<
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/03/agroforestry-project-sows-seeds-of-hope-in-drought-hit-honduras/>
"Ivis Rene Cabrera no longer gazes up at the sky in hopes of rain to irrigate
his field. He’s come to expect the long dry spells as northwestern Honduras
grapples with increasingly longer periods of drought during the dry season.
Now, he and the rest of the Indigenous Tolupan community’s gaze is to the
ground. Their hope lies in an agroecology project to revive the harvests on
their typically fertile lands. Beans and corn, staple foods of the community,
used to be bountiful in Honduras’s Yoro department, before they were hit by
severe droughts.
“We used to produce 10-12
cargas [1,400-1,700 kilograms, or 3,000-3,700
pounds] each, and now we cannot cultivate the crops anymore in many parts of
Yoro. The drought-led crop failure has led many people to migrate to other
areas in search of better livelihood opportunities,” Cabrera says.
In 2021, to build community agricultural resilience to climate hazards in Yoro,
Spain-based NGO Ayuda en Acción and its Honduran partner, FUNACH, introduced an
initiative where 1,669 people, almost equal parts women and men, participated
in multiple synchronized strategies to help them adapt to hazards like
droughts.
Agroforestry in particular has helped Cabrera find his way back to the fields.
“We have now begun harvesting all year around as we cultivate different foods.
The support that we received in building water systems helped us experiment and
harvest new crops like leafy greens and avocados. It helps bring food to my
table,” Cabrera tells
Mongabay.
The agroforestry plots are established to diversify crop production practices
and systems — planting corn and beans with fruit and timber trees."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
