When Xiomara Castro donned Honduras’s blue-and-white presidential sash on Jan. 27, environmentalists might have been forgiven for assuming green issues wouldn’t get much play on inauguration day. Castro, after all, was making history by becoming the first woman to hold her country’s highest office. And she was doing so amid a severe economic crisis—and a fraught political context.

A democratic socialist, Castro was ending 12 years of scandal-plagued rule by the conservative National Party that followed the 2009 ouster of her husband, then-President Manuel Zelaya, in a military coup. In doing so, she was immediately confronted by a nettlesome legacy of that rule: while in office, her predecessor as president, Juan Orlando Hernández, had been named in U.S. courts in connection with international drug-trafficking. On Feb. 15, less than three weeks after her inauguration, Castro’s government would place the former president under arrest pending the processing of a U.S. request for his extradition, which a Honduran court granted on March 16.

Yet Castro did make environmental news. In her inaugural address, she promised to curb rampant, largely unregulated mining projects and rein in the land clearing that has made Honduras more vulnerable to storm damage of the type caused by Hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020. Specifically, she vowed to support agroforestry initiatives aimed at improving the land’s natural ability to retain water in times of drought and floods. She also signaled that the Honduran Army would get involved in natural resource protection. And most immediately, she pledged to halt new open-pit mining permits and review existing ones, most of which allow mining in rivers and forests.

A month after her speech, the Castro administration made good on her promise, issuing an executive order requiring that all national territory be “free of open-pit mining.” The order also calls for the review of mining permits that have already been approved, leaving open the possibility that these might be canceled if the operators aren’t complying with environmental regulations. Currently, mining concessions in Honduras number 217 and cover nearly 132,000 hectares of land (326,000 acres), according to the Foreign Debt Social Forum (Fosdeh), a private Honduran think tank. Of these, 42 have been granted in protected areas contrary to the General Mining Law enacted in Honduras in 2013, Fosdeh says.

Castro has also spoken through her appointments, picking forest engineer Lucky Medina as her Secretary of Natural Resources and Environment. (See Q&A—this issue.) It was Medina’s office that announced the ban on permits for new open-pit mines and the review of permits already granted for such projects.

More than mining
Medina acknowledges that Honduras faces many significant environmental challenges aside from untrammeled mining. He says independent studies and his own experience suggest that Honduras in the past 12 years has experienced the greatest rate of deforestation in Central America. He says that to address it, the government is weighing the use of 2,000 Army personnel to form an Institutional Environmental Task Force that would help halt illegal deforestation, dismantle river mining dredges and patrol protected areas.

On agroforestry, Medina says the administration wants to help communities produce food without causing deforestation. “Eighty-five percent of Honduran territory supports forestry activity,” he says. “People don’t live from forestry alone. They must eat and improve their diets, but also have enough to sell.”

Medina argues that the Central American Integration System (SICA), an eight-nation alliance pushing for closer regional economic ties, could be a source of financing for environmental conservation initiatives in the region. He also sees potential for Central American countries to band together and attract international financing for joint climate-change mitigation initiatives such as forest conservation projects.

Steps such as the cancellation of mining permits are sure to draw fire from businesses in the minerals sector, says Onán Reyes of the government-run Honduran Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation (IHCIETI). He acknowledges they also could be challenged by some, or all, of the 67 opposition lawmakers in Honduras’s 128-seat, unicameral National Congress. But Reyes, a member of Castro’s Libre Party, endorses Castro’s effort to rein in mining. Citing the environmental damage done by unregulated mining in rivers, he points out that the dismantling of dredges allows rivers to return to their historic channels.

Rural alternatives needed
Even moratoriums on land clearing must be considered to improve forest protection, he says, adding, however, that economic alternatives must be developed for communities that have depended almost exclusively on mining and timber jobs.

“There are entire communities that have had to work in the palm-oil and mining industries and are not aware of another form of development that doesn’t cause environmental destruction,” Reyes says. “The National Party never opted for conservation and for community development. People in the communities must be consulted to determine the best means of remediating the damage caused by mining and palm-oil operations.”

The expansion of cattle ranching and African palm-oil operations have caused significant land-use change in Honduras, says Hugo Zelaya of the Regional Risk Management Coordinating Team (CRGR), an association of Central American environmental and social advocacy groups. Zelaya, a sociologist, says the two industries have pushed small farmers off arable lands in the south, prompting them to move north and clear forested areas for crops on soils far less suitable for agriculture.

Zelaya says that because dry seasons have grown longer—a trend that experts attribute partly to human-caused climate change—food production has declined and hunger has worsened, mainly in areas of subsistence agriculture. And while the wet season is now relatively short, the greater intensity of its rains combined with ongoing forest loss have exacerbated flooding and landslides in the north.

Like Reyes, Zelaya argues that the Castro administration must boost the ability of rural communities to find environmentally sustainable means of subsistence agriculture and climate-change protection.