Population and Land Use in Developing Countries Report of a Workshop (1993) / Chapter Skim
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8 Honduras: Population, Inequality, and Resource Destruction
8 Honduras: Population, Inequality, and Resource Destruction
Pages 106-123
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From page 106... ...
The accumulated evidence concerning southern Honduras is remarkably consistent in showing that environmental destruction is attributable more to the inequality of resource distribution and patterns of economic development in the region rather than to population increase. Although our evidence relates primarily to Honduras, it appears that these same processes have also been characteristic of other Central American countries and that they have played a major role in causing the violent conflicts and environmental difficulties that characterize the region today (see Williams, 1986; Leonard, 1987~.
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From page 107... ...
This population expansion has occurred in a nation characterized by extreme inequality of wealth and one of the lowest per capita incomes in Latin America (Sheehan, 1987~. Additionally, Honduras exhibits one of the highest rates of rural destitution in Latin America (57-75 percent, depending on the measures used, in the 1970s)
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From page 108... ...
The Honduran government became an active agent of development, creating a variety of state institutions and agencies to expand government services, modernize the country's financial system, and undertake infrastructural projects. This period of intensified public sector investments coincided with temporary high prices on the world market for primary commodities like cotton, coffee, and cattle.
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From page 109... ...
The major social effect of the cotton boom was to increase inequalities in access to land. Large landowners revoked peasant tenancy or sharecropping rights, raised rental rates exorbitantly, and evicted peasants forcibly from national land or from land of undetermined tenure (Durham, 1979; Boyer, 1983:94~.
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From page 110... ...
Landowners who feared expropriation of unutilized fallow and forest land fenced it and planted pasture as a way of establishing use of the land without increasing labor inputs (DeWalt and DeWalt, 1982:69; Jarvis, 1986: 157~. The main limitation to beef production is pastureland, and this is why there were such extensive changes in land use patterns in Honduras and the other Central American countries during the 1960s and 1970s.
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From page 111... ...
Fences are erected, armed guards installed, and local people excluded from areas they had once freely utilized. Parallels in the social process associated with the recent boom in shrimp mariculture and the earlier expansions of export commodities (cotton, sugar, and livestock)
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From page 112... ...
4A recent report by agricultural scientists reported that: "Since the 19SOs, the agricultural economy of southern Honduras has been dominated by a series of boom and bust cycles of export commodities. Cattle, cotton, and sugar have each reached their zenith only to dissipate in the face of declining productivity and adverse world markets.
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From page 113... ...
of ha. 19,383 304,462 2,629,859 5This inequality of land distribution is also found in the other Central American countries (see DeWalt and Bidegaray, 1991:24)
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From page 114... ...
reports that 39.4 percent of people in Langue rent land; he does not measure borrowing or sharecropping arrangements. 8Although the type of cultivation that is practiced by small farmers in southern Honduras is usually described as slash-and-burn agriculture, the way that a field enters the cultivation cycle is more accurately described as a slash-and-mulch system.
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From page 115... ...
While haulm used for grazing animals in the dry season was worth up to $50 per manzana, rental costs still seemed relatively low. Landowners are willing to rent their land cheaply because the most expensive and labor-intensive aspect of hillside agriculture is clearing secondary growth forest.
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From page 116... ...
This potential profit is not enough to entice most larger landowners to produce grain beyond what they require for their own consumption. ~ ~ For farmers with sufficient land, there is a much more lucrative option available in raising livestock.
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From page 117... ...
Increasing intensity of land use means that yields are much lower, soil fertility is rapidly depleted, and soil erosion is exacerbated. Lack of vegetation on the hillsides also causes frequent landslides when torrential rains hit the region.
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From page 118... ...
Since 1950, the amount of time fields have been allowed to remain fallow has declined precipitously (Stonich, 1986; Boyer, 1983~.~4 As the population density of these highland communities has increased, there has been a corresponding increase in the intensity of land use. Yet simultaneous population increase is not a sufficient causal explanation for the intensity of land use, destruction of forests, soil erosion, or other ecological problems of the region.
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From page 119... ...
The national planning agency (SAPLAN, 1981) estimated that 41 percent of all southern families did not meet minimum subsistence levels, and that families living in "semiurban communities" consumed even fewer calories than rural families (Stonich, 1986: 152-154~.~5 Data that we collected in 1982 in nine highland and lowland communities showed that 65 percent of the children under 60 months of age were stunted (below 95 percent of the standard height-for-age recommended by the World Health Organization)
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From page 120... ...
The cleared lands often end up in the hands of extensive cattle ranching interests as the colonists move further into the forest, simultaneously encroaching upon lands inhabited by the small remaining indigenous population. The consequences of land concentration and the expansion of environmentally costly commercial agriculture have been most severe for those who are powerless to alter the course of these events, but the economic and environmental sustenance of all of Honduran society is threatened by these processes.
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From page 121... ...
CSPE/OEA (Secretaria Tecnica del Consejo Superior de Planificac6n Econdmica y Secretaria General de la Organizacion de Estados Americanos) 1982 Proyecto de Desarrollo Local del Sur de Honduras.
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From page 122... ...
Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 1989 The dynamics of social processes and environmental destruction: a Central American case study.
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From page 123... ...
Gainesville, Fla.: Tropical Research and Development, Inc. USAID Honduras 1989a Strategic Considerations for the Agricultural Sector in Honduras.
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