Tourism and Biodiversity Preservation in Honduras
by Eric Greenquist

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"The Río Plátano," Edgardo Bodden told me, "is a special place. But people need work to live .... Jobs like lobster fishing and wood cutting are destructive and unstable .... We need local businesses that are not so destructive."

Although Edgardo lives in a small Miskito village in northern Honduras, the dilemma he describes is one of global concern. Edgardo's "special area" is the 815,000-hectare Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve: the largest protected area in Honduras and part of the largest contiguous rain forest in Central America. The reserve is the ancient homeland of the indigenous Miskito, Pech and Tawahka-Sumu peoples, and the ethnic Garífuna. For centuries these peoples have subsisted on small gardens of yucca, beans and corn, and by hunting and fishing.

During the past two decades however, squatters have deforested more than one-tenth of the reserve. Commercial logging, livestock and farm operators have taken advantage of the lack of government controls, and poor farmers have invaded the reserve searching for land. According to Osmín Padilla, former director of Health and Nutrition for the Health Ministry, "The food situation in Honduras is critical." At least 1.2 million Hondurans suffer from life-threatening malnutrition and 60 percent of Hondurans eat what they can find to subsist.

The intruders have driven villagers from their traditional lands and introduced a host of economically transient and destructive land uses. Even native persons, attracted by the easier money, have joined the assault. In December 1996, the World Heritage Committee added the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve to its list of World Heritage in Danger.

The fate of the reserve has global implications. Latin America, with more than one-half the world's remaining tropical forests, is the world's richest store of biological diversity. The rate of deforestation in Latin America however, is the highest in the developing world. Species extinctions are occurring there at unprecedented levels. As environmental conditions deteriorate, economic stability and human health throughout the region are increasingly threatened.

To help save the Río Plátano, in 1995 Honduras joined the Partnership for Biodiversity, a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to promote conservation worldwide. MOPAWI, an indigenous organization active in the Río Plátano since 1985, leads the Honduras Partnership. Other members include the Honduran Forestry Administration, which is responsible for protecting the reserve, Peace Corps, which helps with community development, and the U.S. Department of the Interior which provides technical expertise in the protection of natural areas and rare species.

Part of the Partnership's strategy is to help indigenous villagers create small businesses which are environmentally friendly, encourage conservation and provide employment alternatives to more destructive land uses. The development of a tourism industry in the reserve, operated by indigenous persons, is showing great promise as part of a strategy to promote conservation.

Las Marías is a community of 420 Miskito and Pech villagers. Because Las Marías is one of only a few villages in the heart of the reserve, it receives almost 300 visitors each year. When I visited Las Marías in 1995, villagers expressed to me great interest in providing services to visitors. The services they provided however, were extremely poor.

In 1996 the Partnership began a series of workshops to teach villagers about the needs of tourists for basic services, infrastructure and fair pricing. The Partnership also taught courses on guiding, food preparation, environmental education and organizational strengthening, and helped the community develop local rules to protect the primary rain forests, birds and other resources that visitors come to see

The people of Las Marías took full advantage of these workshops. Villagers organized an ecotourism committee and built a community meeting house. Individual families constructed five new visitor lodgings which were cleaner, safer and more comfortable than the two that had existed before. The ecotourism committee prepared a list of guide and transport services, complete with prices, and began building trails. Local women organized a cooperative to sell handicrafts. According to Martín Herrera, president of the ecotourism committee, as many as eighty villagers eventually could benefit from tourism.

On the northern coast of the reserve, the Miskito community of Raistá benefits from tourism in a different way. The Partnership helped villagers build a farm to grow crops of live butterflies for export to international zoos and exhibits. During the farm's first year of operation it sold butterfly pupae worth $4,800. Unexpectedly, that year 430 persons from 28 countries heard about and visited the farm. Villagers and Peace Corps volunteers were quick to see the possibilities. The farm sold T-shirts to tourists worth $1,700 and earned another $1,013 in tour fees, augmenting farm income by one-third. Villagers also provide visitors with housing, food and transportation.

Garífuna villagers in the reserve community of Plaplaya hope tourism will support their conservation efforts. Each year, as loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles return to the north coast to nest, villagers begin nightly patrols along an 8-kilometer stretch of beach. Upon finding a turtle nest, villagers carefully dig up the eggs and re-bury them in a protected enclosure. This protects the eggs from local poachers who have decimated the turtle populations.

Says Adalberto Padilla of MOPAWI, "People remember when nesting turtles were common. Now they search many nights just to find one."

In 1997, villagers rescued 48 nests and released 1,152 hatchling turtles to the sea. Currently, this project is subsidized by the Partnership, which also is working to stop the poaching. Villagers hope however, that eventually there will be enough tourists, eager to see the nesting sea turtles, to support the program and provide the village with badly needed income.

The development of tourism services by villagers will not solve the most significant threats to the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. The economic benefits of tourism however, are helping motivate villagers to regulate their own uses of natural resources to protect local plant and animal communities. Tourism development has become an important part of a larger strategy for biodiversity conservation.

Eric Greenquist is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Eugene, Oregon. He coordinates actions in Honduras by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Email.

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