Central American Agriculture

Central American farming divides roughly into (a) staples, such as beans, maize and rice, grown mostly by small farmers, many with only a hectare (2.5 acres) or two, who live off their crops and sell any surplus; and (b) export goods, such as bananas, coffee, cane sugar, sesame (in Nicaragua) and shrimps. There is more than one bean harvest a year.

In commercial crops, due to Hurricane Mitch in 1998 Honduras lost nearly half of its bananas and 20-25% of its coffee-which means, between them, about one-eighth of its exports. Nicaragua lost only 6% or so of either, but two-thirds of its sesame. As for shrimps, for all the flooding of their salty lagoons, there are even reports that Honduras's shrimp farmers will do better in the year after Mitch than before.

Crop losses, however, are only the simplest part of the story. A harder question is what Mitch did to the land. When rivers that had burst their banks receded, they left sand up to two meters deep. Some small farmers with fields next to rivers have lost them for good. Where there is less sand, they can mix it into the soil, but the mixture does not hold water so well. In the hills, torrents of water washed soil away, or left it but rinsed the nutrients out of it. No one can yet quantify the effects, but at least for a time the land will be less fertile.

Honduras grew 27% less food per person in 1996 than in 1980. But it is much worse news for some individual farmers, since so many were only just scratching a living anyway. The same goes for workers on the big banana plantations. In Honduras, Standard Fruit (a subsidiary of Dole, an American fruit giant-- formerly United Fruit) says it will in time produce as much as before; but not necessarily in the same spots, and it will take two years just to replant everything that was washed away. Overall in the plantations, the result will be temporary or permanent unemployment for thousands of workers.

At least Standard can afford the $70--75million it reckons it will need to put its Honduran plantations back in order. For many subsistence farmers there, the problem is how to replant at all, and what. Normally, they save enough seed from one harvest to plant the next. Not this time. The government bought rice and maize seed abroad. Agriculture officials in both Honduras and Nicaragua reckon their farms could recover in about five years. Nicaragua's government plans to spend $1 billion during that time to achieve it. But neither country has that kind of money, and local banks are reluctant to lend except short-term. The governments of the Mitch-hit countries will present their plans for reconstruction to prospective foreign aid donors.

Source: modified from an article in The Economist, 20 February 1999.