Rural Development Policies and Sustainable Land Use in the ...

12 CHAPTER 2
Box 2.1 Land Issues in Honduras
In Honduras, lack of access to land (which affects as many as 250,000 rural households)
and insecurity of land tenure are widely regarded as critical constraints to asset creation
and poverty reduction, as well as a major source of social instability (Government of
Honduras 2001). Despite past attempts to transfer significant areas of underutilized private
and public land with agricultural potential to minifundistas (households with less
than 1 hectare of land) and rural landless households, Honduras continues to have a highly
skewed land distribution. About 70 percent of landholdings account for about 10 percent
of land in farms; and a little over 1 percent of farmers own 25 percent of the land. Of the
465,000 households registered in the 1993 Agricultural Census, 97 percent held less than
50 hectares of land, 80 percent of them held less than 5 hectares of land, and 27 percent
held no land at all (Barham, Boucher, and Useche 2002). Tenure security is closely related
to landholding size and insecurity of land tenure affects especially smallholders:
whereas only 42 percent of all farms below 5 hectares have secure tenure, this percentage
is 76 percent for farms > 50 ha (SAG 2002). In addition, there is evidence that the
necessary complementary reforms in the credit and other input markets are not forthcoming
to a sufficient degree, thus preventing the poor from taking advantage of land
market reforms (Barham, Boucher, and Useche 2002).
programs. Distortions in the markets for traditional
export commodities (e.g., taxes on
coffee and banana exports) were (partially)
corrected, while the focus on agricultural
policies shifted from a focus on food security
(i.e., basic grains crops) and traditional
exports to the production of high-value nontraditional
export crops.
Along with the above macroeconomic
and sector reforms, a process of decentralization
began in the early 1990s. The decentralization
process not only transferred
significant budgetary authority to municipal
governments, but also shifted some responsibility
for forest areas owned by the government
and protection of natural resources
in general to municipalities. 18 The government
also gave up its monopoly in timber
exports. However, the implementation of the
decentralization process has been slow and
reforms in the forestry sectors are far from
being completed.
The remaining forest areas of Honduras
are estimated at almost 6 million ha, or about
half of the total size of the country. According
to SAG (2004) about 100,000 ha of
broadleaf forest are converted each year into
new agricultural land (mostly in the province
of Colón), and conversion of pine forest
is continuing as well (deforestation in
the western and southern regions of Honduras
has long taken place; now it is occurring
mostly in the province of Olancho).
Addressing deforestation and encouraging
sustainable development in the forestry
sector are identified as priority areas in the
PRSP, particularly after Hurricane Mitch
showed that deforestation and lack of appropriate
soil conservation practices increase
vulnerability to environmental damage from
major storms. Efforts to promote agroforestry,
improved soil conservation, and
specialized forestry operations have been
hampered by the conflictive situation around
18
The Government of Honduras has allowed counties (municipios) to regain control over about 30 percent of the
country’s forests, which belonged to them but had been managed by the central government.