Canada's Gildan hopes Honduras plant will lure brands worried about Asian sweatshops

Canadian Press

MONTREAL — Gildan Activewear hopes to become an outsourcing supplier of choice to major clothing branded companies worried about poor working conditions in Asia.

The apparel company said Thursday that its growing facilities in Honduras can lure companies that are looking to repatriate their production to the Western Hemisphere following a building collapse in Bangladesh last week that killed more than 400, and a recent fire.

“The last thing in the world they want is for their brands to be compromised or tainted by sourcing from suppliers that don’t have proper working conditions,” chief administrative and financial officer Laurence Sellyn said in an interview.

Gildan already supplies T-shirts to brands such as Nike, Reebok and Addidas following its acquisition of Anvil and hopes to significantly expand that relationship and expand into other apparel products it makes.

However, Sellyn declined to say how much the company expects to increase this business over the next two to three years.

“We see that as a base for significant growth (and) potentially becoming a very material part of our business,” he said.

Gildan is virtually debt-free and producing lots of cash, Sellyn said, so the company doesn’t have to cut corners on safety and is able to make capital investments in good working conditions.

By owning its own low-cost manufacturing facilities, it has the advantage of being able to control labour practices, production quality and costs.

Although its wages in Honduras are low by Western standards, he said they exceed local norms.

Even as it seeks to expand this part of its business, Gildan said it’s very optimistic about the growth potential of its core businesses.

Gildan earned “record results” for the second quarter of its 2013 financial year and is also upgrading its outlook for the year as a whole.

Honduras extenderá estudio de Caracol Strombus Gigas

La Tribuna

La Industria Pesquera y las autoridades de la Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería (SAG),  firmaron un convenio que permitirá a seis embarcaciones dar seguimiento al “Proyecto de Investigación y Evaluación para el Monitoreo de las Poblaciones de Caracol Gigante en el Caribe Hondureño”, con lo se podrán determinar las cuotas anuales de pesca biológicamente sustentables.

Dentro del Estudio las seis embarcaciones sólo podrán capturar 210 toneladas métricas lo que corresponde a 462 mil libras, de las cuales el cinco por ciento queda para consumo nacional, el resto es exportado al  mercado de Estados Unidos e Islas del Caribe, las exportaciones de la temporada pasada aportaron en divisas más de tres  millones de dólares.

Mientras Honduras no declaré una cuota de comercialización que no vaya en detrimento de las poblaciones del Strombus gigas, basándose en los resultados del Estudio, el país seguirá con la moratoria establecida.

Una vez concluido el Proyecto se presentará un informe ante la CITES con el fin de que se levante la sanción.

Piden agilizar vigencia de la ley de minería

País aún no goza beneficios de la ley

La Prensa

Tegucigalpa - El retraso en la entrada en vigencia de la ley de minería ha impedido que el país comience a captar unos cuatro mil millones de dólares en inversión, según estimaciones de la Asociación Nacional de Minería de Honduras (Anaminh).

En el diseño de la Anminh las grandes inversiones mineras las efectuarán empresas provenientes de China, Canadá y Estados Unidos, así como de otras naciones de Sudamérica.

Para el presidente de los mineros, Santos Gabino Carvajal, la visión de estos intereses económicas está centrada en al menos 10 minas que dejaron de ser explotadas desde los tiempos de la colonia española a la fecha.

Estas firmas desarrollaron en las últimas décadas una serie de estudios de exploración superficiales.

Los proyectos en los que hay interés están en los cuatro puntos cardinales de Honduras, al comenzar con la explotación del óxido ferroso en Santa Bárbara, El Paraíso y Yoro. “Se trata de 10 proyectos nuevos para extraer hierro para la exportación”, dijo Carvajal.

Desde hace varios años el Banco Central de Honduras (BCH) financió una serie de estudios económicos vinculados con la extracción de este mineral.

Según el subcoordinador del Foro Social de la Deuda Externa de Honduras (Fosdeh), Raf Flores, el costo del transporte era una de las principales limitantes para sacar el mineral de una mina situada en Agalta y exportarlo. Sin embargo, una empresa de capital europeo encontró la manera de obtener rentabilidad y ocupa decenas de rastras que transportan el metal hasta el puerto de San Lorenzo con destino a China.

Además existe un importante potencial para explotar minerales metálicos y no metálicos al norte de Francisco Morazán, Choluteca y Valle, donde existen oro en cantidades importantes. “La zona fronteriza con Nicaragua es muy rica en minerales”, expuso el industrial.

Riqueza petrolera

Pero también hay estudios que indican que en Honduras existen yacimientos petroleros.

Según el director del Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma deHonduras, Navil Kawas, de explotarse en el mediano y largo plazo el oro negro que se encuentra en el país, contribuiría a mermar la factura petrolera anual estimada en 2,500 millones de dólares.

INGO’s plan to align clean water programming in Hondura

By Patrick Moriarty and John Sauer

Water Services That Last

What is it that IADB’s Max Valasquez Matute in Honduras finds ‘only a bit short of a miracle’?  The decision by seven INGOs to align their programming in Honduras in support of an Everyone Forever movement aimed at delivering full coverage in sustainable rural water, sanitation and hygiene services.

Whether there was divine intervention or not, the meeting we attended on the 24 May between the assembled board members of the Millennium Water Alliance and the Mesa de Cooperantes (the donor coordination platform) of the Honduran WASH sector was pretty unusual – and very exciting.

The MWA represents most of the biggest North American INGOs, and as such a huge combined total of WASH sector activity.  We conservatively estimated that their aggregate contribution to Honduras’s WASH sector in the last five years was more than 20 million $US.  Not only do Catholic Relief Services, CARE, IRC Water and Sanitation Center, Living Water International, Water.org, Water For People, World Vision, contribute a lot of money (possibly as much as 25% of total sector financing), but they are present in a large portion of the country (as shown in the map) and are there for the long term.  Imagine then, how potent they could be as a force for positive change if they were to align their programme to a common set of principles and operating practices.  This is what is being tried in Honduras under the “Everyone Forever” banner.

The principles to which the MWA members are aligning in Honduras are part of  a unique framework that more and more WASH sector actors see as a way to achieve faster progress and greater sustainability. The Everyone Forever approach includes:

- taking the whole municipality and not just a community or village within it as the principal unit for intervention

- working to support local governments – mayors – to commit to a vision (and develop realistic planning) to ensure that every person, every school, every clinic within that municipality has access to permanent WASH services

- ensuring that Everyone pays and contributes – supporting the municipality to identify financing to achieve the vision, and supporting them to work the finances through their system – to iron out bottlenecks (making municipalities credit worthy); and also generate community level contributions through tariffs;

- modeling what it takes to reach the last to be served (in the Honduran context the most dispersed rural communities);

- assessing and addressing Forever challenges from the beginning including long-term finance for major repairs and system replacement; sustainable sanitation; water resource management and protection; monitoring, evaluation, and learning, and institutional strengthening;

- embedding all of the municipality level work deeply into national structures and thus creating a bottom up (mayor to mayor) and top down movement to replicate and scale what has been achieved in the municipalities.

At the heart of EF is a deep commitment to putting municipalities at the heart of service delivery, to support them, to champion them and to building on the energy this creates to achieve a movement that leads to full coverage.

The beauty of the EF approach is that it starts with a vision – not a set of pre-prescribed ‘solutions’ – and an approach to working that is based on principles and an openness and willingness to learn.  To support this learning and to ensure coordination and embedding at the national level, the MWA members are supporting the inception of an “EF hub” in Honduras.  This hub will aim to coordinate activities across the movement – ensuring alignment and learning between MWA members and reaching out and linking to other networks and actors – such as the Mesa de Cooperantes or the national water rural water network (RAS-HON).

This is the start. There’s a lot to do and a lot to learn along the way.  Aligning the programmes of seven INGOs across – initially – 12 to 20 EF municipalities will take a lot of working out.  However, as Paul Hicks of Catholic Relief Services said during the meeting, Honduras has what is probably the most vibrant WASH sector of the region and some of the strongest and most empowered municipalities.  We’re hugely excited about the potential that the MWA EF programme has to build on this energy and enthusiasm to achieve a transformation in how lasting water, sanitation and hygiene are brought to all Hondurans.  A real miracle!

Risking everything for a better life

Illegal immigrants aboard La Bestia, a notorious Mexican cargo train

Jody Paterson

A Closer Look

Illegal immigration to the United States is both bane and blessing for Honduras.

A young acquaintance of my boss is currently experiencing the bane side of things, locked up in a prison in Tyler, Texas after she got caught last month trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Prison officials are telling her she'll be held in jail for two or three months as punishment, then shipped back to Honduras along with the 2,500 or so other illegals from the country who are deported from the States every month. 

The blessing is, of course, the money. An estimated 600,000 Hondurans live and work illegally in the U.S., and the money they send home to their impoverished families accounts for a staggering 20 per cent of the country's GDP.

What would Honduras do without the thousands of brave souls willing to risk everything in an attempt for a better life? Having to leave family and friends behind while dodging countless dangers is hardly the solution that anyone would want for a country, but Honduras would have significantly more problems than it already has were it not for those tough citizens who put their lives on the line for a better life for their loved ones. 

The stories are legion here about the journey, what with so many people having given it a try (and often more than once). The research has found that it's rarely the poorest of the poor who make the trip, seeing as that group can't afford even the most basic amenities to ease the hardships that await. The ones who tend to make it are those who can come up with $5,000 for an experienced coyote - one who know the safest routes, the best hotels for hiding from the authorities, and the size of the bribe that might be required to get a person out of a tight spot. 

The more money a person has, the easier the trip. One woman made the entire journey in a mere six days, travelling the final leg first with a Mexican police escort and then with U.S. police. Everybody's got their price, apparently.

Others tell of horrendous weeks or even months trying to get to the U.S. Some run out of food and water. Others get attacked by gangs in Mexico who prey on the travellers. Some endure the Mexican cargo train they call La Bestia, infamous for its many dangers and its tendency to leave travellers wounded and maimed from a perilous ride on the roof. One young fellow managed to survive the challenging swim through a small hole in the underwater fence that divides the Mexican and U.S. shores of the Rio Grande, only to discover on the other side that his best friend who'd been right behind him had drowned.

And far too many people simply vanish, leaving their families to wonder forever more. The woman who owns a little restaurant in our neighbourhood hasn't heard from her son since he left for the U.S. six years ago. The family of the young woman who recently turned up in a Texas prison initially thought she'd died as well, as the group she was with had left her behind after she was unable to keep up. 

My Chinese grandfather came to Canada more than a century ago pretending to be somebody's adopted son, a favourite strategy at the time for Chinese immigrants who never would have gotten into the country without that little lie. Perhaps that explains why I've always thought highly of illegal immigrants. 

Catch the right-wing political news on the subject and you'd think they were talking about lazy cheaters who just want an easy ride. The truth is that only the most motivated, the most prepared, the most resourceful people would even consider trying to enter a country like the U.S. illegally.

To want a better life for your family - how can you fault a person for that? Illegal immigrants make tremendous personal sacrifices. They do jobs that others won't do. They fuel the economy of developed countries, even while those same countries work very, very hard to make life miserable for them. 

We talk a good game about "feeling" for people trapped in poor countries, but clearly like it best when they stay home and settle for our little aid handouts. We really ought to be celebrating the courage, resilience and adaptability of those who strike out on an uncertain, life-threatening journey with no idea whether it's going to turn out to be the best thing they've ever done for their family or a tragic and costly mistake.

Let them come. They make this world a better place.

Development institutions: It's not just about money; adopt a holistic approach,

Exploring the links between economics, social protection and democratisation will allow for long-term development impacts

Alfio Cerami 

Guardian Professional

What are the strengths and shortcomings of contemporary approaches to development? Can single solutions aimed at tackling a problem such as increasing gross domestic product (GDP) growth, be sufficient to ensure long-term socio-economic progress?

I believe that despite significant improvements, only little attention is paid to the vital synergies that exist, and must be strengthened, between development economics, social protection and democratisation. If international organisations and development professionals continue to deal with these elements individually, their efforts to increase peace and stability in transition and developing countries are doomed to be unsuccessful.

So far, most of international organisations (like the UNDP, Unicef, USAid and World Bank) have preferred to implement an institutionalised approach to development. While this approach to development has succeeded to obtain significant short-term results, it has not achieved long-term goals such as economic growth, individual well-being, community-based solidarities, interpersonal trust and political representation.

The lesson I draw attention to in my book is 'please keep the global picture in mind!', which is to help citizens to live in a place where they can access basic infrastructure and facilities (roads, hospitals, schools), get employment, are not segregated or face discrimination and have a voice in the political system through voting rights.

Economic development is crucial in this case because it provides the basis for technological advancement and innovation, which, subsequently, leads to better access to jobs and improvement in standard of living.

However, clientelism and corruption still need to be tackled when financing a project.

International organisations and development professionals should also push for reforming social protection systems to make them more inclusive and ensure equal access. Not surprisingly, the affection of citizens to their governments is often proportional to the benefits that these institutions are able to deliver in practical terms. As several surveys have constantly shown democracy remains a system to be pursued, but only if it is able to offer what the citizens really need in material terms

In the resource rich countries of sub-Saharan Africa, such as Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Namibia, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone and South Africa, missing the link between development economics, social protection and democratisation has led to a competition among political elites for natural resources that has often favoured one group of the society at the expenses of others. This results in anger and resentment, often leading to civil tensions and armed conflicts.

Similarly, in resource scarce countries such as Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, Togo and Uganda, missing the link has resulted in a clientelistic acquisition of state-assets by political elites. This has increased tensions and nurtured armed conflicts among the different constituencies of the society.

In Middle East and North Africa, the increase in global food prices in 2008 and in 2010, followed by an unprecedented drought, has led to a dramatic food crisis. The governments there haven't been able to respond through the usual means of price subsidies. Interestingly, while for most international observers the Arab Spring has opened, at least initially, the door to a new wave of democratisation, its future developments are still uncertain. Missing the link can, in this case, not only destroy the citizens' requests for freedom and for more distributive justice, but it can also lead to new and worst forms of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism and terrorist affiliation.

Alfio Cerami has held appointments at European and non-European universities, and was an international consultant for Unicef. He is the author of Permanent emergency welfare regimes in sub-Saharan Africa: the exclusive origins of dictatorship and democracy

Brote de roya producirá graves repercusiones sociales al país

Robeiro Oliveira Silva, IHCAFE director

El Tiempo
Marcala, La Paz

A más de mil metros sobre el nivel del mar y en una de las centenares de fincas afectadas por la roya, el director ejecutivo de la Organización Internacional del Café (OIC), Robeiro Oliveira Silva aseguró que es necesario aprender a convivir con esta plaga, transformando el manejo de los cafetales ante las alteraciones producidas por el cambio climático.   

Con una experiencia de más 25 años tanto en los sectores público y privado y una larga trayectoria profesional, Oliveira Silva es economista, egresado de la Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais de Brasil y asumió la Dirección de la OIC en noviembre de 2011 en sustitución del colombiano, Néstor Osorio.  

Además, el funcionario es considerado como la máxima autoridad en materia del grano a nivel mundial, quien durante su visita por la comunidad de Marcala, La Paz calificó como “muy desolador” el panorama del aromático en suelo catracho, aunque es optimista y dijo que el brote de roya podría solventarse en un término de dos años. El titular de la entidad internacional contestó varias interrogantes realizadas por Diario TIEMPO, cuyas respuestas se detallan a continuación:

¿Cuáles son sus primeras impresiones al verificar in situ el impacto de la roya en los cafetales hondureños?
Me preocupa mucho lo que he visto por el impacto social que tiene sobre las familias hondureñas, creo que es un daño, una disminución en la producción estimada y más que esto una pérdida de empleos e ingresos que van a repercutir socialmente en el país, este es el mayor problema.

¿Cómo podría recuperarse el país luego de las pérdidas ocasionadas por esta plaga?
Lo que siento es que la comunidad cafetera de Honduras tiene un compromiso con la recuperación de los cafetales y con esto estamos transmitiendo a nivel internacional que necesitamos de apoyo de los países productores y consumidores; creo que estamos ante un fenómeno que podemos solucionar y que otros países enfrentaron como Brasil y Colombia, que salieron con éxito.

Una vez culmine sus visitas por la región ¿En qué consistirá el informe que presentará en Londres?
Nosotros vamos a mandar un informe a todos los países productores y consumidores sobre toda la región centroamericana, transfiriéndolo al conocimiento de la comunidad internacional de lo que pasa aquí, la necesidad de una ayuda coordinada a toda Centroamérica.

¿Qué tipo de colaboración inmediata en este rubro podría otorgar la Organización Internacional del Café al país?
La ayuda de Brasil y Colombia es de cooperación técnica, pero las instituciones multilaterales de crédito tienen que traer fuentes alternativas de financiamiento para la región; entidades internacionales especialmente el Banco Mundial y el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo deben de estar muy cerca de los países de la región para facilitar un financiamiento adecuado a los productores de café.

¿Qué sugiere técnicamente a los organismos hondureños para que ayuden sobreponerse a los estragos ocasionados por la roya del café?
Técnicamente, en este aspecto es fundamental el apoyo de IHCAFE (Instituto Hondureño del Café), transmitiendo a los productores cómo hacer los manejos culturales necesarios. Honduras estaba creciendo bastante, era motivo de orgullo para la OIC y va a volver tan luego que este brote de roya pueda ser contenido.  

¿Cuáles son las principales problemáticas hoy en día después de los efectos de la plaga?
Primero de asistencia técnica, de cooperación para que la región tenga las condiciones de manejar los tratos culturales, el segundo de financiación para los productores, no hay duda sobre esto.

¿Qué situación pudo apreciar en el rubro del café durante su visita a Guatemala?
La situación es difícil, pero están tomando las medidas, donde las autoridades se encuentran atentas y vigilantes a este problema.  

¿Cómo se puede aprender a convivir con la roya?
Hay que seguir todos los aspectos técnicos necesarios y aquí en Honduras el IHCAFE está preparado, entrenado para esto, a penas necesitamos de un poco más de cooperación con los otros países productores.