Tourism and Biodiversity Preservation in Honduras
by Eric Greenquist
“The Río Plátano,” Edgardo Bodden told me, “is a special place. But people
need work to live .... Jobs like lobster fishing and wood cutting are
destructive and unstable .... We need local businesses that are not so
destructive."
Although Edgardo lives in a small Miskito village in northern Honduras, the
dilemma he describes is one of global concern. Edgardo’s “special area” is the
815,000-hectare Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve: the largest protected area in
Honduras and part of the largest contiguous rain forest in Central America.
The reserve is the ancient homeland of the indigenous Miskito, Pech and
Tawahka-Sumu peoples, and the ethnic Garífuna. For centuries these peoples
have subsisted on small gardens of yucca, beans and corn, and by hunting and
fishing.
During the past two decades however, squatters have deforested more than
one-tenth of the reserve. Commercial logging, livestock and farm operators
have taken advantage of the lack of government controls, and poor farmers have
invaded the reserve searching for land. According to Osmín Padilla, former
director of Health and Nutrition for the Health Ministry, "The food situation
in Honduras is critical." At least 1.2 million Hondurans suffer from
life-threatening malnutrition and 60 percent of Hondurans eat what they can
find to subsist.
The intruders have driven villagers from their traditional lands and introduced
a host of economically transient and destructive land uses. Even native
persons, attracted by the easier money, have joined the assault. In December
1996, the World Heritage Committee added the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve to
its list of World Heritage in Danger.
The fate of the reserve has global implications. Latin America, with more than
one-half the world’s remaining tropical forests, is the world’s richest store
of biological diversity. The rate of deforestation in Latin America however,
is the highest in the developing world. Species extinctions are occurring
there at unprecedented levels. As environmental conditions deteriorate,
economic stability and human health throughout the region are increasingly
threatened.
To help save the Río Plátano, Honduras and the United States in 1995 formed the
Partnership for Biodiversity. The Partnership is led by MOPAWI: an indigenous
organization active in the reserve since 1985. The Partnership is funded by
the U.S. Agency for International Development and includes the Honduran
Forestry Administration, which is responsible for protecting the reserve.
Peace Corps volunteers help with community development, and specialists from
the U.S. Department of the Interior provide technical expertise in the
protection of natural areas and rare species.
Part of the Partnership’s strategy is to help indigenous villagers create small
businesses which are environmentally friendly, encourage conservation and
provide employment alternatives to more destructive land uses. The development
of a tourism industry in the reserve, operated by indigenous persons, is
showing great promise as part of a strategy to promote conservation.
Las Marías is a community of 420 Miskito and Pech villagers. Because Las
Marías is one of only a few villages in the heart of the reserve, it receives
almost 300 visitors each year. When I visited Las Marías in 1995, villagers
expressed to me great interest in providing services to visitors. The services
they provided however, were extremely poor.
In 1996 the Partnership began a series of workshops to teach villagers about
the needs of tourists for basic services, infrastructure and fair pricing. The
Partnership also taught courses on guiding, food preparation, environmental
education and organizational strengthening, and helped the community develop
local rules to protect the primary rain forests, birds and other resources that
visitors come to see.
The people of Las Marías took full advantage of these workshops. Villagers
organized an ecotourism committee and built a community meeting house.
Individual families constructed five new visitor lodgings which were cleaner,
safer and more comfortable than the two that had existed before. The
ecotourism committee prepared a list of guide and transport services, complete
with prices, and began building trails. Local women organized a cooperative to
sell handicrafts. According to Martín Herrera, president of the ecotourism
committee, as many as eighty villagers eventually could benefit from tourism.
On the northern coast of the reserve, the Miskito community of Raistá benefits
from tourism in a different way. The Partnership helped villagers build a farm
to grow crops of live butterflies for export to international zoos and
exhibits. During the farm’s first year of operation it sold butterfly pupae
worth $4,800. Unexpectedly, that year 430 persons from 28 countries heard
about and visited the farm. Villagers and Peace Corps volunteers were quick to
see the possibilities. The farm sold T-shirts to tourists worth $1,700 and
earned another $1,013 in tour fees, augmenting farm income by one-third.
Villagers also provide visitors with housing, food and transportation.
Garífuna villagers in the reserve community of Plaplaya hope tourism will
support their conservation efforts. Each year, as loggerhead and leatherback
sea turtles return to the north coast to nest, villagers begin nightly patrols
along an 8-kilometer stretch of beach. Upon finding a turtle nest, villagers
carefully dig up the eggs and re-bury them in a protected enclosure. This
protects the eggs from local poachers who have decimated the turtle
populations.
Say Adalberto Padilla of MOPAWI, "People remember when nesting turtles were
common. Now they search many nights just to find one."
In 1997, villagers rescued 48 nests and released 1,152 hatchling turtles to the
sea. Currently, this project is subsidized by the Partnership, which also is
working to stop the poaching. Villagers hope however, that eventually there
will be enough tourists, eager to see the nesting sea turtles, to support the
program and provide the village with badly needed income.
The development of tourism services by villagers will not solve the most
significant threats to the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. The economic
benefits of tourism however, are helping motivate villagers to regulate their
own uses of natural resources to protect local plant and animal communities.
Tourism development has become an important part of a larger strategy for
biodiversity conservation.
Eric Greenquist is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management
in Eugene, Oregon. He coordinates actions in Honduras by the U.S. Department
of the Interior. His E-mail address is egreenqu@or.blm.gov.
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