Lights Out in Honduras
by James Gollin

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It's 6:00 PM in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and the narrow streets surrounding the city's Parque Central are busy with shoppers. Vendors selling cheap plastic sandals and polyester clothing manufactured in local maquila factories shout to potential customers over the noise of a dozen portable generators. The scent of frying chicken mingles with the diesel fumes, while uniformed guards cradling M-16s lounge near the generators that are parked in front of a few well-lit businesses. Elsewhere, there is no electricity at all. The city is dark, or lit only by candles. A shopkeeper stretches his hand, palm up, from the door of his empty grocery. With the sad smile of a campesino in a field of parched corn, he says "If it rains, they might turn the lights back on."

Electric power has been severely rationed throughout Honduras since last Spring, when the government suddenly announced that water levels in the nation's largest reservoir were down two hundred feet. The giant hydroelectric facility at El Cajon, 112 miles Northwest of Tegucigalpa, was essentially non-functional. El Cajon, which means "the box," was built during the early 1980s with $750 million in loans from the World Bank and the Inter- American Development Bank. Planners claimed it would provide cheap, plentiful electricity to Honduras and also export power as far away as Panama, generating sufficient foreign exchange to pay interest on the hefty loans. From 1985 till 1990 the dam's four giant turbines supplied 70% of Honduras' needs and created $8 million a year in electricity exports. By early 1994, however, the situation had changed dramatically. Water levels in the reservoir fell well below the level of the power plant's main intake channels, and just ten feet above the less-efficient back-up channels, forcing a dramatic decrease in power generation. Over half of the 25,000 acre reservoir system had become a giant mud flat.

As El Cajon's turbines fell silent, ENEE, the National Electric Company, discovered that petrochemical plants taken off line in 1985 hadn't been "mothballed" and could not be re-commissioned. Since then, ENEE has been doling out power in four and six hour units to different cities and regions on an irregular schedule, while begging for emergency loans from the World Bank to purchase power and generators from Mexico. Businessmen such as Pepe Herrero, who runs a food processing plant in the town of La Ceiba, have spent scarce foreign exchange on imported generators and diesel fuel. "What else can I do?" asks Herrero. "Let everything rot?" His costs have skyrocketed but, since supermarkets and retail customers lack power to run their refrigerators, sales are down.

"This year alone, Honduras will spend $60 million on imported energy, and even that is not enough to sustain the economy," says Arnoldo Bertran of the Inter-American Development Bank's Tegucigalpa office. The IDB estimates that power shortages are costing Honduras $20 million a month in lost industrial production, but the real effects of the crisis are difficult to measure. Office workers chat idly near open windows, their fax machines and computers inoperative. Cement mixers are silent, paralyzing the construction industry. Airline reservation systems have collapsed in chaos and, since pumping gasoline requires electricity, long distance transportation has become unpredictable. In the darkened cities, crime is rampant.

Newly-elected President Carlos Reina publicly accused former President Callejas of intentionally draining the El Cajon reservoir in the final months of 1993 in order to sabotage the new administration. While there is strong evidence that Callejas let increasingly scarce water pour through the turbines rather than imposing rationing during last year's election campaign, the real reasons behind the Honduran power crisis are longer-term in origin and more difficult to reverse than mere political maneuvering. Throughout Honduras, taxi drivers, politicians, and campesinos can all explain the source of the crisis with one word: deforestation.

"The process of deforestation has disrupted the ecological equilibrium in Honduras," admits Ernesto Vargas, biologist and ENEE's Chief of Watershed Management at El Cajon . His counterpart at the government-run Honduran Forestry Development Corporation, COHDEFOR, Wilfredo David, agrees: "Thick forests regulate the flow of water in an eco-system. Rain impacts on leaves and soaks into the mulch, leaching out slowly into subterranean streams, providing a steady flow of water into the rivers that fill the reservoir." Deforestation has led to decreased rainfall, increased evaporation, and general drought-like conditions. When rain does come, violent erosion carries off topsoil, filling the reservoir with sediment. During one 1990 storm, rapidly rising water levels panicked downstream landowners and ENEE responded by partially draining the reservoir, a decision they now regret.

As part of a belated effort to fight deforestation in the 3,200 square mile El Cajon watershed, COHDEFOR recently shut down half a dozen sawmills operating illegally near the reservoir, but another 20 are still in operation. "Lumber extraction is a problem, but not the main problem," says Wilfredo David, whose agency has often been accused of corruption in awarding timber concessions. "Sawmills cut only 800,000 cubic meters of lumber per year, while campesinos wielding machetes cut six million cubic meters of firewood."

Demand for lumber and firewood by a rapidly growing population, combined with the persistence of traditional slash and burn agriculture techniques, is deforesting Honduras at a rate of nearly 200,000 acres per year, a significant area in a country smaller than Pennsylvania. Migratory farmers move up road systems built by timber companies, burning tropical forests and planting corn and beans in the ash-enriched soil. After a year or two, when the land is exhausted and can support only thin grasses suitable for cattle ranching, the campesinos move deeper into the forest and repeat the cycle.

Chet Thomas of the non-profit group Aldea Global has been working with farmers in the El Cajon region for ten years, teaching them regenerative agricultural techniques that improve the soil while encouraging them to plant cocoa, orange, mango and avocado trees. "It's insane," he says. "They spent the better part of a billion dollars on the dam, but not $5000 on protecting the watershed."

Dr. Becky Myton, a US-trained ecologist and advisor to the Minister of the Environment, was on a commission that reviewed the plans for El Cajon back in 1982. "The consensus was that we shouldn't build such a big dam there and that a strict watershed management plan was necessary, but we were overruled in both cases by the IDB and local economic interests," she says.

Wilfredo David at COHDEFOR points out that his agency has been studying the watershed for years, in collaboration with the IDB. A six volume report was released in 1990, then revised for three years. Finally, on September 30th of this year, the IDB and the government of Honduras agreed on a $20.4 million emergency loan to reforest and protect the El Cajon watershed.

"It's too late," claims Ciriaco Andino, head of Watershed Management at SANAA, the government agency in charge of water resources. "Only 10% of the area is still pure forest. Even if we planted ten million trees per year it would take us twenty years to restore the eco-system." Andino opposes COHDEFOR's plan to introduce rapid-growing "exotic" trees such as eucalyptus, which he claims would upset the balance of local insects, birds, and mammals.

"The IDB program is better than nothing," counters Dr. Myton. "The whole country will go down the tubes if we don't start reforesting." She is concerned that, if sediment levels in the reservoir get any higher, the dam will not be able to come back on line even if the water level rises.

"If you want my opinion, not as an expert, but as the son of my mother, we don't really need reforestation," says ENEE's Vargas in his office near the reservoir. "What we really need is to protect the area, leave it alone, and let nature recuperate."

Many Honduran officials have come to realize that, just as the outflow of water through the dam's turbines can not exceed inflow to the reservoir, a society that cuts wood faster than trees grow can not prosper for long. "The future of El Cajon is the future of Honduras, and the future of the world," says Vargas. "Either we establish a political and economic regime based on sustainable development or, well.... There is no other alternative."

In the United States, debate over the environment is often discussed in terms of spotted owls versus loggers. But in a small country such as Honduras, the essential fallacy underlying the "jobs versus the environment" debate is exposed. Without a healthy, sustainable environment, the economy of any nation will soon either collapse or, by importing precious resources, simply delay a more general environmental and economic collapse. This attitude, once put forward only by environmental activists, has now become the official creed of institutions such as the IDB and the World Bank. "Our aim has always been to abolish poverty," says Kenneth Newcombe, Chief of Global Environment Coordination at the World Bank. "Now we understand that solving poverty and protecting the environment go hand in hand."

Will Honduras be able to reverse deforestation, bring back the gentle rains, and eventually turn the lights back on? "We still have the option to decide the future of our nation," asserts Vargas. "But we have reached the point of no return. One more step and we are over the edge."

James Gollin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico - and when not traveling in Honduras - can be reached via email.

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