Ecobreves – HONDURAS: Communities to Manage Sustainable Forest

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

TEGUCIGALPA, Jan 31 2011 (IPS) - Eight communities in the northern Honduran departments of Atlántida and Yoro will take charge in the next two months of 30,000 hectares of forest to carry out a sustainable management project. Karla Cáceres, of the Atlantic Regional Development Network, which is promoting the initiative, told Tierramérica that the area to be sustainably managed and utilized and protected will have broad citizen participation.

For more than three decades that the people “live with the forest, and today the government authorizes them the permits to legally manage it for its sustainability,” she explained. The community programs will have financial backing from the Forest Conservation Institute, donor countries and of the areas farming cooperatives, which will purchase the products. The beneficiary zones are part of the Honduran Atlantic protected areas.