CATIE promotes a water harvesting plan to help more livestock farming families in Honduras cope with drought

• In addition to the support provided to producers in Choluteca, CATIE is working with the Government of Honduras to bring water to areas affected by prolonged drought and to ensure that green financing reaches hundreds more families in the coming years.

Prolonged drought is one of the greatest challenges currently facing livestock farmers in southern Honduras: dry pastures, livestock under stress, and increasingly uncertain harvests. Against this backdrop, CATIE (Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) Director General Dr. Luis Pocasangre met with Honduran government authorities during his mission to Honduras from August 24 to 27 to advance a water harvesting project and seek new sources of financing that would allow the support currently provided to families in Choluteca to reach many more communities.

Water to cope with drought

One of the main topics on the agenda was a new water harvesting project promoted by the Minister of Agriculture and Livestock, Mr. Moisés Molina, which CATIE is already developing under the leadership of Dr. Leida Mercado. The idea is simple but powerful: to build on and expand successful rainwater harvesting and storage experiences already tested in Central America and bring them to Honduras’ Dry Corridor, one of the areas hardest hit by drought.

The project seeks to draw on knowledge generated through other CATIE initiatives to identify where water harvesting infrastructure should be built, thereby increasing the number of farms that can better withstand dry periods. Minister Molina expressed interest in seeking support from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) to finance the project, focusing on three priority areas: water, sustainable livestock production, and climate change.

More funding to reach more families

Another major challenge is sustainability: the fund that currently finances concessional loans for producer families—administered by the Honduran public development bank BANHPROVI—has resources committed only through 2026. For this reason, CATIE also met with the project’s Board of Directors and Honduras’ Secretariat of Finance (SEFIN) to explore ways to maintain and expand this support beginning in 2027.

BANHPROVI proposed the possibility of creating its own green fund to ensure the continuity of financing, while SEFIN indicated that there is openness to exploring a budget allocation within the 2027 national budget. “Our commitment is to ensure that this support does not remain limited to the 11 families that have already received loans in Choluteca, but reaches the nearly 500 families that the project set out to benefit in southern Honduras,” said Dr. Pocasangre.

As part of this same agenda for joint action, CATIE and the Government of Honduras also agreed on the importance of training the next generation of Honduran agricultural professionals. They therefore discussed opportunities for master’s and doctoral scholarships at CATIE’s Graduate School for technical staff from the country’s agricultural institutions.

These efforts build on the progress presented days earlier in Choluteca, where the MAF-Ganadería-HN project provided financing to the first 11 producer families in the area, as part of its goal of benefiting nearly 500 families across the three regions where the project operates. The project is funded by the Mitigation Action Facility (MAF).