Few chances to fly, but they bounce

My boss was telling me on the long drive back from San Pedro Sula yesterday that there was some funding coming available soon out of Europe for projects targeted at building resilience.
I got a (quiet) chuckle out of that, because Hondurans could write the book on resilience. Like the song says: They get knocked down, but they get up again.
Resilience has been a popular topic among socially aware types for many years. I think it's a fascinating subject, and applaud all efforts to understand the intangible things that permit one person to hang in despite horrible life circumstance while another in a similar situation is totally destroyed.
But a lack of resilience is not the problem in Honduras. Life is incredibly hard here for the majority of people,  and it's true that poverty and violence are worsening in Honduras even while neighbouring countries are seeing improvements. Almost 70 per cent of the country lives in poverty, and some 40 per cent live in extreme poverty.
 None of that is because they're lacking in resilience, however.
 In fact, they bounce back like you can't believe - from hurricanes, floods, terrible crop years, crippling accidents, illness, a chronic lack of money, death in the family. Many don't live well but they do live sustainably, feeding their families on corn and beans grown on the craziest of slopes and getting by with virtually no money.
And I've yet to see any of them wringing their hands about their tough lot in life. They just carry on.
So no, Hondurans aren't poor because they're missing what it takes to thrive. They're poor because they live in a country with a negligent and ineffective government, zero social supports, a lack of employment, impossibly low pay scales, and a broken, dysfunctional education system that offers no hope for better jobs and brighter futures for young Hondurans.
In theory, Hondurans are "free" to pursue their dreams. This ain't no Cuba, those who lean to the right are quick to point out. This is a country that has embraced capitalism, and the kind of libertarian freedoms that make the Wild West look tame.
 But in reality, the only dream that's got much money attached to it is the long, hard slog north to try to sneak illegally into the United States. Unless you're a high-status, rich Honduran (and there are a surprising number of those, who really ought to be more worried for the future of their country), the only way you're going to find money for things like a decent house, basic health care or better schooling for your kids is if you work illegally in the States for a few years or get into the cocaine business.
But resilience? Oh, they've got plenty of that. Just to make that incredibly difficult journey into the U.S. takes more resilience than I hope I ever have to summon, and yet an estimated 100,000 Hondurans do it every year.
Those in the struggling "middle class" - my co-workers, for instance, who make $6,000 annually - frequently have to make wrenching decisions to leave their families behind to take jobs in distant towns. They've got the same dreams as any parent does of a better world for their children, but all they see when they look into the future is more of the same. They love their country, but they hate where it's going.
I'm sure my boss will come up with a clever project around resilience, of course. A Honduran non-profit would be crazy not to jump at any opportunity for funding. Maybe some people will get a free cow out of it, or a new vegetable garden.
But let's not go blaming this troubled country on the scrappy, resourceful people living poor in Honduras. They bounce, and it's a lucky thing.

Farewell to one of Victoria's most controversial citizens

The death of Victoria lawyer Doug Christie last night prompted me to dig out a feature I did on him for the Times Colonist way back in 2002. Everybody's got a strong, strong opinion on the man, and plenty of people just plain hate him. But like most people, he was a complex character.

An uneasy peace: At 56, controversial lawyer Douglas Christie now worries for his children

Victoria Times Colonist, Monitor section
Sun Mar 3 2002

They're dying off, the men who Douglas Christie loved the most. His heroes are dead men and the list is growing every day.

It hasn't been easy being the lawyer to the stars of Canada's white-supremacist movement these last two decades, but at least there used to be a few more people who he looked up to, some friends who didn't think he was such a bad guy. Now, they're either dead or gone.
Dead: Paul Arsens, the Victoria businessman who first rented Christie this funny little box of an office 23 years ago on the parking lot beside the Royal Theatre.
Barney Russ, the "wonderful man" who let Christie finish out his articling with him after Christie got ditched by another law firm. E. Davie Fulton, former Tory justice minister. John Diefenbaker, still mourned by Christie as a great loss.
He's sitting here talking about his life and suddenly realizing that they're all dead.
Even his infamous clients are fading away. Anti-Semitic columnist Doug Collins has died. So has white supremacist John Ross Taylor and accused war criminal Imre Finta. Jim Keegstra stays off the public radar as much as possible.
Ernst Zundel, whose anti-Semitic Web site was found in violation last month of federal human-rights laws, has moved to Tennessee and married the woman who runs the site for him. And hate-rock musician George Burdi isn't even in the movement any more.
Christie's no youngster himself, 56 now and surprised to find himself enjoying fatherhood. His children are nine and 11, and a key factor in how he ended up president of the Saanich Water Polo Club. He's had a long, hard run at this life of his, and nearly 20 years of being publicly denounced for some of the company he has kept. It's got Christie wondering if it's time for a change.
He hadn't expected to have children. But now that he does, it makes a difference.
"I worry for the kids," Christie says. "I remember coming down to my office a few years back with my son, then age four, and finding the window smashed in. He couldn't understand why someone would do that to his Daddy."
Christie is top villain among those who fight against hate propaganda in Canada; his skill as a lawyer has helped a number of his controversial clients win their fights before courts and human rights tribunals.
He differentiates himself from his racist clients -- he's merely a libertarian and an ardent proponent of free speech, he contends. But there are many who don't believe him.
"Doug Christie has aligned himself so many times with these perverted monsters that he has to be viewed as one himself," Vancouver radio talk-show host Gary Bannerman said back in 1985. Christie sued him and lost. The judge ruled it was fair comment.
Three years ago, Christie became the first lawyer in Canadian history to be banned from Ottawa's parliamentary precinct because the government didn't like his client, Zundel.
And when the Law Society of Upper Canada went looking for evidence in 1993 that Christie was aligning himself too closely with his clients' causes, it ruled only grudgingly that he was off the hook.
"He has made common cause with a small, lunatic anti-Semitic fringe element in our society," wrote Windsor lawyer Harvey Strosberg. "[But] suffering Mr. Christie's words and opinions is part of the price one pays for upholding and cherishing freedom of speech in a free and democratic society."
Even the politicians run from him. While his politics certainly lean to the right, the Canadian Alliance nearly tied itself in knots trying to distance itself from Christie when he joined the party two years ago.
It's all a bit much, says Christie.
"I'm in a debate with myself whether there's anything to salvage in Canada," he says. "There's definitely no hope in Ottawa. All I can see is slow decline."
Christie was born in Winnipeg, the oldest child of a federal tax collector and a homemaker. He has an arts degree from the University of Winnipeg and a law degree from UBC, having put himself through school with jobs in the oil fields, as a lifeguard and making sandwiches in his university dorm to sell to other students.
He remembers the conversation with his father that led to him choosing law.
"I liked working outside, but I also liked reading through documents and that sort of thing," Christie recalls. "My dad said, 'Well, you could be a farmer or a lawyer.' I figured I could be a lawyer AND a farmer, but not the other way around."
Christie became fascinated with religion during university, and converted to Catholicism when he was 21. It came as something of a surprise to his Presbyterian family. In his early days as a Catholic in Victoria, Christie founded St. Andrew's Refugee Association to aid newly arrived Vietnamese refugees.
His faith remains an important part of his life. The only two images hanging on the walls of his Courtney Street office are Jesus and Civil War leader Robert E. Lee.
Christie's first venture into the public eye was as a Western separatist, a concept that gained him a bit of an audience in the late 1970s and early '80s.
It was at one of those rallies that he met the woman he would eventually marry, Keltie Zubko, on-line publisher of the Freedom Papers and a kindred spirit. Zundel called her "an unsung fighter of freedom of speech in Canada" in one of his Internet "Z-grams" last year. She and Christie celebrated their 20th anniversary on Valentine's Day.
Christie's Western Canada Concept is still a registered political party, although he won only 62 votes when he last ran as the WCC candidate for Saanich South in the 1996 provincial election. And its founder remains committed to his belief that the West should separate, arguing that every new party and attempt at political reform rises out of the West, only to be crushed by the East.
The vision for the West under the WCC is of an English-speaking "genuine national culture true to our existing European heritage and values." Aboriginals would take individual cash settlements and be done with it. Abortions would be restricted, as would immigration. "Capacity to voluntarily assimilate is a prerequisite to all new immigration," notes the party's Web site.
They're not the most popular views to hold, nor were they when the party started. So perhaps it's not surprising that Christie felt the urge in 1984 to call up the Alberta teacher he'd been reading about who held some pretty controversial views as well.
Jim Keegstra was mayor of Eckville, Alta., and a teacher at the local high school. He'd been warned six years earlier to tone it down in the classroom with his criticism of Catholics, but this time he'd been talking about the Jews in Germany. His students lined up to testify that Keegstra's teaching had left them hating Jews and doubting the Holocaust, and he had been fired and charged with promoting hatred.
"I felt sympathy for the guy," says Christie. "I'd been kind of big news for a while in Alberta, and I felt that the media tends to pick on people sometimes. So I phoned him up. I just wanted to say 'Hey, don't be down-hearted.' Keegstra recognized Christie's name from his Western Canada Concept connections and asked if Christie would represent him. "I said OK very slowly, because I knew this would change my life forever."
It did. Keegstra's views on the Holocaust and Jews were so outrageous that many people suspected that no one but a fellow believer would take on such a case.
The Ernst Zundel case was that same year. As Canadian distributor of an ugly little pamphlet out of Britain titled Did Six Million Really Die?, Zundel had been charged with spreading false news. Christie set up his Canadian Free Speech League around that time as a defence fund for Zundel and Keegstra.
There have been many others since Christie was launched down this path. Some have belonged to the Ku Klux Klan or the white-supremacist Church of the Creator. Some were accused of recording hateful phone messages or writing hateful essays, still others with running Internet and telephone hotlines deemed racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic or hateful by human rights tribunals and courts across the country.
"Except for Joan of Arc, it's rarely the case that the people a lawyer defends are seen as savoury by others," says Christie about his client list. "I think their views are interesting, that's all, and important because they're different."
As for his own views, Christie considers himself "authentic" for standing up for what he believes in, which for the most part has not yet aligned him with his clients but has certainly placed him close to the pack. He says he's not anti-Semitic.
"I don't mind Jews and they don't usually mind me," contends Christie (although he does recall a long-ago morning in the Y change room when he stood stunned in his three-piece pinstripe suit as local businessman Howie Siegel, Jewish and stark naked, tore a strip off him for taking on the Keegstra case). "I get along well with people in general. I treat them like individuals."
It was around the time of Keegstra, the spring of 1985, that Red Deer College English professor Gary Botting stumbled into Christie's life.
Botting was a Jehovah's Witness, a religion whose followers went through a period in the 1950s of being criminally prosecuted for spreading false news. As a result, he felt strongly about protecting freedom of expression.
So when he heard about an Alberta library banning a Holocaust-denial book, Botting spoke out. Christie was on the phone soon after, and Botting soon found himself bundled onto a plane to Toronto to be an "expert witness" at Zundel's trial.
Botting seems quite baffled today at how it all happened, and how completely his relationship with Christie subsequently unravelled a few years later. He was a friend and fellow traveller -- even articling with Christie during Botting's transition into a lawyer after the two men met.
Botting, now living in Bowser and no longer practising law, says the friendship deteriorated as he grew more worried about the people he found himself keeping company with. When Botting received the debut George Orwell free speech award in 1986, a Christie invention, he was horrified to see the TV news juxtapose his image with that of an ex-Klansman standing beside a burning cross.
The moment that ultimately severed the relationship was at a party 11 years ago at Zundel's Toronto home, says Botting. He'd wandered into Zundel's basement and come upon "a large-screen TV with half a dozen really elderly Nazi types weeping away as Hitler rallied the masses for the 1936 Berlin Games." He began to question whether freedom of expression was the issue at hand.
"I'm all in favour of a free marketplace of ideas," Botting says now. "But Christie always seemed to go that one step farther."
In 1996, humiliated by reports that Zundel was still pointing to Botting's trial testimony as support, Botting wrote a letter to Christie saying his free speech league was in fact a front for an "anti-Semitic agenda." He renounced all ties with Christie and returned his Orwell award.
Does Christie share the views of his clients? He will say only that his clients' opinions are "interesting," and shouldn't be silenced just because people don't want to hear what they have to say.
He has been quoted in the past questioning theories about the Holocaust, telling reporters in 1985, "I can say I've come to have some grave doubts about the exterminationist side." He definitely rubbed federal Citizenship Minister Elinor Caplan the wrong way a couple of months ago with a comment about her "Jewish animosity" toward one of his clients.
Botting recalls driving with Christie while he sang along gustily in German to a tape of war-era German marching music, played at deafening volume for the benefit of an alarmed hitchhiker in the back seat.
"I think the shock appeal is part of it," says Botting. "But there's something very distasteful about using Nazism for its shock value."
George Burdi, the reformed founder of a white-power music distribution company (he now describes himself as "a born-again liberal" and plays in a multi-race band), says it's simplistic to think that there's a single viewpoint shared by everyone on the extreme right.
"It's a bit like Christianity inside the movement in that you hardly find two with the same view," says Burdi, who spent two weeks with Christie in adjoining hotel rooms during a hate trial three years ago.
"You'd be surprised. I remember hearing Ernst Zundel arguing for more immigration from Asia.
"But what's important to understand is that none of them are Dr. Evil, wringing their hands and planning to destroy people. They believe what they're saying."
Christie was Burdi's lawyer in 1999 when the Toronto musician pleaded guilty to spreading racial hatred, having been caught in a sting selling racist CDs to police. Burdi remembers Christie urging him to let the matter proceed to trial, even offering to take the case for free rather than see Burdi plead guilty.
"He was ready to give up three months of his time away from home, and do it pro bono," says Burdi. "I have to call that honour. I think it's a real shame a man like that has spent his life trapped in this bitter battle."
Christie remembers the time when he was sitting in his car outside his office and a truck drove into the side of the building. Had he been inside, the truck would have hit him while he sat at his desk. He doubts it was an accident.
He's since boarded up his office windows in the old Broughton Street jewelry kiosk he leases from the city, the better to avoid the hassle of cleaning up broken glass.
He hesitated for two weeks before agreeing to be interviewed, fearful of another wave of media-generated hassles.
"I'm starting to think I'm running out of friends," he says jokingly.
His name alone is trouble enough. A Toronto lawyer with the same name suffered through 11 death threats in the 1990s before he finally took out a newspaper ad noting that he wasn't that Doug Christie. Life hasn't been any smoother for Victoria's Doug Christie.
"Ultimately, you have to be what you are," he says. "There's never been an easy time to say these things. When people really take time to live authentic lives, it far exceeds in value the compromises made for short-term gains."
Christie has chosen to fight back by suing people, a practice that has raised eyebrows among those who find it strange behaviour for a man who considers himself a champion of free speech. He has sued newspapers, politicians and various individuals over the years, with varying degrees of success.
Financially, Christie says he's done all right for himself, although no one would know it by the look of his office. The carpet is worn, the furniture minimalist and tatty. The lighting is dim. The walls are nearly bare but for Jesus, Robert E. Lee and a handmade poster declaring "Justice is My Hope." Christie says he likes to save on overhead.
There have been lower-profile clients over the years supplementing his freedom-of-expression cases: A Victoria grandmother fighting to have her granddaughter come visit her at her escort agency; the local film festival battling to show a documentary about porn star John Holmes inside St. Ann's Academy; marine engineer Bob Ward in his libel lawsuit against former premier Glen Clark.
But it's never long before the next controversial case emerges. And they invariably have something to do with contentious opinions around Nazis and the Holocaust. The most recent in that long line is the case of Michael Seifert, the convicted war criminal from Vancouver who Ottawa is trying to strip of Canadian citizenship and deport.
The issues Christie has raised around free speech don't sit comfortably with many. It's difficult to support Christie's wide-open version of freedom of expression without appearing to endorse the appalling views of some of his clients.
One who handled the challenge well was Conrad Black. Exhorted by former employee Doug Collins to support his fight to overturn a B.C. Human Rights ruling that found his writing hateful, the newspaper baron replied: "Some of your editorial reflections are such that, while we don't contest your right to your opinions, we are not prepared to publish or underwrite them ourselves."
Warren Kinsella, a Toronto lawyer whose 1994 book Web of Hate includes a chapter on Christie, says Christie is a good lawyer, routinely underestimated by those who come up against him. He is also in demand as a public speaker, travelling around the world at the request of those who like what he has to say. He'll be in Borneo this month on one such engagement, and is popular in Australia.
"He's very dogged, very determined to represent these people," says Kinsella of Christie's standard clientele. "It's just a shame that many of them possess such loathsome opinions."
Burdi says the white-power movement in Canada that Christie has figured so prominently in is "moribund" these days. The old guard has moved on, and the new wave of young and vicious white supremacists that Burdi was briefly part of is languishing.
He figures it was the Internet that did in the movement, the opposite of what everyone predicted. Hate literature is now so readily available that it has lost its thrill.
As for Christie, he isn't likely to abandon his cause, or run out of clients. It's been more than half a century since the Holocaust, but there seems to be no shortage of people still eager to argue over it.
"If you and I disagree, why should one of us have to be silent?" asks Christie. "Every group should be open to criticism if criticism is true, and the way that's determined is through public debate and analysis."
But he's tired these days, and troubled by a bout of asthma that landed him in the hospital recently. He's thinking about new directions, musing over how nice it would be to work in a plant nursery.
"Thirty years. There've been some stressful times in there," says Christie. "I've got to think about slowing down. I think I'll just try to do what I can with whatever is left to me."

When aid is a crutch and not a solution

I spent an unsettling afternoon yesterday listening as people from a very poor village in this region inadvertently revealed to me one of the major problems with international aid.
The village is home to about 100 families, virtually all of them scratching out the most meagre of existences from land that's too steep and too full of clay to be good for farming.
Their five-year-old school is looking the worse for wear, but there's no money to fix the screens or stop the water that's making its way into one of the two classrooms. The roof is in danger of collapsing on the local church. There are no jobs or school past Grade 6 for the young people, only four vehicles in the whole town, and no housing options for expanding families other than to squeeze another three or four people into Mom and Dad's teeny adobe home.
So as you can imagine, they were happy to see us. My organization was there to help them identify and priorize community projects, and the villagers were very eager to talk about what they needed
A new soccer field, for one. A kitchen for the school. Equipment for the people in town who have some marketable skills but can't use them because they didn't have tools. Help starting up a new bread-baking business. A new roof for that church. Better roads. Retaining walls that could be backfilled to create tiny lots for more houses. Latrines for the houses that don't have any. A better way to handle garbage other than just chucking the stuff into the street, which is what happens now.
Good ideas all. The plan now is to pitch some of those projects to international funders to see if somebody wants to put up some money.
But the truth is that you could fund every one of those projects and the community would still be a dirt-poor place with little hope for a diet that goes beyond corn and beans, sustainable infrastructure, or a future for its young people that isn't just more of the same.
Please don't interpret this as me saying we should stop international aid. Countries like Honduras have seen major improvements over time in the health and well-being of their citizens because caring donors and governments in distant lands ponied up for carefully considered interventions.
 International aid also has the potential to shape government policy, and this country could certainly use some of that. My own little organization has done some great work to help individual families lift themselves out of the grind of daily poverty.
But projects alone can't change the future of a community, or of a country. Whatever projects are ultimately realized in that little town we visited yesterday will not change the fact that its residents are poorly equipped for the modern world, unable to sustain their own community, and destined to live ever more marginally while waiting for the next group of well-intended visitors to show up with more project funding.
 Hats off to whatever group got that school built in the village, but where was the money supposed to come from to maintain it in a town where everybody lives virtually without income? And while many would argue that a Grade 6 education is better than none at all, is it anywhere near enough schooling to prepare young people for an increasingly complex and global economy?
If the unemployed seamstresses, mechanics and plumbers in town had the tools they needed to work, where would they find the people to pay them for that work - or the transport to access larger commercial centres? If the local bread-makers were helped to start a business, where would they sell their goods?
And would their business make enough money to cover costs? Or would they end up like the villagers in other towns around here who started raising tilapia through an injection of international funds only to discover they couldn't make enough selling the fish to pay for the cost of feeding them?
Projects are great ways to kick-start a new day. It's smart to use international funds to build schools in countries committed to reforming their education system but too poor to get started. It's caring to put foreign dollars and expertise to work to strengthen health care in a region digging itself out of a crisis. It's an excellent investment to provide seed money for private enterprise in a town where all the ingredients are there to make a new business work.
But stringing a bunch of projects together without ever getting to the root of a problem - well, that's just busy work. Honduras has plenty of that, but will spin its wheels as a country until there's long-term, strategic support for transformation that goes all the way to the top.
Until then, we're really just putting a pretty face on the status quo. I feel for all the Hondurans who know it.

Going buggy

I often have the feeling these days that small ants are crawling on my face. Unfortunately, that’s because they are. 

You have to forge a whole new relationship with insects if you live in a tropical country. There are just so many of them, and so many loosely fit doors and windows for little creatures to squeeze past. 

The ants that get on your face - and in your computer keyboard, your e-reader, the cracks in your kitchen table, the cereal that you forgot to put in an air-tight plastic container - are teeny little guys drawn to food crumbs and electronic things (Warm for sleeping? Comforting hum? I don’t know).

At times they pass through your kitchen in a long, thin highway of organized ants on a mission, and you recognize you must have dropped something really tasty somewhere. Other times, they wander across your hands and arms as you type at your keyboard, as if your keyboard strikes are shaking them awake. 

Lately, a few of the bigger leafcutter ants have made their way under the door as well. That’s a whole other story - one that will culminate in a few months with a stream of leafcutter ants making their way past our front door, each carrying bits from whatever nearby plant they have decimated to make the special fungus that they eat. They can take a garden plant back to sticks in a night.

We’ve decided that the leafcutter ants who come in our house are from the forager class, sent to check out whether there’s something worthwhile beyond our door. They’re at least 50 times bigger than the bitsy ants that live in our computer keyboards, and quite ferocious-looking with their formidable pincer-legs up front. But they don’t care to walk on your face, for which I am grateful.

Then there are the cockroaches. They come in various sizes, but they’re all kind of creepy with their scuttling movement, dark-of-night habits and ability to survive much abuse, including being launched like a well-played hockey puck toward the brick wall out back when somebody like me inevitably draws the line and sweeps one ferociously hard out the door. 

I don’t like them much. If I thought I could kill every one of them if I just tried harder, I’d probably do it. 

But there’s only so many times you can spray Raid, or try to do something elaborate with your tube of toothpaste so you never again have to flick on your bathroom light to the sight of a giant cockroach enjoying a minty snack.

You can sweep them put the door, stamp them dead, lay towels across every window gap, observe immaculate kitchen habits.  The damn things will just keep coming. Sooner or later, you have to find a kind of peace with them. 

The biting bugs - well, I dislike those guys most of all. We’ve got mosquitoes and nasty biting midges in Canada, too, but down here the sheer variety is impressive.

There are, for instance, the ones that bite your lower legs in the cool season. Those bites swell up, itch like crazy, and take days to go away. 

There’s another kind of biting bug that comes in the rainy season that chomps you maybe 15 times all in one area - the back of your arm, say. You itch like crazy, but then the bites are gone within a couple of hours.

We’ve got very fine screen on our windows and good door-closing habits, but those teeny biters thwart us just the same. Happily, anti-itch creams like Alergil are cheap and readily available here, so I just make sure there’s always a tube nearby.

Spiders tend to be the nightmare of bug-a-phobics. But I made my peace with spiders a few years back, I think after seeing Microcosmos and ending up impressed by their talents despite my misgivings. 

They’ve got a number of fancy spiders in Honduras: some that weave golden webs; some that wear a funny crab’s-shell kind of getup; some that glitter like they’ve been bedazzled. If you can get past the fear factor, the spiders here are actually pretty amazing. 

Then there are the pre-Semana Santa beetles that crunch underfoot in March and April. The cicadas that sing their strange songs from the trees, changing their tune as the seasons pass. The flies with dangly hind legs that insist on hovering near your face, and that can still get me screaming and flailing around despite my best efforts to appear untroubled. 

But of course, there are also the butterflies, fluttering past like delicate flower petals in the breeze. Blue, yellow, orange, transparent - you can't believe the variety in the tropics. They’re the payback for the dangly-legged flies, the bug-infested cereal, the mosquito welts on your feet. And how could I forget the glow bugs, glimmering a luminescent green over the farm fields at night? I shared one magical night with my family on Dec. 21 when we sat in the dark amid the Mayan ruins, counting flickering neon specks in the grass. 

That’s the thing with nature - it comes as a package. When I feel that familiar tickle of a tiny ant making its way up my neck, I try to remember that. 

Coffee in crisis

This fungus-stricken plant has at least
some ripe cherries.

A Honduras coffee finca is usually a beautiful sight at this time of year. 

The leaves are a rich and shiny dark green year-round, so a hillside finca is always attractive. But this is the season when the harvest is finishing up and the plants are even prettier, covered in new growth and small white flowers that herald the coming year’s crop.

Sadly, that’s not how it is out there right now. A recent tour I did of several small fincas around Sesesmil, Copan demonstrated just how hard the fungus known as la roya has hit the Honduras coffee industry.

The official sources in the country are still playing down the impact of the la roya attack, suggesting losses of 25 per cent for the 2012-13 harvest. 

But producers know the true impact is much worse than that - closer to 60 per cent losses this year for many growers. That will be followed by a massive drop in production for the next two years, while the infected plants recover from being severely cut back to help them survive the fungus.

It’s a terrifying prospect in a country where the coffee harvest is just about the only thing that generates money for the small rural producers who grow most of the coffee coming out of Honduras. 

La roya - coffee leaf rust - is an old foe for coffee growers, and there are definitely things you can do to stop it. But that’s in some kind of dream world where growers have money and time to spare for the major interventions necessary to stop the fungus, and in a time when the fungus was just an occasional problem and not a wide-spread disaster.

If you have money, you can fight back. 

You can, for instance, spray the plant with a number of fungicides over a certain period of time. You can cut the plant back hard and afford to sit back and wait through the two years before it produces again. You can take preventive action by spraying uninfected plants with copper, or buy new strains of plants genetically resistant to la roya and just start over. 

But the majority of coffee producers in Honduras are small-scale, independent growers, using coffee dollars to smooth the edges from what would otherwise be subsistence living. They’re a long way from well-off, most without money for anything beyond the basics when it comes to keeping their fincas in good working order. 

The bulk of the growers who belong to the COAPROCL coffee co-op in Sesesmil are facing losses of nearly 70 per cent of their crop. And that’s just this year: they’ll also have to weather two more years of dramatically reduced production, presuming they can even achieve the monumental task of cutting back every sick plant on their fincas. 

As recently as October, the growers thought they were heading into a banner year. But then the plants started dropping their leaves. Green, thriving plants turned to leafless, yellowing sticks within a matter of weeks. The ripening coffee cherries stopped ripening, many dying on the branch due to the lack of nutrients coming from the plant. 

The result: The harvest is late and small, with a gloomy forecast until 2016. 

The lines of credit will come due for producers any day now, but they won’t have the money to pay for them - or the money for school, medical needs, clothes for the kids, repairs for anything that might break over the next year, food and care for the animals, or all those other goods and services that families can’t produce on their own.

These cherries shrivelled before they could ripen
after the leaves fell.

I toured the fincas with an Australian couple who have a coffee-roasting company in Melbourne and an affinity for Copan beans. They added a whole new wrinkle to the la roya dilemma, noting that so far, resistant coffee strains just don’t produce as flavourful a bean as the varieties that are currently being decimated in Honduras.

So even a wholesale switch to one of the resistant varieties won’t be the answer. Not if it makes buyers unhappy. COAPROCL  producers are acutely aware that it’s all about the buyers - and satisfying the discriminating coffee drinkers of the world who give the crop its worth. 

Some regions haven’t been hit as hard. Comayagua growers expect to be down just five per cent, presuming they get a handle on the armed criminals stealing their coffee harvests right off the plant. In Lempira, losses are looking to be around 30 per cent. 

But whatever is coming over the next three years is going to hurt everyone. Even the guys loading the trucks at the export companies are bracing for a downturn; they get paid by the bag, and there are going to be far fewer bags around this year. 

Add in the people who cut coffee during the harvest season and we’re talking millions of people, in a country where so many already live right on the knife’s edge. Growers are also worried that if they can’t ship enough coffee to their overseas buyers over the next three years, they’ll lose markets as well. 

In another country, you’d like to think that government authorities would be all over this natural disaster. But that’s a whole other sad story. Brace for the hurricane.