Participation Up, Hunger Down
by Susan Walsh, Executive Director, Honduras
January 2010

“Ahora, casi no hay los Junios!” (“Now, there are hardly any Junes”). That’s what the Honduran farmers we support kept telling us when, in mid-October, we headed to their villages in the central highlands of this breathtaking tropical country. Los Junios is the period starting in early June when food stocks are depleted and hunger sets in for families forced to farm on steep hillside slopes.

The best valley lands are used for commercial banana, sugarcane, and pineapple plantations. But thanks to the vision of our local partner – the Foundation for Participatory Research with Honduran Farmers (FIPAH) – the number of weeks without enough to eat has dropped dramatically, from an average of five weeks a year down to about one! FIPAH’s strategy is very straightforward: involve farmers in the problem-solving right from the start. They’ll take care of the rest.

During our 10 days with the innovative farmer-researcher teams (CIALs) at the heart of this program, we saw old, middle-aged, young, and adolescent women and men taking full charge of their local farming systems. They were researching and improving crop yields and productivity with the use of natural farm inputs like a compost called bokashi and by crossing the hardiest of their criolla, or local, plant varieties with the higher yielding seeds from the university research station.

By diversifying the varieties within each crop, they were also staring down the increasingly extreme weather; at least some of the varieties would survive. Watershed management techniques like terracing and living fences were conserving precious water resources. Crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing plants was breathing new life into tired soils. Participation in the CIALs also had unanticipated but equally welcomed benefits. In a system otherwise run by men, female farmers like Ana Maria Flores were getting long-overdue opportunities to assert their needs and rights. CIAL leaders were putting their names forward for positions within community organizations and local government.

Small enterprises were also emerging. The Laguna village CIAL was the first to set up a co-op store to sell household supplies, creating extra income. Children were going to school because their parents could finally afford their books and uniforms. And in the district of Jesus de Otoro there is now a wonderful radio program run by a dynamic local woman, Luisa Gomez, that keeps farmers in the region informed and connected to each other – and to their ever-growing movement to build food sovereignty!