Research Report 123
Natural Resource Management in the Hillsides of Honduras
Bioeconomic Modeling at the Micro-Watershed Level
2001
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ABOUT THIS REPORT
Farmers who live in fragile tropical hillsides often operate under severe resource constraints and face difficult tradeoffs when confronted with changes in production conditions. Using a bioeconomic linear programming model, this study simulates the effects of population, market, and technological changes on farmers’ income and on their management of the natural resource in a hillside area of Central Honduras.The results show that economic growth and agricultural intensification are not necessarily adverse for fragile environments. In fact, farmer incomes would be much lower and degradation much higher if intensive agriculture had not been adopted. Such a result, however, must be framed within a complex set of conditioning factors, among which agroecology plays a fundamental role. Although the economic advantages of horticultural production are clear in the area studied, this strategy is not suited for all contexts.This report offers a series of policy recommendations that implicitly recognize such limitations, thereby helping to direct resources where they will have their greatest impact.ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Bruno Barbier, an expert on applied bioeconomic modeling, is currently a researcher at the International Center for Agronomic Research and Development (Centre International de Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement/CIRAD). He earned his Ph.D. from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Agriculture (ENSA) in Montpellier, France, in 1994. From 1994 to 1997, he was a post-doctoral fellow in IFPRI's Environment and Production Technology Division and from 1998 to 2000, a senior scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical/CIAT).
Gilles Bergeron works as senior food security advisor for the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project, based at the Academy for Educational Development in Washington, DC. He earned his Ph.D. in development sociology from Cornell University in 1993, served as post-doctoral fellow in IFPRI's Environment and Production Technology Division from 1993 to 1997, and joined the FANTA team as food security specialist in 1998. His academic work has concentrated on natural resources management, participatory methodology validation, and food security and poverty alleviation programs.
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