of Choluteca," said Juana Lafnez, a school teacher in El Corpus, as she recounted the isolation of the hillside communities after the hurricane hit...
...Steady population growth has country's gross dom been one causal factor...
...2 9 Its new cabinetlevel environmental ministry is underfunded and rarely consulted...
...these southern highlands have hurricane region, fie the highest rural densities in Honduras...
...The city reported only 102 deaths and 78 missing, but the displaced numbered 38,814, more than a third of its inhabitants...
...The challenges of reconstruction are daunting given that Honduras' natural resource base has long suffered the demands of global capitalist development...
...and Susan Stonich, "The Political Economy of Environmental Destruction: Food Security in Southern Honduras," in Scott Whiteford and Anne Ferguson, eds...
...4 (1984), pp...
...The grassroots response to the hurricane was impressive...
...Having attracted peasant settlement from Nicaragua and central Honduras from 1880 to 1930, the southern highlands began to fill up...
...Using their radio station "Radio Progreso" to keep people in touch, the Jesuits worked closely with the neighborhood committees that formed to control looting and distrubute the food aid...
...But he is quite adroit at using both institutions and some favored NGOs to manage staged public forums and undermine genuine participation while stifling criticism...
...But unfortunately, the optimism about Mitch's silver lining seems to have eroded as the government directs its energies toward the engineering of big highways and away from any sort of cogent social policy...
...2 2 From the north-central region of Yoro, Ines Fuentes, a national leader of the peasant land reform movement spoke of another kind of environmental maldevelopment...
...Global Review," New York Times Business Supplement, December 8, 1998, p. 1. 18...
...117-121...
...This official subterfuge notwithstanding, Mitch has made the government's priorities abundantly clear: to support large, corporate interests that generate foreign exchange for debt repayment and for ever-greater consumption for the wealthy...
...By 1974 land in pasture had increased to 61% of the south's land area...
...45-74...
...2 0 Other regions of Honduras share the telltale scars of global capitalism's misuse of Honduras' natural resources...
...The government of Presis more concerned with restoring ting Tegucigalpa to San Pedro to Puerto Cortes-its national ch it did within a week with suplitary...
...See also Informe sobre el desarrollo humano, Honduras 1998, p. 57...
...They have turned a blind eye to the illegal burning of many thousands of acres of forests each year, which is rapidly turning Honduras' forest reserves and biodiversity into fragmented remnants...
...The irony of this bizarre post-Mitch year is that the necessary shipments of emergency foods often lower grain prices, adding another disincentive to plant...
...Since the late 1950s, peasants have protested land enclosures by cattlemen and, in coordination with peasants in other regions, they organized one of the largest land reform movements in the isthmus...
...Environ- holdings in the region mental destruction-mostly cattlemen-induced defor- an enormous genetic estation-and its foreclosure on so much human or, more recently, pay opportunity was well under way here before Mitch...
...Grassroots communities and local NGOs are working to rebuild their lives with a more palpable awareness of the historical patterns of environmental degradation that Mitch has served to compound...
...At Stockholm's recent International Summit for Central American Reconstruction, President Flores secured $2.7 billion in loans and grants...
...Mitch also laid bare the unsustainable nature of Honduras' export-oriented development model...
...technical ends of mass producnow accounts for 60% of the lestic product (GDP...
...TI Such questions cry out for continued applied that emergency neig research...
...From an environmental perspective it has wrought massive deforestation, soil erosion and the pesticide contamination of soil, water, plants and animals...
...Omar Lainez collected the pre- and post-Mitch data on the shrimp industry, June 1999...
...and Stonich, "The Political Economy of Environmental Destruction...
...Even before the hurricane, the south was already Honduras' poorest and most denuded region...
...Yet large they must be periodi families will remain a rational response to poverty as mud and rock...
...Marc Edelman, "Reconceptualizing and Reconstituting Peasant Struggles: A New Social Movement in Central America," Radical History Review, Vol...
...San Jose: Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones, 1990...
...Formerly Punta Sal, the park was renamed in 1995 when its namesake was murdered for defending it from timber and palm oil interests backed by the military...
...63-70...
...For a history of the north coast, see Victor Meza, Historia del Movimiento Obrero (Tegucigalpa...
...the contour, both with stone walls and perennials with other regions organiz large root systems...
...On the fateful night of October 30, 1998, when the storm was at its height, the mountain's steep slopes and narrow valleys put people between crashing boulders and trees from above and flash flooding from below...
...Mitch dumped a lot of rain all at once...
...Authors' interview, Roberto Vallejo, director of INADES, Tegucigalpa, May 1996 and May 1999...
...9 Mitch hit the eastern Choluteca highlands equally hard...
...The campesino farmers of the area call the scarred hillsides, left bare by thousands of rock slides that evening, the "devil's claw marks...
...Had there been oil in those pipes, they certainly would have ruined the park's botanical gardens, coral reefs and beaches...
...When Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras last October, the Choluteca River, engorged by the heavy rainfall, became a raging monster that took out Tegucigalpa's bridges, hospitals, factories and prisons...
...long as the government denies any real social security Peasants from the n for the elderly of this poor nation...
...But Chiquita Brands-the mpany-had helicopters and a 39REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA fleet of four-wheel drive trucks yet did nothing to rescue thousands of their stranded workers from the rooftops when the banana fields were flooded...
...Usually it is drought and usurious grain merchants called coyotes, often financially linked to cattlemen capital, that have directly undermined production and, ultimately, peasant livelihood itself...
...Social disintegration and anomie, like the physical isolation of communities after Mitch, is a growing danger...
...The region's remaining stands of deciduous and pine forests were cut to 13%.7 From a human perspective, the south's reliance on this U.S.-backed export development model-first beef, cotton and sugar and, since the late 1970s, melons and gourmet shrimp-has led to rural landlessness, chronic unemployment and steady outmigration...
...Honduras' southern region, which consists of the departments of Choluteca and Valle, presents a classic, well-documented case of both failed and contested export development...
...The massive flo tioned both the initial labor costs needed to establish and stranded thousan the terraces and the yields, especially compared to his of their scattered ban traditional second planting of monocropped beans...
...years of the national budget to rebuild the entire economy, the government must concentrate on the infrastructure for the nation's productive plant-the main structures of power, transport and communications for agribusiness and industry...
...Since January, NA4IA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA however, the government has put the total cost of reconstruction at $5.2 billion, which means that only half of the reconstruction bill has been financed-assuming that these new funds are prudently spent...
...See the Honduran Network for Sustainable Development at <http//www.rds.org.hn...
...H. Jeffrey Leonard, Natural Resources and Economic Development in CentralAmerica (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987...
...Despite the danger, the Flores Administration appears willing to risk this natural treasure, as well as Tela's growing ecotourism industry and one of Honduras' most popular beaches, in order to benefit corporate industrial interests...
...Harvest of Want: Hunger and Food Security in Central and Mexico (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), pp...
...Directions in the Anthropological Study of Latin America: A Reassessment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987...
...personal correspondence), November 6, 1998...
...The raging Choluteca River continued on, picking up still more rainwater in its deadly rampage to the Pacific Gulf...
...In Tegucigalpa, the many crowded, impoverished neighborhoods with poorly constructed houses and few services contrast sharply with new well-constructed residential areas for the small middle and upper classes with their shiny new shopping malls, banks and U.S...
...The government also refuses to look to the long-term and fund reforestation projects or the three large bioreserve projects it gave to the National Institute for Environment and Development (INADES) to manage...
...fast-food industry and investments in new packing plants and container trucks in Honduras, and with multilateral investments in the new highway system to the north T coast ports, cattlemen, greedy for more pasture land, Began to enclose and evict the peasants...
...They must port from the U.S...
...A network of 28 environmental NGOs is organizing a national forum to devise strategies to challenge the Flores government's anti-environmental policies and demand support for a participatory, sustainable plan for reconstruction...
...Brenda Avila, a park technician, said that the first pipes that the government installed were washed to sea by Mitch's heavy rains...
...This model has also contributed to a decline in basic food production and the loss of traditional skills for future sustainability...
...Look over here," he said, pointing to a nearby flat area on the hillside...
...With well over 100,000 people unemployed, the south since Mitch is a region of acute crisis...
...As we passed hundreds of "devil's claw marks" on the mountains before us, I asked Nacho if there had been more rock slides on the pasture land or on farm land...
...Over 150,000 displaced people from 80 neighborhoods crowded schools, hospitals, churches and makeshift shelters...
...La Mosquitia, the vast eastern Caribbean lowlands, once held one of the world's significant rainforests, where Honduran mahogany was in abundant supply...
...and Stonich, "Development, Rural Impoverishment and Environmental Destruction," pp...
...Mitch has given environmentalism an urgency that was missing in the earlier peasant movement, and there is evidence of sustainable innovations at the grassroots throughout the country...
...Had turned over the emerge Jesuits and neighborhoo Chiquita's callous firing probably would have beer n contrast to tins commercianzea lanascape, a Dit of natural green remains in the Jeanette Kawas National Park, west of Tela on the Caribbean coast...
...While Tegucigalpa and southern Honduras managed to resist world development pressures until mid-century, the subsequent urbanization and economic expansion took off at a furious if utterly unplanned pace in a fitful attempt to catch up with the country's industrial North Coast, which has been dominated by the U.S...
...See Informe sobre el desarrollo humano, Honduras 1998, p. 43...
...See, for example, "Los Ecoterroristas," La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa), January 3, 1999...
...As the river widened, it poured into Fourth Avenue, rechanneling itself through low-lying downtown districts...
...4 With shoddier housing, usually located on highly vulnerable areas, the poor of Tegucigalpa and Choluteca were more exposed to the damage caused by Mitch...
...5 But the government has given few indications it will seek to take the storm's destruction as a point of departure for building a more sustainable development model...
...The land once belonged to an absentee cattlewoman who let them cultivate this hillside in exchange for clearing pasture below...
...Authors' interview, Ignacio Espinal, Potreritos, Concepcio6n de Maria, June 1999...
...2 3 Part of the problem, he says, was too great an emphasis in the 1970s and 1980s government agrarian reform program on rapid mechanization and not on longer-term sustainable practices...
...or drinking water...
...The transnational claimed that their fields had been totally ruined from the debris that had washed down from the surrounding mountains...
...And the shrimp industry has brought about significant species loss...
...l 2 In addition to the anguish of the isolation imposed by the disaster, peasants are hesitant to plant new crops for fear of more rock slides during this rainy season or even of another "La Nifia" superstorm...
...49, 182...
...Authors' interview, Angela Rivas de Rosenzweig, Howard Rosenzweig and Susan Van der Linden, II Sagni Relief Project, Copan Ruinas, June 1999...
...Mud and rock slides either buried or slid out from under a dozen poor neighborhoods on the bare hillsides surrounding the downtown area, sending hundreds of people to their death...
...and South Kore...
...If subsistence production can be maintained or even surpluses achieved, then peasant families can hold their own against the encroaching cattlemen, still eager for more pasture...
...al., A Cautionary Tale...
...The jobs these agro-industries created never kept pace with the numbers of peasant farmers they displaced...
...Plowed land is the most likely to erode, but the NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA thin, steep pasture lands can erode more quickly than the milpa, especially if the farmer leaves Just as it recarved the physical landscape, Mitch seems to have so me vegetation on the farmland...
...1 Virtually the entire harvest for maize, VOL XXXIII, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999 37REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA sorghum and beans was destroyed...
...People heard a whirring noise," said Venancio Montoya, manager of the United Communities (CU) and president of a peasant cooperative, "Some thought it was a relief helicopter and stepped outside in the night, only to be buried under the rock and debris of the collapsing hillside above them...
...But the post-Mitch world is only intensifying global capitalism's 20 years of imposed atomization of Honduras' traditional bonds of families and communities...
...From a health perspective it has not only generated widespread malnutrition, but also, thanks to the cotton and melon industries, to one of the highest levels of pesticide poisoning in Latin America...
...The national area in forest cover shrunk from 44% in 1970 to 36% in 1980...
...The neoliberal governments of the 1990s were led by Presidents Rafael Callejas of the Nationalist Party (1990-94), and Liberals Carlos Roberto Reina (1994-98) and Carlos Roberto Flores (1998-present...
...As roads and newer higl we returned to Nacho's home under the midday sun, and palm oil plantat he talked about Mamerto's farm in hopeful terms as a industrial city of San viable alternative for highland farmers...
...But the land was sold to a cattleman who decided to turn the whole slope into pasture by burning every year, eliminating any growth but pasture grasses...
...But wherever the ground was open or eroded, the heavy rains opened it up even more...
...Given the lack of affordable housing, new urban dwellers established squatter settlements on Tegucigalpa's hillsides and out along Choluteca's river banks in the south, a process which has left the hills surrounding the capital devoid of vegetation...
...Cattlemen burn for pasture, while peasants burn off public lands, often frustrated by landlessness and by the more powerful loggers and ranchers who seem to have no trouble securing access to public forests...
...Responding to the basic human needs and aspirations of the poor and working majority is simply not a priority...
...Rural densities here are now above the 310 inhabitants per square mile cited in Boyer, "From Peasant Economia to Capitalist Social Relations...
...Mamerto's cultivation of spiny cedar, native to Hon- women at non-union duras and much valued for fine furniture-making...
...25...
...Only then might the swallows return to Honduras and the isthmus...
...74-75...
...tional plot of interplanted maize, beans and sorghum, Nacho has cautiously introduced elements of the new permaculture promoted by a Church-run peasant agriculture program...
...Honduras' current average density is 119 inhabitants per square mile...
...6. For economic and environmental assessments of Central America's export-led model of development, see Robert Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986...
...2 In many ways, Tegucigalpa and Choluteca were accidents waiting to happen...
...A savvy peasant farmer named Ignacio "Nacho" Espinal took us on a morning walk behind the long, curved horseshoe-shaped ridge of Potreritos, his remote highland community of 74 households in Concepci6n de Marfa...
...There it widened to six times its normal size, burying many mostly poor neighborhoods and part of the commercial center in mud...
...The slopes are terraced on the right to unionize...
...For a broader discussion of these issues, see Boyer, "Capitalism, Campesinos and Calories...
...Jack Warner, S.J...
...Successive neoliberal governments of the 1990s have served to accelerate the polarization of urban space...
...We were like islands...
...El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa), June 14, 1999...
...He reported that Mitch destroyed over 100 acres, covering them in rock, with one small cooperative losing all of its land...
...mated that approximately b to KAo or it nad stands of older growth trees...
...mi] also promote the production of healthy food for The government c Honduras instead of using its limited land in export urgency of other prior production...
...2 7 Scavenger loggers are officially allowed to sell the semi-damaged timber after a burn...
...65 (1996), p. 43...
...Choluteca municipal data collected by Pedro Corrales, July, 1999...
...ould blame its absence to the rities...
...The Eleven" will let the old trees stand, as Nacho put it, "to keep nature's vegetation...
...and Boyer, "Charisma, Martyrdom and Liberation in Southern Honduras," Comparative Social Research, No...
...personal correspondence), November 720, 1999...
...See also Jeff Boyer, "Peasant Leaders and Allies Speak...
...In the northeastern highlands of the department of Choluteca, it ripped out 60 houses in Duyure and destroyed the entire town of Morolica before descending upon Choluteca's capital...
...Boyer, "Capitalism, Campesinos and Calories in Southern Honduras," in Jack Rollwagen, ed...
...3. United Nations Development Program, Informe sobre desarrollo humano, Honduras 1998 (Tegucigalpa: UNDP), pp...
...5. See also Susan Stonich, "Development, Rural Impoverishment and Environmental Destruction in Honduras," in Michael Painter and William Durham, eds., The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp...
...Since Stockholm, Flores has softened the rhetoric about funding priorities and has given some support to the Municipal Emergency Committees and the Honduran Fund for Social Investment (FHIS...
...old United Fruit Col T he great Sula Val- ley, on Honduras' north coast, was VoL XXXIII...
...Just as it recarved the physical landscape, Mitch seems to have carved a fundamental sense of vulnerability deeply into people's psyches...
...At home with the curved blade mountain machete in his milpa, the tradiCampesinos refer to these scarred hillsides, which were damaged by Mitch-induced rock slides, as the "devil's claw marks...
...Emergency neighborhood committees sprang up overnight to counter looting and to organize the search for food, water and medicine, while nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worked side-by-side with local groups and international agenNACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Jeff Boyer is associate professor of anthropology and founding director of the Sustainable Development Program at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina...
...7. See Boyer, "From Peasant Economia to Capitalist Social Relations," pp...
...I think the ground got so heavy and sodden that it just gave way...
...Displaced by agribusiness and steady population growth in the central and southern hinterlands, peasants have flocked to these two cities, doubling the country's urban population from 20 to 40% over the past 50 years...
...In June the Flores Administration reported a 5.8% reduction in GDP and a 30% reduction in tax revenues this year compared to 1998...
...Cars, buses and refrigerators were swept away by the torrent...
...But with the growth of the U.S...
...It's no good for milpa now," said Nacho, "with all this grass and erosion...
...Information also provided by Jack Warner, S.J...
...Crossing the property line, we entered an open, overgrazed pasture, with eroded gullies...
...The environmental negligence of Flores and previous neoliberal governments precedes Mitch...
...La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa), May 13 and April 1, 1998...
...and Michael Conroy, Douglas Murray and Peter Rosset, A Cautionary Tale: Failed Development Policy in Central America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner/Food First, 1996...
...we got in eight days what we usually get in a year," he said...
...cies to coordinate relief efforts...
...The older system of railhway networks link the banana ions to ports, and to the major Pedro Sula and the traditional any operations, the towns of La .18 ds prevented the northern rivers t simultaneously dumped heavy 'oding drowned countless people ds of workers on the tin rooftops ana camps for days without food he Jesuits of El Progreso report hborhood committees, not the authorities, constituted the only oting...
...This is, of course, the environmental side of what has been called the savagery of contemporary neoliberalism...
...8. On peasant malnutrition, see Boyer, "Capitalism, Campesinos and Calories...
...As many NGO leaders told us, history is not destiny, and a more authentically Honduran development is possible...
...See also Gary MacEoin "Honduras: Corruption Hinders Hurricane Recovery," National Catholic Reporter, April 30, 1999...
...Nearly a year after the hurricane hit, some 10,000 people who lost their homes due to Mitch remain in large temporary shelters...
...Nacho, a tall and wiry man who appears younger than his 58 years, learned to read in the 1960s through Catholic Radio Schools and is something of the community scribe and news analyst...
...The tasks of "human development," he said, must fall to the 297 municipalities and to the NGO and the international communities-meaning scant help for secondary roads and bridges, rebuilding water systems, clinics, schools, houses and reclaiming small farmsteads...
...See Leonard, Natural Resources and Economic Development in Central America, pp...
...To add insult to injury, Chiquita laid off 7,500 employees a week later...
...Yet they struggled y exploitation and in 1954 won Later, they helped peasants in :e for land reform...
...Data from both municipalities collected by Pedro Corrales, July 1999...
...2 1 The government, apparently tied down with the disasters in central Honduras, left the stranded coastal and inland communities along the Patuca River to fend for themselves...
...9. On agrarian politics and resistance, see Boyer, "Peasant Leaders and Allies Speak: Land, Economia and Democracy in Honduras," Paper presented at the XXI Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Chicago, September 1998...
...But the immediate and long-term damage is devastating...
...agribusinesses in the two industries, they both remain active in the struggle to find more autonomous and sustainable alternatives to this largely imposed model of development...
...We walked around to a shady slope to see U.S...
...Nacho took us into a grove of older hardwoods that adjoined a stand of scrub trees below...
...Rather than encourage these conservation efforts, the government is supporting the construction of a large petroleum storage and shipping facility for the entire country in Tela...
...1 7 In this lds are frequently flooded and cally reclaimed from deposited orth coast became banana workural ties to small-scale peasant nature itself...
...1 0 Forty seven died and 785 houses were damaged or destroyed in El Corpus and Concepci6n de Marfa...
...Yet they later hired a smaller num clean up many fields...
...Even the national peasant movement often seemed ready to abandon the more environmentally sensitive elements and scale of traditional agriculture in the rush to become modem.24 Mitch's destruction would surely have taxed the resources of any government...
...Together, peasant slash-and-burn agriculture and slowly expanding pasture land had reduced the region's forest cover to less than 40% by mid-century...
...It also became one rld's first pesticide treadmills...
...A needy peasant will sell his crop before harvest at a low price to a coyote, who sells the grain later for as much as a 600% markup...
...While neither the peasants nor the fishermen succeeded in breaking the dominant power of local cattlemen nor of U.S...
...He is the president of "The Eleven," now a group of 16 Potreritos households who farm cooperatively, and one of the founders of the CU...
Vol. 33 • September 1999 • No. 2
