Country Comments

Honduras since 1961 has seen its population increase four fold from 2 to now 8 million people. With average fertility rates at 2.5 children per mother and population increasing at roughly 160,000 more citizens a year, the country has now started to exceed its carrying capacity and become unsustainable and with its current population growth it will be extremely difficult to reverse this trajectory anytime soon.

Rainforests are being destroyed on a massive scale. In the tropics, farmers often slash and burn forests to clear fertile land for crops. But the soil’s fertility does not last long, so the farmers must clear a new patch of forest every few years. As a result of the increasing pressures from population growth much of the biodiversity of the country is under serious threat. Open pit mining has wreaked destruction on ecosystems. In March 2022 President Xiomara Castro banned open pit mining declaring it harmful to its citizens and to the fragile environment. Honduras is a poor country. The UN’s World Food Programme predicted the combined effects of catastrophic flooding and pre-existing economic precarity worsened by COVID-19 lockdowns meant the number of food insecure Hondurans would jump from 1.6 million in 2019 to three million by the end of 2020.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2021 a quarter of women and girls become pregnant before turning 18—the second-highest rate in Latin America. Half of underage pregnancies result from rape.