RIO NEGRO HAS all the makings of a great ecotourist destination: A secluded location, generous hosts, spectacular waterfalls, protected forestland, and a plethora of hiking and camping opportunities.
Its problem? No tourists.
That few outsiders have visited the little community in recent years is due in part the Honduras’ poor international image.
With a murder rate roughly 20 times higher than the United States and four times greater than Mexico, the country is a hard sell. In fact, the country has widely been described as the “murder capital of the world” since 2010, with much of this violence related to the country’s use as a corridor for drug trafficking.
But it was not always this way.
Years ago, many considered Honduras to be a rising star. As a 2007 Frommer’s article explained, “After years in Costa Rica’s shadow the country is positioning itself as a serious contender to its southern neighbor’s behemoth eco-tourism market. It boasts the same sorts of attractions, but is far less crowded.”
Then the bottom soon fell out of the country’s tourism economy.
In 2009, the Honduran Army, on orders from the country’s supreme court, ousted president President Manuel Zelaya in the run-up to a controversial constitutional referendum. Since the coup, high rates of gang-related violence in the country have kept most tourists confined to the country’s north coast, an area known for its beaches.
My Visits
I made two trips to Rio Negro — one in 2013 and another the following year. Both trips were made with Farmer to Farmer, a small nonprofit organization from Wisconsin that imports fair trade coffee and does much of its business with farmers from Rio Negro and other nearby communities.
Rio Negro, I learned, is the kind of place you go to if you want to get away — and I mean really get away. Although many families have invested in small hydroelectric turbines to supply modest levels of electricity to their houses, the community remains off the country’s national electric grid, and you can forget about getting any sort of an LTE signal.
For me, this was good thing. Stripped of the usual distractions, I reconnected with my senses in a way I almost forgot was possible, soaking up the sounds and smells of the intense rainforest surrounding. Better still, time seem to expand up in Rio Negro. Down in the city of Comayagua, days had flown by, but up here? A single afternoon seemed to last forever.
One of my best afternoons was spent in Parque Nacional Montaña de Comayagua, a massive 184-square kilometer national park in which Rio Negro is nestled. We barely scratched the surface of what the park had to offer, but we did visit the impressive Cascada de los Ensueños waterfall, a 45 minute trek from the main road through a forest with impressively-large trees.
As Andrew Gaertner, the trip host from Farmer to Farmer, noted, “It’s second growth forest but you wouldn’t know it because it has been protected for thirty years.”
My stay in Rio Negro was incredibly cheap by American standards. I only paid 250 Lempira (around $12 US) to stay for an entire weekend — and that included food.
It was easy for me to see how a place like Rio Negro could be a major ecotourist destination if it were located in a country with a better reputation. But as it is, the community has seen few recreational visitors in the last five years.
A Devastating Disease
For the people of Rio Negro, Honduras’ bad international image is especially unfortunate. In addition to the absence of once-anticipated tourism dollars, the community has been hit by an epidemic coffee plant disease that has swept Central America.
The disease is fungus known as Coffee Rust (locally, La Roya) that derives its name from the brown and yellow rust-like lesions it produces on the leaves of coffee plants. The fungus works from the ground up, gradually starving its host plant by destroying its ability to photosynthesis sunlight. A coffee plant gradually drops infected leaves until only a stick skeleton remains.
Coffee rust is not exactly a new problem. The disease was first reported in East Africa the early 1860s, but strict quarantine measures kept the it out of the Americas for more than a century.
In the 1970s, however, the disease suddenly appeared in Brazil, possibly carried on coffee seedlings or other plants imported to the country. Quarantine and eradication efforts proved unsuccessful and the disease reached Central America a few years later.
Outbreaks were once contained to lower, warmer altitudes.
Then things started to warm up.
The latest epidemic of coffee rust in Central America began in Guatemala in 2010, and warmer, wetter weather patterns have allowed the fungus to penetrate higher altitudes, touching even the remote village of Rio Negro.
According to figures from the International Coffee Organization for the 2012-13 season, Coffee rust affected approximately 25 percent of Honduras’ coffee crop, resulting in a the staggering loss of 10 percent of the industry’s jobs and about $230 million.
At Rio Negro, the fungus has been especially devastating. One community leader I spoke with estimated at least half of farmers in the area had been hit by coffee rust and in some cases crop yields had been reduced by as much as 80 percent over the previous year.Unfortunately, all indicators suggest the 2014 season will be much worse.
Most of the farmers I talked to were expecting about a two-thirds reduction over the previous year — a crop that had already been greatly impacted by the disease. In response, many farmers had cut down or were planning to cut down their wilting plants to out try rust-resistant varieties.
However, this approach won’t necessarily fix everything.
Coffee plants require three years of growth before they produce their first crop. Not only that, rust-resistant varieties typically require more sunlight, thus requiring the clearing of trees and other shade plants. On mountainous hillsides, this increases the chances for soil erosion and mudslides. Rust-resistant varieties also do not perform very well at high altitudes, and they are susceptible to their own fungus, known as Ojo de Gallo, or Rooster’s Eye.
The outlook seems bleak at best.
As one farmer I spoke to put it, “It’s either Rooster’s Eye or Coffee Rust.”
A Turning Point?
I spent my last morning in Rio Negro talking with my host, Annalicia, about her coffee harvest as well as their experience with tourists.
She explained that before the coupe, her and her husband, Lucio, had hosted as many as 30 people a month. Since then they have had almost no visitors. She explained that in the absence of ecotourism, many of the community’s lodges had been mainly used to house seasonal coffee-pickers.
Like so many others, Analicia and Lucio’s coffee crop was hit by coffee rust. So two years ago they planted rust-resistant varieties. This would make next year their first harvest of the new variety.
“This,” she said, “is our last year of hardship.”
It has been well over a year since I returned from Honduras. This past summer, coffee rust finally grabbed international headlines.
And although some coffee-growing countries may now be experiencing a rebound from coffee rust, others continue to be pounded by the disease.
It is a situation I find myself thinking about a lot, especially as we march steadily towards a warmer globe and more rapidly-shifting climates.
On many a morning I sip my first cup of coffee and think about what Annalicia’s said.
This is a our last year of hardship.
I hope she was right. I really do.
All content copyright 2015 Alex Snyder
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