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Honduras Land Reform
The Honduran government nominally began to address
inequitable
land ownership in the early 1960s. Those efforts at reform
focused
on organizing rural cooperatives. About 1,500 hectares of
government-owned land were distributed by the National
Agrarian
Institute (Instituto Nacional Agrario--INA) beginning in
1960.
A military coup in 1963 resulted in an end to the land
reform
program. Lacking even modest government-directed land
reforms,
illegal squatting became the primary means for poor people
to gain
land throughout the early 1970s. These actions spurred the
government to institute new agrarian reforms in 1972 and
1975.
Although all lands planted in export crops were exempted
from
reform, about 120,000 hectares were, nevertheless, divided
among
35,000 poor families.
By 1975 the pendulum had swung back, and agrarian
reform was all
but halted. From 1975 through the 1980s, illegal
occupations of
unused land increased once again. The need for land reform
was
addressed mostly by laws directed at granting titles to
squatters
and other landholders, permitting them to sell their land
or to use
it as collateral for loans.
Despite declarations by the Callejas government in 1989
of its
intent to increasingly address social issues, including
land tenure
and other needs of small farmers, the early 1990s were
jolted by
increased conflicts between peasants and the Honduran
security
forces. Agricultural credit and government support
increasingly
favored export crop producers at the expense of producers
of basic
food crops.
The Honduran land reform process under President
Callejas
between 1989 and 1992 was directed primarily at large
agricultural
landowners. An agrarian pact, signed by landowners and
peasant
organizations in August 1990, remained underfunded and
largely
unimplemented. Furthermore, violence erupted as discharged
members
of the Honduran military forcibly tried to claim land that
had
already been awarded to the peasant organization Anach in
1976. In
May 1991, violence initiated by members of the Honduran
military
resulted in the deaths of eight farmers. To keep similar
situations
around the country from escalating into violence, the
government
promised to parcel out land belonging to the National
Corporation
for Investment (Corporación Nacional de
Inversiones--Conadin). The
government also pledged to return to peasants land that
had been
confiscated by the Honduran military in 1983.
An Agricultural Modernization Law, passed in 1992,
accelerated
land titling and altered the structure of land
cooperatives formed
in the 1960s. The law permitted cooperative members to
break up
their holdings into small personal plots that could be
sold. As a
result, some small banana producers suffering from
economic hard
times chose to sell their land to the giant banana
producers. After
an agreement was reached with the European Union (EU) to
increase
Honduras's banana quota to the EU, the large banana
companies were
avid for additional land for increased production to meet
the
anticipated new demand from Europe.
Data as of December 1993
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