------Program code: NS-080613-05019 (what's this?)
Source: CCTV.com
06-13-2008 11:18
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In Part 1 we saw how fishing communities in Vietnam have learned to protect against disasters. In this half, we travel to Honduras.
For today’s young inhabitants in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, there are no memories of the devastation left by Hurricane Mitch nearly a decade ago. As people continue with daily life, subtle remnants of the city’s painful past remain, etched on riverside homes. When hurricane Mitch ripped its way through Central America in 1998, Honduras was hit hardest. 18,000 people died, more than 3 million were left homeless and devastating structural and agricultural damage totalled over 6 million dollars. 80% of the country is mountainous.
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Honduras’s vulnerability lay in the degraded condition of its hillsides. Too many trees had been felled for firewood. The rain that Mitch brought with it turned the treeless and eroded slopes into lethal mudslides. But there was one part of Honduras, the region of Lempira, that managed to feed not only itself, but the rest of the country during the worst of the storm. Situated in the remote western hills of Honduras bordering with El Salvador, this impoverished area also suffered extensive damage at the hands of Mitch.
Ian Cherrett – Chief Technical Advisor, Lempira Sur: How could this poor, backward area that was known in the National consciousness as receiving food aid provide food aid to those parts of the country which were supposedly the most developed yet were the ones that suffered most in Mitch.
Six years before Hurricane Mitch Ian Cherrett and Luis Alvarez, with the support from the Dutch and Honduran Governments, led the UN’s technical team credited with changing Lempira’s fortunes. Luis Alvarez, couldn’t know at that point that his efforts would pay off so handsomely six years later.
Luis Alvarez, National Technical Coordinator from 1994 to 2002: When we arrived in Lempira in 1992, there was only 16,000 hectares of forest. But a thousand were being destroyed every year. At that rate we wouldn’t have a forest left. If you hadn’t been here before you wouldn’t know the difference.
Farmers used to burning the land were ruining Lempira’s natural ability to withstand heavy rains and erosion.
Ian Cherrett: Slash and burn agriculture is the agricultural equivalent of a fast food economy because it’s a very easy simple process. You cut down the bush and the trees and you set fire and you plant. Once you’ve had one harvest, two harvests, it’s no use you have to move on, because the soil is no longer fertile. The problem is once the number of people grew and the density of the population grew there was nowhere to move on to.
