By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jun 21 1996 (IPS)

The Honoran government, accustomed to foreign recipes to improve the nation’s economy, now faces the problem that ingedients used have not produced the desired result – especially in the area of food security!

Over the past two years the administration of President Carlos Reina has steadily followed an economic structural adjustment plan begun five years ago, but for the last month the government has been unable to resolve an acute shortage of black beans. The pulses are one of the mainstays of the Honduran diet, and the ministry of agriculture officials are having a hard time explaining why there are so few available.

The blame has been put on climate change, lack of credit, and stock-piling on the part of speculators. No one has dared admit the root cause of the shortage may be the lack of a food policy.

More than 20 years ago, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned just such a situation would occur if corrective measures were not taken. At the time FAO recommended increasing agricultural output by five percent per year in order to meet food needs, but the advoice was ignored and Honduras moved from being a grain exporter to an importer.

Political analyst Jorge Yllescas maintained the “bean crisis” would have been no where near as severe as it is today if due preventative measures had been taken.

Yllescas told the Tegucigalpa daily ‘El Heraldo,’ that if beans remained scarce, “we could be on the brink of a great political upheaval…”

The price of beans has never been so high in the Central American nation, where about 2 kgs of beans go for four dollars – beyond the reach of the average Honduran.

leading agricultural businessman, Jose Segovia, said the scarcity of beans reflected the failure of a series of recipes from the international credit organisations, who “try to impose their rules without taking the real situation into account.”

“We spent years listening to what we should have done and have to do. They have imposed incongruent policies on us which only seek to make the developing nations into consumer markets for the big powers,” he said.

All these policies support the agro-export model which favours big industry, leaving aside basic agricultural production like maize, rice and beans, which is left in the hands of the rural population, he added.

Cristino Herrera, of the National Rural Workers Association (ACAN) said the agricultural modernisation bill favoured agro- industry and non-traditional products, as these generated hard currency while staple foods did not.

“As a result, the government gives priority to anything which can generate income, because this way they remain in the good books of international creditors,” he said. “They fulfil the economic adjustment plan, but hide the real situation of increasing poverty.”

According to State predictions, imports of basic grains will remain a policy while agricultural production is increasing at only 1.9 percent per year compared with demographic growth of 3 percent.

Marco Micheletti, viceminister of Natural Resources said the bean crisis “is not entirely our fault, but that of bad policies in the past, which we now have to correct.”

He spoke of using a 50 million dollar emergency fund to provide soft loans to rural workers as production incentives, while making several estates legally available for cultivation.

Official figures indicate the nation is facing an annual food deficit of six million 45 kg sacks of maize, a million sacks of rice and 400,000 sacks of beans.

The crisis, and how the government handles it, will severely affect its chances of reelection in elections due in Nov. 1997, political observers said.

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