Honduras Forestry
Rugged terrain has hampered Honduras's development.
Courtesy Department of Defense, Still Media Records Center (top)
and Randall Baldwin (bottom)
As in much of Central America, Honduras's once abundant
forest
resources have been badly squandered. In 1964 forests
covered 6.8
million hectares, but by 1988 forested areas had declined
to 5
million hectares. Honduras continued to lose about 3.6
percent of
its remaining forests annually during the 1980s and early
1990s.
The loss is attributable to several factors. Squatters
have
consistently used land suitable only for forests to grow
scantyield food crops; large tracts have been cleared for
cattle
ranches; and the country has gravely mismanaged its timber
resources, focusing far more effort on logging than on
forestry
management.
The government began an intensive forestry development
program
in 1974, supposedly intended to increase management of the
sector
and to prevent exploitation by foreign-owned firms. The
Honduran
Corporation for Forestry Development (Corporación
Hondureña de
Desarrollo Forestal--Cohdefor) was created in 1974, but it
quickly
developed into a corrupt monopoly for overseeing forest
exports.
Timber was mostly produced by private sawmills under
contracts
selectively granted by Cohdefor officials. In fact,
ongoing
wasteful practices and an unsustainable debt, which was
contracted
to build infrastructure, appear to have undercut most
conservation
efforts. The military-dominated governments contracted
huge debt
with the multilateral development agencies, then extracted
timber
to pay for it. Cohdefor generally granted licenses to
private
lumber companies with few demands for preservation, and it
had
little inclination or incentive to enforce the demands it
did make.
With encouragement from the United States Agency for
International Development (AID), the Honduran government
began to
decentralize Cohdefor beginning in 1985. Under the
decentralization
plan, regulatory responsibilities were transferred from
the central
government to mayors and other municipal officials on the
assumption that local officials would provide better
oversight.
Despite decentralization and the sale of government
assets,
Cohdefor's remaining debt was US$240 million in 1991. The
government also assumed continued financial responsibility
for the
construction of a new airstrip in the area of timber
extraction,
upgrading facilities at Puerto Castilla and Puerto
Lempira, and
providing electricity at reduced prices to lumber concerns
as part
of the privatization package.
Major legislation was passed in 1992 to promote
Honduran
reforestation by making large tracts of state-owned land
more
accessible to private investors. The legislation also
supplied
subsidies for development of the sector. The same law
provided for
replanting mountainous regions of the country with pine to
be used
for fuel.
Data as of December 1993
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