Honduras

Honduras, like many other countries in Mesoamerica, is a highly unequal society with respect to income distribution and land ownership. Like many other Central American countries, the economy and the livelihoods of the people are dependent on export agriculture such as bananas and palm oil. At one time, 70 percent of the productive land in the northern plain was owned by a handful of U.S. agribusiness companies like the United Fruit Company.

Today, small farmers struggle to makes ends meet. Free trade and neoliberal economic policies mean increasing food imports and little-to-no public support for small-scale production and marketing. The countryside is losing population as livelihoods fail. Honduras’ economic development model bets on urban employment in assembly plants (maquilas), which does not generate nearly enough employment to absorb impoverished farmers—resulting in a race to the bottom.

Inequities in Honduras also occur along ethnic lines. The minority indigenous population such as the Garifuna on the Caribbean coast, have no autonomous control over their ancestral lands and face high poverty rates. 

The Garifuna have organized and taken their concerns before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They have won, only to be faced with local officials and developers who choose to ignore the rulings of the highest human rights body in the hemisphere. Clearly, favorable rulings are not enough. Powerful interests must feel the organized grassroots pressure of the disenfranchised.

The struggles of indigenous groups and small farmers for rights to land, water and food and sustainable livelihoods are embodied in the hopeful vision of Food Sovereignty put forth by the Vía Campesina.