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Can Re-Localizing Agriculture Slow Climate Change?
The climate case for and against local food in Honduras (or anywhere)
As we are driving through the Honduran countryside, I ask my friend Hector a serious question:
“Given that the pandemic and supply chain inflation have shown that the global food system is both fragile and potentially dangerous for Honduras, and further given that the same global food system is causing irreparable harm to the planet vis-a-vis runaway climate change, how plausible would it be to relocalize the food system of Honduras? Specifically, could Indigenous knowledge of how to live sustainably on the land be used to rescue Honduras from the climate change crisis that we are seeing?”
Hector is an Agricultural Engineer and has been interested in sustainability all his life. I am an organic farmer and Montessori teacher. This is the type of conversations we have.
I ask this question on the last day of my recent two week trip to Honduras, while riding in the passenger seat as Hector drives us through the Sula Valley in the northwest of the country. The Sula valley is immense, and almost all of it flooded during the dual hurricanes of Eta and Iota in November of 2020. Hondurans know all about the extreme weather events linked to climate change.
