1: It was only 8:30 in the morning and already the sun was unbearably hot over Mocula banana plantation, Chiquita's largest in northern Honduras. But instead of carefully tending the 500 acres of banana trees, as has been done here for almost a century providing Honduras with its principal export earner, the workers are now cutting down the damaged trees one by one trying to clear the land - for what they are not quite sure.
The damage to the country's banana plantations is only a small part of the estimated $3.8 billion-worth of destruction caused to Honduras, one of Latin America's poorest countries, by Hurricane Mitch in October 1998; this was equivalent to 70 per cent of its GDP. The uncertain future still facing the banana workers 18 months later illustrates the longer-term effects of such a natural emergency, raising important questions which apply equally to more recent disasters such as Mozambique and Ethiopia. However, media attention is never sustained long enough to ask such questions.
In the case of Chiquita, the questions relate to the company's response. For, as the workers in Mocula told me, of its 11 plantations in the region, only one has been brought back into production. Meanwhile, the 118 families who depend on this plantation and live in what is a company town, have been suspended without pay and are living off their pension payments given to them in fortnightly instalments. With no news about the company's plans and fearful that Mitch is being used as an opportunity to break the unions by switching production to countries like Nicaragua and Ecuador where unions are weaker, the workers are half-heartedly making plans to grow yucca or chiles for the local market. As their elected leader told me: "We now face the prospect of changing from being workers to peasants."
Travelling through what is called Honduras's development corridor, from the capital Tegucigalpa in an arc up to the north coast, the long-term damage caused by Mitch is all too evident. While the main roads are now passable, the bridges over the main rivers have all been destroyed and replaced by temporary bailey bridges, including six of the seven bridges linking the north and the south of Tegucigalpa. One of these, built by the US army and opened by President Clinton, collapsed recently.
More dramatic is the fact that the width of river beds, now virtually dry until the rainy season returns in May, has been doubled in many cases. This has necessitated relocating large numbers of people further inland.
Yet, with some half a million people estimated to be still homeless out of a population of just over 6 million, the government admitted in February that it expected only 59,689 homes will have been constructed by the end of this year, and all of these by the NGO sector. This shows both that the official priority has been to reopen roads and restore electricity and water supplies to upper-class and middle-class suburbs, but also that international aid has been desperately slow to arrive.
Not one cent of the 250 million euros pledged by the EU in November 1998 has yet arrived due to bureaucratic delays in Brussels. The US subtracted the cost of the helicopters it supplied in the immediate aftermath of the disaster from its total aid package, leaving the Honduran government with far less than it expected. Furthermore, of the $2.7 billion total aid package promised, $1.6 billion is in the form of loans, thus exacerbating Honduras's already burdensome national debt.
Even when aid does arrive, it can cause more problems than it solves. For example, I heard severe criticism of the World Food Programme for arriving too late and staying too long, undermining the production of local food crops through distributing imported food for free.
Aid agencies can also undermine the local economy through importing materials, sometimes of dubious quality or made from unsuitable material. I was told of one major European agency which, due to its unfamiliarity with local conditions, ordered in roofing materials which proved unable to withstand the Honduran heat. Another one imported Italian farm implements which quickly broke when used.
These stories raise a fundamental issue: whether aid is going to be sustainable and successful or unsustainable and damaging. Does it enable people to be the principal agents of their own recuperation? Many local people told me they did not want gifts but rather access to resources, such as low-interest credit, which would enable them to execute their own plans.
I visited a number of projects which showed such an approach in action. Under the leadership of a local woman, Ms Sergia Vazquez, the people of the Colonia Campo Cielo, a suburb of 900 families perched precariously in flimsy shacks on the hillside overlooking Tegucigalpa, are themselves laying concrete paths and steps with drainage systems by their side and building supporting walls to prevent erosion. Their neighbouring community had been swept away when the hillside collapsed during Mitch.
In the village of Guacamaya outside the city of El Progresso, 150 houses were destroyed by Mitch and a similar number damaged. So much mud flowed over the village that houses were totally submerged and the land surface raised. One now sees the roofs of houses sticking out of the dusty baked earth. Yet, a group of enterprising local women returned to the village as soon as the water subsided and began a brick-making enterprise with some aid from Trocaire; with the bricks they are constructing well-built houses for the village and using profits to run courses in dressmaking and to open a bakery. The only approach made to them by the local municipality was to levy a fine for building without permission.
The contrast with the 10,000 people crowded in an emergency shelter made from asbestos sheets and built by the UN in Tegucigalpa could not be greater. These homeless people were told they would be rehoused in six months. Eighteen months later they are growing desperate as violence and domestic abuse in the overcrowded conditions reaches alarming proportions and they fear they have been forgotten by the authorities.
With meteorologists predicting more frequent natural disasters in Latin America, the international community urgently needs to devote closer attention to the long-term effects on countries, and particularly on the poor, of emergency aid. Though, as the Honduran government recognises, such emergencies open opportunities for improving infrastructure and people's livelihoods, this can only happen if aid is used to strengthen capacity "from the national to the local levels" and not undermine it.
Peadar Kirby lectures on Latin American studies at DCU and is a member of the executive of Trocaire.