The biodiversity of Capiro Calentura National Park, on the northern coast of Honduras, could disappear as a result of tourism, agricultural expansion and drug trafficking.

Howler monkey in the Capiro Calentura jungle. Credit: Sonia Edith Parra/IPS

Capiro and Calentura are two mountains in the foothills of the Nombre de Dios Sierra, close to Trujillo, capital of the Caribbean coastal province of Colón. The park has 7,542 hectares of tropical and subtropical rainforest, and in it are 20 micro-watersheds that supply water to 32 surrounding communities, including Trujillo.

The park was established after a push from a group of teachers from Trujillo. It forms a natural complex with the neighbouring Guaimoreto Lagoon Wildlife Refuge, covering 10,387 hectares along the ocean.

In the last three years, a new threat has emerged here, as it has along the entire northern Honduran coast: drug trafficking.

The natural canal that connects the sea to the lagoon is now a drug transit route — nobody who is not involved in trafficking dares venture there. In the refuge’s buffer zone there are several clandestine aircraft landing strips.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Central America is one of the most important corridors for moving narcotics. In 2007, of the 700 tonnes of cocaine seized around the world, 91 were intercepted here.

National and foreign drug traffickers buy up land around the wildlife refuge to more closely control their illicit transactions and make use of valuable natural resources.

“It’s sad to see how we are losing the most valuable thing we have in the region: our parks and our water sources. So far we have been able to survive, put food on the table, but tomorrow — I don’t know,” said a rural worker from the area who asked not to be named.

In fact, nearly everyone interviewed for this article spoke with this reporter only on condition of anonymity.

Living in this area are the Garífuna (descendants of African slaves and indigenous Caribs), the indigenous Pech peoples and small farmers who migrated here from other parts of the country. There are more than 60,000 inhabitants, according to the park’s 2007 environmental management plan.

The Calentura and Guaimoreto Foundation (FUCAGUA), created in 1991 to preserve manage these sites, worked with the communities to develop an agro-forestry project in order to diversify crops.

The project includes gardens to produce healthy seeds of coconut palms, decimated by hurricanes and disease, and develop fruit crops and tubers like the ñame, and legumes like the balú — staples of the local cuisine.

Thanks to this initiative, which reinforces food security, next year the Garífuna will harvest their first healthy crop of coconuts.

But it is not all good news. There are sectors of the park where the howler and white-faced monkeys, jaguars and deer can no longer be found. As for the park’s flora, valuable timber, like mahogany and ceibo seem to have disappeared.

FUCAGUA’s actions have been successful in protecting part of the park and the refuge. The foundation utilises the 1992 Presidential Pact 1118, which established these protected areas.

In November of that year, an executive order banned resource exploitation and exploration in the area and instructed government agencies to delineate the borders and preserve them. But that hasn’t happened.

Nearly 20 years later, the ambiguous legal situation continues. Although the borders were drawn up several times — the latest in 2006 — there was no decree to make them legal, meaning that the protected area loses ground day by day.

In the park’s buffer zone, land is sold without title, or the titles are issued irregularly by the National Agrarian Institute. As such, cattle ranching and food crops continue their encroachment.

Although Honduras does have a Natural Resources and Environment Secretariat (Ministry) and Forest Conservation Institute, the protected areas are administered by non-governmental organisations through contracts with the state.

But they don’t have state financial support, and often lack even technical and legal backing.

Meanwhile, the expansion of tourism continues unabated as well.

The Canada-based company Life Vision Properties is building the Alta Vista and Campo del Mar Nature Park tourism complexes, complete with private neighbourhoods in the mountains or on the beach, in the Capiro Calentura and Guaimoreto buffer zone.

“Before, foreigners could not buy land less than two kilometres from the beaches,” a FUCAGUA source said. But that rule changed with legal reforms in the late 1990s.

According to Randy Jorgensen, executive director of Life Vision, the project promotes economic development in the area. A few weeks ago, a bulldozer belonging to the company turned an old ecological path into a highway.

On Jan. 22 and 25, the government issued environmental permits to the two projects. At the time, the country was still under control of the government that took power in the June 2009 coup.

FUCAGUA is now trying to get the Forest Conservation Institute to present the demarcation of the zone to Congress to make it legally binding.

To do so, it will use some of the financing from the sustainable resource management project of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in the Honduran Atlantic, provided by the European Union.

*This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by Inter Press Service (IPS), CGIAR/Biodiversity International, International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ), and the United Nations Environment Programme/Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP/CBD) — all members of the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org).

The great biodiversity of a protected area on the Honduran Caribbean coast is at risk, despite the efforts of a handful of residents and local institutions.

Howler Monkey in the Capiro Calentura jungle. - Sonia Edith Parra/IPS

Capiro and Calentura are two mountains in the foothills of the Nombre de Dios Sierra, close to Trujillo, capital of the Caribbean coastal province of Colón. The park has 7,542 hectares of tropical and subtropical rainforest, and in it are 20 micro-watersheds that supply water to 32 surrounding communities, including Trujillo.

The park was established after a push from a group of teachers from Trujillo. It forms a natural complex with the neighboring Guaimoreto Lagoon Wildlife Refuge, covering 10,387 hectares along the ocean.

In the last three years, a new threat has emerged here, as it has along the entire northern Honduran coast: drug trafficking.

The natural canal that connects the sea to the lagoon is now a drug transit route — nobody who is not involved in trafficking dares venture there. In the refuge's buffer zone there are several clandestine aircraft landing strips.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Central America is one of the most important corridors for moving narcotics. In 2007, of the 700 tons of cocaine seized around the world, 91 were intercepted here.

National and foreign drug traffickers buy up land around the wildlife refuge to more closely control their illicit transactions and make use of valuable natural resources.

“It's sad to see how we are losing the most valuable thing we have in the region: our parks and our water sources. So far we have been able to survive, put food on the table, but tomorrow — I don't know,” said a rural worker from the area who asked not to be named.

In fact, nearly everyone interviewed for this article spoke with this reporter only on condition of anonymity.

Living in this area are the Garífuna (descendants of African slaves and indigenous Caribs), the indigenous Pech peoples and small farmers who migrated here from other parts of the country. There are more than 60,000 inhabitants, according to the park's 2007 environmental management plan.

The Calentura and Guaimoreto Foundation (FUCAGUA), created in 1991 to preserve manage these sites, worked with the communities to develop an agro-forestry project in order to diversify crops.

The project includes gardens to produce healthy seeds of coconut palms, decimated by hurricanes and disease, and develop fruit crops and tubers like the ñame, and legumes like the balú — staples of the local cuisine.

Thanks to this initiative, which reinforces food security, next year the Garífuna will harvest their first healthy crop of coconuts.

But all is not good news. There are sectors of the park where the howler and white-faced monkeys, jaguars and deer can no longer be found. As for the park's flora, valuable timber, like mahogany and ceibo seem to have disappeared.

FUCAGUA's actions have been successful in protecting part of the park and the refuge. The foundation utilizes the 1992 Presidential Pact 1118, which established these protected areas.

In November of that year, an executive order banned resource exploitation and exploration in the area and instructed government agencies to delineate the borders and preserve them. But that hasn't happened.

Nearly 20 years later, the ambiguous legal situation continues. Although the borders were drawn up several times — the latest in 2006 — there was no decree to make them legal, meaning that the protected area loses ground day by day.

In the park's buffer zone, land is sold without title, or the titles are issued irregularly by the National Agrarian Institute. As such, cattle ranching and food crops continue their encroachment.

Although Honduras does have a Natural Resources and Environment Secretariat (Ministry) and Forest Conservation Institute, the protected areas are administered by non-governmental organizations through contracts with the state.

But they don't have state financial support, and often lack even technical and legal backing.

Meanwhile, the expansion of tourism continues unabated as well.

The Canada-based company Life Vision Properties is building the Alta Vista and Campo del Mar Nature Park tourism complexes, complete with private neighborhoods in the mountains or on the beach, in the Capiro Calentura and Guaimoreto buffer zone.

“Before, foreigners could not buy land less than two kilometers from the beaches,” a FUCAGUA source said. But that rule changed with legal reforms in the late 1990s.

According to Randy Jorgensen, executive director of Life Vision, the project promotes economic development in the area. A few weeks ago, a bulldozer belonging to the company turned an old ecological path into a highway.

On Jan. 22 and 25, the government issued environmental permits to the two projects. At the time, the country was still under control of the government that took power in the June 2009 coup.

FUCAGUA is now trying to get the Forest Conservation Institute to present the demarcation of the zone to Congress to make it legally binding.

To do so, it will use some of the financing from the sustainable resource management project of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in the Honduran Atlantic, provided by the European Union.

Who will draw up the standards for the recently passed Honduran forestry law and how it will be done are key questions for the fate of the country's forests, say environmentalists.

A white-headed capuchin (Cebus capucinus) in the Honduran jungle. - Photo Stock

Three days after approval, a law must go through the revision and correction commission, and then it is signed by the president and published in the official gazette. In this case, the National Institute of Forest Conservation and Development (ICF) is to draft the law's standards within a period of three months.

The bill was passed by Congress on Sep. 13, so there is no explanation for the delay, Aída Romero, of the Democracy without Borders Foundation, told this reporter.

According to Ana Lanza, of the congressional Secretariat General, the delay is due to the fact that there are nearly 200 articles to codify in this piece of legislation.

Behind the slow-moving process is pressure from the timber industry, which is why it took eight years to get the law passed, said an activist who requested anonymity.

The declared annual exports of timber to the United States total three million dollars, but true sales reach 6.8 million dollars, or 226 percent more, according to Andrea Johnson, who monitors illegal logging for the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

Great Britain and Spain import Honduran timber worth 100,000 and 1.3 million dollars, respectively, but the real sums are 1.6 million and 2.6 million dollars — another illustrative case of illegal logging and sales.

The participation of communities in forestry consultative councils, the regularization of forested lands — with demarcation of areas of protection, conservation, community management, water resources — and prison sentences of up to 15 years for environmental crimes are some of the noteworthy items in the controversial law.

Establishing the law's standards is essential because that is where it can either be implemented correctly or have its spirit completely changed, according to the Democracy without Borders Foundation, leader of the Coalition for Environmental Justice, involving eight Honduran environmental groups.

Faced with the delay in the process, the Foundation presented the Congress-approved text to the correction commission along with some suggestions so that the process would not be further bogged down, says Romero.

The Coalition plans a dissemination campaign so that the communities take on the role that has been given them in the consultative councils.

It will also keep an eye on the law's codification process, which will be in the hands of the executive director of the ICF, created by the law to replace the much-challenged COHDEFOR, the forest development agency.

But the Coalition will abandon the process if the ICF post goes to Ramón Álvarez, current general manager of COHDEFOR, whose term has been the subject of corruption complaints, said Romero.

Álvarez himself invited the Coalition to participate in setting the law's standards, when as head of COHDEFOR he opposed reforming the forestry legislation, stressed Romero.

According to a 2005 EIA study, there is a network in Honduras that forges permits, hands out bribes, issues false land titles and uses intimidation tactics, and which implicates politicians, COHDEFOR, timber companies, sawmills, truckers, loggers, police and other officials.

Companies like José Lamas SRL, Maderas Noriega, Sansone, Serma, Derimasa and Yodeco are the main lumber suppliers for buyers in the United States and Europe, including Aljoma Lumber, Home Depot and Intergro, according to the EIA report.

The text states that most illegal trade involves pine and mahogany species, among others, which come from the Olancho and Mosquitia departments and the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, in the Honduran north and east.

The EIA says that 80 percent of the mahogany trees and 50 percent of the pine logged in Honduras in 2004 were cut illegally. In the 1990s, the country lost 10 percent of its forest cover.

Honduran biodiversity, concentrated in107 protected areas that cover a total of 27,000 square kilometers, is threatened by deforestation.

In 1996, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) declared the Río Plátano Biosphere “threatened”.

Meanwhile, the Olancho Environmentalist Movement (MAO) and the Campamento Environmentalist Movement await implementation of the new forestry legislation. Their conservation work has been met with threats, intimidation and the deaths of eight members since 1997. The most recent were two activists murdered Dec. 20, 2006.

Víctor Ochoa, of MAO, said in an interview that “the government institutions have remained passive and complicit in the illegal logging in Olancho. The forestry law is not obeyed. Institutions like COHDEFOR are corrupt, and their work has been to legalize what is illegal.”