Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Long bus rides, and the high cost of lousy infrastructure in Honduras

A new bridge installation didn't go so well in Olancho last month; communities will continue to be isolated in the rainy season
I’ve made the trip to Tegucigalpa, the capital, a couple of times in the last few weeks. 
It take about eight and a half hours from Copan Ruinas, with a stop in San Pedro Sula to change buses.
It’s comfortable. Cuso encourages people to use Hedman Alas, a high-end bus line that makes a big deal about security. Airport-style check-ins, with hand baggage checks, a metal detector and a digital snapshot of every passenger. (I’m not sure how that is supposed to increase security, but I smile for the camera.) No stops along the way. And the buses are new, with comfortable seats, and an odd selection of movies. (Coming home on the weekend, I had Furry Vengeance with Brendan Fraser, whose presence is a reliable indicator that a movie will be bad, and The Reunion, a WWE-produced action vehicle for wrestler John Cena.) For a few dollars more, you can even go Ejecutivo Plus - sort of a bus business class.
Eight hours is still a long time. The distance between the two cities, as the crow flies, is about 220 kilometres. But Honduras is mountainous, and the roads follow the valleys where possible. 
The total travel distance is actually 435 kms.
The mathematically astute will have realized that means the average speed for the journey, mostly on the country’s main highways, is about 55 km/h.
The long trip to Tegucigalpa is no big deal for me. But for businesses that need to get there or make deliveries, it adds cost and time. For small producers, it’s a big barrier to getting goods and crops to urban markets. 
The problem is even worse off the main roads. By official count, Honduras has 14,296 kms of roads. Less than a quarter of them are paved - about 3,200 kms. A Peruvian economist who spoke in Tegus last week, Enrique Cornejo Ramírez, estimated that only 10 per cent of the road network is in fair condition.
The paved roads, with some exceptions, aren’t good: Potholes, washouts, never-ending construction.
Trucks ease by with two wheels on those logs
And the unpaved roads are much worse. They wind up steep hillsides and ford streams, and wash out in the rainy season and turn to dust in the dry. I was at a workshop on adding value for small farmers and co-ops. It was hard to talk about expanding markets or product differentiation when people’s first problem was that they couldn’t get their honey eight kms to the nearest town because the road was frequently impassable. When they can only sell locally, they face competition from all the other farmers growing the same things, and get lower prices.
Why are things such a mess? Hondurans point to Hurricane Mitch as a big factor, and it did result in massive damage to roads and wiped out bridges across the country in 1998.
Corruption is a problem. A newspaper story last month reported up to 25 per cent of government spending - including on infrastructure - is lost to various forms of corruption.(Before Canadians get too smug, remember the current Montreal construction corruption scandal.)
And Honduras just doesn’t have enough money. Work has halted on many of the current projects because the government hasn’t paid the companies in a couple of months. Tax loopholes and evasion reduce the money coming into government. (Teachers, for example, are exempted from income tax; companies show paper losses year after year and don’t pay tax.) Spending is routinely over budget. And IMF aid deals limit government borrowing. (Which, at interest rates around 11 per cent, is problematic anyway.)
It’s not just roads. The country’s main port is inefficient and outdated. There’s been talk of an airport for Copan Ruinas - which would make a huge tourism difference - for a decade, with no progress. 
And it’s not just transportation. The country’s phone company, Hondutel, is broke. Rural schools are substandard. In San Pedro Sula, with 1.9 million people, the Rotary Club is raising money to build the first public library. It’s been better lately, but for a couple of months power outages were routine in Copan, to the point that a group blockaded the road to Guatemala in protest. (Which seemed to help.)
And I’m writing this offline, because Internet service has been erratic for about 10 days.
This all goes far beyond inconvenience. Imagine trying to run a business, or any economic activity, when electricity is unreliable and transportation dodgy.
Once, it might not have mattered quite as much. Honduran businesses were local, shared the same handicaps and worked around them.
But Honduras, like so many countries has embraced freer trade as a route to more prosperity. Which means its businesses often face competitors operating in places with every infrastructure advantage.
Infrastructure tends to be a boring topic. Until it’s not there.

4 comments:

Scotty on Denman said...

Thanks for your updates, Paul.

I worked in the woods for many years. Camp life is all about off-grid, diesel generators for electricity and, in my day, radio phones for communication. We used to plot maps and compile reams of cruise numbers by hand after dinner; today that stuff's done on laptops (carefully protected from moisture and dust), data being sent thence by cell or satellite link, almost completely paperless (rigours of the field still require hand-written notation, although I have seen attempts at entering data into handheld devices in the field---in the rain or snow.) Still, batteries are recharged and bunkhouses lighted mostly by diesel generated electricity.

Once in a while one might spot the rusted remains of an old steam donkey from the days when many remote camps were powered by the only thing at hand: firewood. I've also found remains of pelton wheels used to convert water power into electricity at old campsites.

There's a hermit who lives in the woods up the hill from my house; like me, he heats his little cabin with firewood, something in plentiful supply around here. Unlike me, he has no electricity from the grid; instead he uses a solar panel purchased from Canadian Tire for about $60 and some electrical regulator (a small box that cost I think another $60) and a marine battery I got him for chopping my winter's firewood. From this he lights his cabin with LEDs and runs his computer. So, despite his otherwise rather old fashioned accoutrements, he is somewhat hight-tech. I'm wondering how much Hondurans use solar-electric, satellite links and firewood-powered electric to compensate for their fragmented and sporadic infrastructure.

paul said...

Scotty:
Not much use. I know of one person who added solar panels to his new house, figuring it made sense given the high cost of electricity. But most people can't afford the capital cost of things like solar.
And satellite links are the stuff of sci-fi. Only six per cent of households have Internet access. It's a low-tech country.
Many of the downtown businesses have generators - the roar is one way you know the power is still out.
(I'm a solar fan. Our RV, back in Canada, has panels and golf cart batteries and served well off the grid.)

paul said...

Scotty:
Not much use. I know of one person who added solar panels to his new house, figuring it made sense given the high cost of electricity. But most people can't afford the capital cost of things like solar.
And satellite links are the stuff of sci-fi. Only six per cent of households have Internet access. It's a low-tech country.
Many of the downtown businesses have generators - the roar is one way you know the power is still out.
(I'm a solar fan. Our RV, back in Canada, has panels and golf cart batteries and served well off the grid.)

paul said...
This comment has been removed by the author.