|
|
"QUEZUNGUAL" -- THE ANSWER TO STORMS LIKE MITCH??
BY PHIL GUNSON IN HONDURAS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
Hurricane Mitch, which left much of Honduras and northern Nicaragua in ruins
last October, has been called the most devastating natural disaster to
strike the region in 200 years.
Ironically however, with the exception of the Bay Islands (Islas de la
Bahia) and part of the Caribbean coast of Honduras, it was not the
180-mile-an-hour winds of this exceptional "category five" hurricane that
did the damage.
As Mitch slowed from category five to category one - and then to mere
"tropical storm" status - most people assumed the danger was past, and that
the ex-hurricane would blow itself out harmlessly over the Caribbean.
In fact, the horror was about to begin. Instead of following its
predicted course, the storm described an extraordinary s-curve, entering
Honduran territory near the port of Trujillo and exiting close to the
Guatemala/El Salvador borders.
Blocked by a cold front from advancing northwards, it dawdled for days
over Honduras, dumping the huge volume of water it had picked up from the
Caribbean over the mountainous spine of Central America.
In less than a week, much of Honduras experienced the equivalent of half
a year’s rainfall. Only slowly did it dawn on the country’s authorities
that a major tragedy was about to occur.
But although the storm itself appeared to be a freak, once-in-a-century
occurrence, the consequences were all too predictable. Environmentalists
had been warning for years that deforestation and a lack of urban planning
would combine to produce a disaster in the event of a serious storm.
No one had heeded their warnings, and as a result, thousands would die
and hundreds of thousands be made homeless. And all this in a country where
- almost unnoticed - a farming technique that its proponents claim would
help avoid such disasters was already being modernised with great success.
Mitch passed almost directly over the remote village of Guarita near the
border with El Salvador. But you would be hard pressed to find any evidence
of its passing.
This is the poorest and most forgotten region of the country. "We’re so
abandoned, even Mitch ignored us," joked one resident. It was to these high
mountains that the Lenca chieftain Lempira withdrew in the 16th century to
lead resistance to the Spaniards - and it was here, according to legend,
that he plunged to his death from a rocky outcrop near the summit of the
highest peak.
Much of the population is still of Lenca indian origin. Just one
telephone and four doctors serve the area’s 110,000 people - and the
doctors do not work weekends. Malnutrition is put at 64 per cent and
illiteracy averages 50 per cent. The roads resemble dry riverbeds.
But no one died in the southern third of the departamento (province) of
Lempira and, physical damage - other than to the roads - was minimal.
The explanation is a system for farming mountainsides invented by poor
subsistence farmers and currently being refined and promoted by Honduran
agronomists with foreign assistance.
So successful is the system that those employing it lost only 10 per cent
of their crops in last year’s severe "El Nino" drought and even after Mitch
had a grain surplus of 50 to 60,000 quintales (1 quintal = 100lbs) with
which to alleviate hunger elsewhere in the country.
Known as the "Quezungual" method, after the village where its use was
first observed, it avoids the ruinous "slash-and-burn" technique which
destroys the forest and leads to erosion, soil degradation and the
destruction of vitally important watersheds.
"When I first came here six years ago," recalled agronomist German
Flores, "this area was just one big fire." Now farmers who burn their land
have been reduced to single figures in many of the 84 communities in which
the Prolesur project is working.
The reason for slash-and-burn is to give the soil a quick injection of
fertiliser - in the form of burned vegetation - just before therains come.
But although it results in good yields in the first year, production
quickly tails off, and with no tree cover the soil is eventually washed off
into the rivers.
Seventy per cent of Honduran farmland is hillside, but the country’s
agricultural colleges have traditionally taught plains farming, in the
interests of the agribusiness companies that dominate the export trade.
The destruction wrought by Mitch was a direct consequence of this
one-sided approach, according to Ian Cherrett, who directs the Prolesur
project for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), with finance
from the Dutch government.
"There is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster’," Cherrett argues. "There
are natural phenomena which interact with human activities."
When Mitch released an unprecedented volume of water over the Honduran
mountains the lack of vegetation and soil on the hillsides led to extremely
rapid run-off. Eroded soil, loose rocks and trees added to the weight which
eventually crashed into roads, bridges and houses downstream.
The toll of the disaster was exacerbated by a lack of planning which left
houses, factories and farms right in the path of the flood waters.
The concrete bridge across the mouth of the Rio Cangrejal in La Ceiba,
for instance, was smashed when the swollen river-waters picked up an entire
small factory and hurled it against the bridge’s westernmost span.
The Quezungual method involves planting crops under trees, whose roots
anchor the soil. Pruning provides the soil nutrients and terracing - or the
use of natural, plant barriers - helps eliminate erosion. Instead of
ploughing, farmers use the traditional pointed stick when sowing.
Yields have increased, crop varieties are multiplying and birds and
animals which had fled the increasingly barren hillsides are beginning to
return.
"Before, we just had vegetables to feed ourselves," said 20-year-old
Juventina Aguilar, as she stood among pineapples, papayas and a dozen other
crop varieties in the family’s hillside plot above the hamlet of San Pablo.
"Now there’s a surplus of everything and we have to sell our produce."
According to Celestino Serna, a peasant farmer in San Pablo and a convert
to the method, it was "the scarcity of water" that forced local people to
change their ways. "I remember when there were more trees and bushes here
and water was more abundant," he said.
"But nobody told us what was wrong until the experts from Prolesur
started helping us." Quezungual is based on a local technique, but there is
no record of how long ago it was first used, and it had almost died out
when agronomists began studying it in the early 1990s.
Now, in the aftermath of Mitch, the Honduran government has expressed
interest in extending Quezungual to other areas of the country. Although it
is primarily suited to small, hillside plots, variations for larger farms
and cattle ranches are being developed.
"The key is sustainability," argues Ian Cherrett. "The adoption of this
system is not enough: a number of complementary activities are required,
otherwise they will simply double their population - and then they’re back
where they started.
"What we are proposing is that they should be seen not just as peasant
farmers but as landscape managers. They would be paid for this through a
tax on, say, electricity and water.
"If the inhabitants of San Pedro Sula (the country’s industrial centre),
for instance, had paid out a little at an earlier stage, they wouldn’t be
faced with such a huge repair bill. You could look on it as a kind of
insurance."
Ironic as it may seem, the dirt-poor descendants of Lempira may be just
in time to save the remainder of the country from five centuries of
mismanagement by those who drove them into the hills.
ENDS