IDB to help indigenous and Afro-Honduran communities cope with climate change

IDB release

About 7,000 people will benefit with a $4.4 million grant to finance irrigation projects, risk prevention and renewable energy

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has approved a $4.4 million grant to boost indigenous and Afro-Honduran peoples’ ability to adapt to and mitigate climate change and to reduce their vulnerability to extreme weather events. 

The grant, funded by the Nordic Development Fund (NDF) of the IDB, amounted to 3.5 million euros. 

In español aqui.

The contribution will finance small-scale irrigation projects, risk-prevention infrastructure projects, and renewable energy projects — all proposed by the communities — benefitting nearly 7,000 people in Honduras. The Central American country is considered the third most affected by extreme weather events caused by climate change, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and rising sea levels. 

The irrigation ventures are expected to boost agricultural output in targeted communities by 70 percent, while implementation of local renewable energy solutions is anticipated to produce 250 kilowatt/hours of electricity per day. 

Additionally, the program will train 100 community leaders and 900 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students in ways and means to reduce the effects of climate change vulnerability in their localities. 

The indigenous and Afro-Honduran communities represent 7 percent of the population. Of those living in rural areas, 20 percent are poor and 80 percent are extremely poor. 

The irrigation projects will seek to tackle growing water scarcity problems posed by a reduction in total annual rainfall and the amounts accumulated during dry summer months, particularly in indigenous and Afro districts in inter-mountainous areas in the northern, central, and western parts of the country. 

The NDF is a multilateral development fund established by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden in 1989. It has since financed 190 development assistance projects worth 1 billion euros.Youth participation must take place for social change to happen. Also in the fight against corruption, young people need to play a leading role in order for it to be successful. Representing the present and the future of their countries, they are the one group that can transcend today’s problems to see tomorrow’s solutions.

Honduran youth forum calls for urgent change in transparency, security

Transparency International

This week, young people representing communities from all over Honduras came together in the country’s capital, Tegucigalpa, to speak about their ideas on how to tackle some of their country’s biggest challenges. Conscious of their responsibility for the future of their country, they proposed changes to policies that affect their lives directly.

The youth spoke out against those actions that result in a lack of transparency. These issues have limited opportunities for a better future in light of the misallocation of scarce resources that could be invested in their development. They advocated for solutions that would open up the possibility for them to have the better life and opportunities that all young people around the world deserve.

In order for positive change to happen, the young people of Honduras believe that urgent measures need to be taken in the following five areas: transparency and citizen security, participation in the creation of the national budget, education, health and employability.

To take a proactive role in tackling issues ranging from having to pay for public services that are meant to be free to the fear of retaliation when reporting those bad practices, they presented a manifesto to the Vice President of Honduras during the opening ceremony of the Third Central America and Dominican Republic Forum for Transparency. 

You can read the full manifesto (in Spanish) here.

Around the world, young people are an important part of society and represent a large proportion of their societies. Currently, around one-fifth of the world’s population is between 15 and 24 years old. They are a vital building block for constructing a transparent and accountable society.

How not to feed the world

Tom Philpott

Mother Jones

The debate over how to "feed the world" amid population growth and climate change often hinges on crop yields. The theory is that if we can squeeze as much crop as possible per acre of farmland, we'll have abundant food for everyone. This idea dominates the marketing material of giant agrichemical firms like Monsanto. "In order to feed the world's growing population, farmers must produce more food in the next fifty years than they have in the past 10,000 years combined," proclaims the company's website. "We are working to double yields in our core crops by 2030." Such rhetoric is routinely echoed by policymakers.

But jacking up yields—even if Monsanto and its peers can accomplish that feat, which they haven't so far—won't solve the hunger problem on its own. The globe's farms are already producing enough food to feed 12 billion people—twice the current population and a third again more than the peak of 9 billion expected to be reached in 2050. Yet at least 925 million people lack access to enough to eat. What causes hunger isn't insufficient crop yields but rather people's economic relationships to food: whether they have access to land to grow it, or sufficient income to buy it.

Unfortunately, rising food prices and competition for resources appear to be making the situation worse. Take the trend of rich-country investors buying or leasing huge, highly productive tracts of farmland in low-income countries, and exporting the resulting crops. In a scathing report on these "land grabs," the global anti-hunger group Oxfam reports that an "area of land eight times the size of the UK" has been sold off in the past decade—a combined swath of land that "has the potential to feed a billion people," or more than the 925 million who live in hunger. "[V]ery few if any of these land investments benefit local people or help to fight hunger," Oxfam adds.

While some land grabs involve domestic elites taking land in low-income areas of their own countries, the more typical cases involve rich-country investors gobbling land in poor countries. According to an April 2012 analysis by the Land Matrix, cited by Oxfam, the average investor in these deals come from a country with a per capita GDP of $18,918, while the target countries' per capita GDPs average $4,404—a more than five-fold disparity.

Oxfam presents a devastating analysis:

Two thirds of agricultural land deals by foreign investors are in countries with a serious hunger problem. Yet perversely, precious little of this land is being used to feed people in those countries, or going into local markets where it is desperately needed. Instead, the land is either being left idle, as speculators wait for its value to increase, or it is predominantly used to grow crops for export, often for use as biofuels.

Nearly a billion people live in hunger today, and yet the land that could be used to sustain them is being bought up by investors and being put to other uses, including speculation. 

Oxfam says. "Most agricultural land deals target quality farmland, particularly land that is irrigated and offers good access to markets," the report states. And "much of this land was already being used for small-scale farming, pastoralism, and other types of natural resource use." 

Perhaps because so much of the land is already being used by domestic farmers, land investors tend to target countries with weak frameworks for protecting the land tenure of small-scale farmers, Oxfam shows. Thus displaced people are often compensated at below-market rates for their land—if they're compensated at all, the report adds. The result has been an attack on food security in countries that can least afford it. Here's Oxfam:

More than 30 per cent of the land in Liberia has been handed out in large-scale concessions in the past five years, often with disastrous results for local people. In Cambodia, NGOs estimate that an area equivalent to between 56 and 63 per cent of all arable land in the country has been handed out to private companies. In Honduras, the toll of people killed in a land conflict in the Bajo Aguán region has risen to over 60, and shows no sign of stopping.

The situation in Honduras' Bajo Aguán region is indeed bloody—a human rights lawyer representing smallholder farmers in a land dispute with palm plantation owners was gunned down just last month, BBC reports. The Bajo Aguán conflict involves a key driver of the land grab phenomenon: the pushing of food-growing smallholders from land to make way for vast palm oil plantations for exported biofuel. According to Oxfam, the area used for oil palm cultivation has increased "nearly eightfold over the last 20 years to an estimated 7.8 million ha [hectares, or 19.3 million acres] in 2010 and is expected to double again by 2020." That means that within eight years, a chunk of land equivalent to the area of Iowa will have been plowed over for palm plantations to feed not the world's people, but its cars.

Read more here.

Un día en la vida de Dania Guifarro

"Ciclos de Esperanza" relata un día en la vida de Dania Guifarro, una de las tantas madres solteras que viven en un asentamiento de Tegucigalpa. 

Corrupción e inseguridad en Centroamérica: Sin transparencia no habrá soluciones

Carlos Rodriguez 

Transparency International

Armas que ingresan sin registro al país, pistas de aterrizaje clandestinas, cargamentos de gran dimensión que entran y salen por las fronteras y que nadie detecta, edificios nuevos deshabitados, balas que se intercambian entre bandas rivales, violación de leyes por las que nadie paga. Estas son manifestaciones del crimen que lamentablemente suceden día a día en América Latina, con particular virulencia en la región centroamericana.

Las actividades criminales atentan contra la vida de los centroamericanos, deteriorando la seguridad ciudadana. En no pocas ocasiones las organizaciones criminales han logrado infiltrase y cooptar las cúpulas de agencias públicas encargadas de la lucha y prevención del crimen, como la policía.

English version is available here.

Según el Barómetro Global de la Corrupción de 2010, la policía es una de las instituciones percibidas como más corruptas en América Latina. De igual manera, el Latinobarometro 2011 encuentra que solamente el 33% de la población confía en ella. La falta de transparencia y mecanismos de rendición de cuentas efectivos en la policía y en otras instituciones han permitido que el crimen organizado se desarrolle y opere con impunidad..

En “Crimen organizado, corrupción y la vulnerabilidad de la defensa y las fuerzas de seguridad” se explora la relación entre el crimen organizado y la corrupción: las redes criminales hacen uso extensivo de la corrupción, en sus diversas formas, para llevar a cabo sus actividades y evitar investigaciones y juicios. El crimen organizado y la corrupción se retroalimentan, resultando vital entender esta compleja relación para poder combatirla eficazmente.

En este contexto, el Tercer Foro de América Central y República Dominicana por la Transparencia, que este año se realizará en Honduras el 10 y 11 de Octubre, promueve la discusión y coordinación entre actores para avanzar en la lucha contra la corrupción. Además pretende fomentar el acceso a la información, la rendición de cuentas y la participación ciudadana. Estos son elementos clave para fortalecer los sistemas de seguridad pública y frenar la capacidad operativa del crimen organizado.

El objetivo de las organizaciones convocantes, Transparency International, Asociación para una Sociedad más Justa y el Gobierno de la República de Honduras, es mantener actualizada la agenda de transparencia y lucha contra la corrupción. Para ello son necesarios el análisis y la comprensión de los problemas que afectan a la región, como la inseguridad, la pobreza o la falta de acceso a la educación y a servicios sanitarios. Además, el Foro permite promover buenas prácticas que puedan ser replicadas dentro y fuera de la región.

Si bien el Segundo Foro realizado en Costa Rica en 2011 se centró en dar a conocer el vínculo entre transparencia y seguridad, y en identificar líneas generales de acción para abordar el tema, el Tercer Foro servirá para ampliar nuestro entendimiento de esta relación en una región que está considerada una de las más violentas del mundo por Naciones Unidas.

El programa del foro es relevante ya que las políticas de seguridad pública y anticorrupción caminan por senderos separados en América Latina. Esta desconexión se refleja en la ausencia de elementos de transparencia y rendición de cuentas en las instituciones a cargo de la seguridad pública. El Tercer Foro está encaminado a identificar puntos de encuentro entre ambas políticas. Asimismo, pretende impulsar alianzas entre distintos actores para mejorar la seguridad en la región.

Control de precios

Editorial

El Tiempo

En respuesta a la protesta general por el aumento de los precios de los artículos de la canasta básica familiar, especialmente de los alimentos básicos, el Ejecutivo ha creado una comisión que se encargará de presentarle opciones para la reducción de los precios de estos productos.

Esta comisión, integrada con personas del sector obrero, productores, funcionarios gubernamentales y de organizaciones defensoras del consumidor, abarca todo el abanico, y, por lo tanto, es bastante numerosa. La coordinación queda a cargo de los secretarios de Planificación y de Industria y Comercio.

En el fondo, de lo que se trata es de la búsqueda de un mecanismo de control de precios, aunque la iniciativa se presente como un intento de evitar el abuso de la comercialización en perjuicio de los consumidores. La de protección del consumidor corresponde, por ley, a la Fiscalía Especial creada para tal fin.

De antemano puede pronosticarse el fracaso de esta comisión por la sencilla razón de que en una economía abierta, como la nuestra, esa clase de controles no funciona porque la comercialización está sujeta a la ley de la oferta y la demanda. Además, también inciden en esto diversos factores cambiantes e incontrolables, por ejemplo los costos de la energía y la devaluación.

El secretario general de la Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT), llega hasta plantear la necesidad de crear una Superintendencia de Precios, o sea una entidad encargada de establecer los precios al consumidor. Hacer eso implicaría convertir nuestra economía en una economía cerrada, en la que todo el proceso está controlado por el Estado, desde la producción, el mercado, hasta la comercialización final.

En el pasado, y por muy poco tiempo, el gobierno ha concertado períodos de congelación de precios de determinados artículos de la canasta básica familiar, sobre todo a final de año en que la especulación comercial tiende a ser abusiva, aprovechando la euforia navideña y la tendencia al consumo gracias al aguinaldo.

Esta negociación, sin embargo, casi siempre ha sido en perjuicio del consumidor porque la congelación se hace sobre precios alzados de antemano, pues los comerciantes calculan el costo de la devaluación, las posibles variaciones de los servicios, e incluso el pago de aguinaldo a sus empleados.

Lo cierto es que la regulación de los precios es algo muy complejo, aún en las economías cerradas o en las economías abiertas bien organizadas. En nuestro medio, tal como lo plantean algunos empresarios, sería más efectiva la adopción de políticas para estimular la producción agropecuaria.

Por lo pronto, la Fiscalía Especial de Protección al Consumidor, la Secretaría de Industria y Comercio y las autoridades municipales tendrían que actuar diligentemente para coordinar mecanismos efectivos de control de calidad, de revisión sistematizada de las pesas y medidas, y, por supuesto, actuar ante las denuncias formales de abuso comercial.

Climate change will hit Central America's food crops

In some parts of El Salvador and Honduras that have poor soil, where much farming takes place, maize production could drop by around 30 percent by the 2020s, and on poor soils in Guatemala and Nicaragua, it could fall by around 11 percent...

By Megan Rowling

Climate change is expected to reduce maize and bean harvests across Central America, leading to economic losses of more than US$120 million a year by the 2020s and threatening the incomes of around 1 million small farmers, says a new scientific study. Researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) examined how the region's two most important food crops would be affected by higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

"Even with our most conservative estimates, it's clear that climate change could transform the agricultural landscape across Central America," Anton Eitzinger, a CIAT climate scientist and lead author of the report, said in a statement. "Conditions are already tough there; it's one of the poorest and most vulnerable parts of Latin America."

In some parts of El Salvador and Honduras that have poor soil, where much farming takes place, maize production could drop by around 30 percent by the 2020s, and on poor soils in Guatemala and Nicaragua, it could fall by around 11 percent, the study warns.

For beans, Honduras will be the worst affected by 2020, with a production decline of 15 percent, followed by El Salvador at 8 percent, Nicaragua at 6 percent, and Guatemala at 4 percent, the study says. In all four countries, bean production is expected to fall by up to 25 percent by 2050.

But in financial terms, the estimated annual losses for maize are five times higher than for beans, topping US$100 million. The combined figure for both crops -- close to US$123 million -- equals around 30 percent of their current values.

The report, part of a project led by the charity Catholic Relief Services, will be presented at a meeting of Central American donors, policy makers and development organisations in San Salvador on Thursday.

The study forecasts the effects of a 1 degree Celsius temperature rise by the 2020s, and a 2 degree Celsius rise by the 2050s, under a "business as usual" scenario for greenhouse gas emissions. Minimum and maximum daily temperatures will increase and water deficits will get worse due to less rainfall and higher evapotranspiration rates, causing heat stress to plants, it predicts.

The region's dry season could be extended and the "canicula", a short dry spell in July and August, could be more severe, clashing with a crucial stage of the maize production cycle, the organisations said.

Rains could be reduced during the bean planting season in September, with higher temperatures affecting flowering and seed production. The wet months of October and November are likely to see even more severe downpours, like those that destroyed crops and infrastructure in the region in 2011.

Widespread soil degradation will make the problems with changing weather worse, the study says. Farmers working on poor soils will experience greater losses than those with good-quality land, it predicts.

Read more here.