Bad teeth, bad diet and hunger in Honduras

Early on, I was struck by the number of little kids here with bad teeth, often with a strange pattern of decay around the edges of their baby teeth.

A story in the newspaper offered a possible clue. Funazucar, the umbrella association of sugar producers, proudly announced it's donating 40 tonnes of sugar to a school lunch program for poor kids and to help nursing mothers with nutrition. Some 21,000 people, about 16,000 of them children, will benefit.

That works out to about 1.9 kilos of sugar per person. It's not a lot. The average North American consumes about 60 kilos of sugar a year, thanks to a heavily sweetened diet of processed foods and soda pop.

But the Honduran donation will be mainly used to add sugar to children's milk in the school lunch program. That seems like a bad idea.

The standard Honduran diet is already high in carbohydrates. About 70 per cent of the calories consumed - higher in rural areas - is from corn, used for tortillas, and beans.

People like both - it's a rare meal, breakfast, lunch or supper, that doesn't include tortillas and beans. They're cheap. And subsistence farmers can grow their own corn and beans, even on the steep, generally poor-quality land they can access.

That dependence is a problem. Poor farmers don't have irrigation, of course. They plant, as people have for hundreds of years, when the rainy season is supposed to start. If it doesn't, or there isn't enough rain, the crops do badly, as they did in southern Honduras this year. And when the crops are poor, people go hungry until the next year.

(Which, given the coming impact of climate change on corn and bean production, is very bad news for Honduras, and much of Central America.)

In Canada, kids seem big for their age. Here, I found myself guessing children were two years younger than they really were. About 29 per cent of Honduran children under five are stunted - they’re significantly too short for their age - and eight per cent wasted - they weigh significantly too little for their height. (Even the terms convey a certain desperation.)

Partly, it’s a matter of limited diet - too few fruits and vegetables. People are reluctant to give up any of a tiny cornfield for unproven crops.

Partly, it’s a symptom of more complex problems. Water sources in rural communities - home to about half the population - are often unreliable and impure. Diarrhea and parasites take a toll on everyone, but especially on little children. Families cook over smoky wood fires, often inside buildings. Children suffer from respiratory illnesses as a result.

People are working on the problems. Mission groups are installing water systems - though many fail within five years - and helping families build latrines to protect water sources. Agencies, including the one my partner works with, are helping families build ecostoves that use less wood and don’t fill the house with smoke. But progress is slow.

And partly, people just don’t have enough to eat. So sugar, with its quick energy and big calories, is a welcome addition - to kids’ milk, everyone’s coffee.

But sugar as a healthy additive to kids lunchtime milk?

I was already surprised, when I bought a bag of sugar at Bodega Gloria, to find the package proudly proclaimed “With added Vitamin A.” It seemed like trying to market soft drinks with added fibre. (Which Coke and Pepsi both already do in Japan.)

Back to bad teeth. That’s not just a question of diet. Toothbrushes and toothpaste are too expensive for poor families and dental care out of the question.

There are solutions. A U.S. university did a project where they taught kids in a poor rural community to clean their teeth with their fingers and salt and instructed teachers on twice-a-week fluoride rinses. A prominent community member was designated ‘Keeper of the Rinse’ and distributed it to teachers. There were problems, of course.

The baseline study, done before the program, found 83 per cent of the six to eight year olds had cavities. Eighteen months later, it was down to 14 per cent. (The samples were small; you can read about the study here.)

When you don’t have enough to eat, you take calories in whatever form you can get them. But sugar-laden milk - even when the sugar has added Vitamin A - doesn’t seem like a great nutritional step forward.

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.

Honduras model cities plan ruled illegal

I've written about Honduras' model city plan several times, most recently here.

The idea, championed by the government, was to create new, privately owned cities from scratch. The owners would make their own laws and set up their own schools and police forces and courts. It would be like a do-over for the country, separate states within Honduras. The tacit admission was that Honduras couldn't fix its problems.

But the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled this week that the model cities law was unconstitutional, in part because it violated sovereignty by creating a country within a country. 

The idea is, for now, apparently dead.

The politicians complained about the decision. They argue that new, secure cities would result in investment and jobs.

As I've written, model cities have great risks. Owners are naturally going to make laws in the interests of big investors, not citizens, and basic principles of democracy and accountability are at risk.

But after nine months in Honduras, I was a lot more open to the idea than I would have been a year ago. As Bob Dylan wrote, when you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.

One of the big problems is that a country trying the idea out of desperation likely lacks the skills and mechanism to provide proper oversight.

The first city was to be developed with no track record. A promised international oversight commission to ensure all was legitimate and rights were protected was never put in place.

Given the way the project was proceeding, the court decision was probably good for Honduras.

The freedom to create a building out of buses

The freedom to build a bus walkway

Blog posts on Honduras can gets a little gloomy. 

OK, a lot gloomy.

But there are always upsides. When there are no rules, for example, people can enjoy a certain crazy freedom unknown in a place like Victoria, where opening hot dog cart turns into a regulatory ordeal.

The view from the highway La Prensa

People like Manuel de Jesús Cardoza, who has built a sprawling, four-story building out of old school buses and other scrap. (La Prensa wrote about him today.)

Cardoza, who says he’s an engineer with a degree from the “university of the streets,” has used more than 40 old school buses, old machinery, iron wheels, train tracks and other scrap to build the complex beside the highway at La Lima, near San Pedro Sula. He learned to weld and build things as a child workers in a lot of small workshops.

It’s been a 13-year-project, and judging by the pictures, there’s still a lot of work ahead. He’s spent $150,000 so far, and figures another $50,000 will finish the project,

Cardoza told La Prensa he started out thinking it could be an entertainment  centre, with a nightclub and pool. But two years ago he became a Christian and now only wants to hold religious events and weddings.

La Prensa says it’s pretty luxe, with “areas the envy of any luxury hotel,” including a terrace where people can watch the highway sitting in comfy chairs that were once the drivers’ seats in luxury buses.

The whole thing is supported by pillars made of bus wheels welded together and filled with concrete.

The use of a bus as a pedestrian overpass is a particularly stylish touch.

It’s all a bit crazy looking. But the freedom to follow your dream - even if it’s an odd one - is worth something.

Creativity in action
And if you’re looking for a really different wedding venue, think about the Cardoza’s castle

Food prices, hunger and climate change

Pretty interesting juxtaposition of two stories on the El Heraldo website this week.

The cost of the basic food basket in Honduras - the food needed for a family of five for a month - has risen to 6,950 lempiras, or a little under $350, the newspaper reported, citing a report from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

The second story reported that the minimum wage might go up in December, depending on the inflation rate.

A little less rain, and the crops fail

But it also noted that the current minimum wage schedule ranges from $230 a month to $355 a month. (The minimum wage schedule varies depending on the nature of the work and location. Farmworkers and others doing similar work are at the bottom; urban office workers get the higher minimums.)

The laws aren’t actually enforced. But even if employers are paying minimum wage, the stories highlight how tough life is for Hondurans.

If there is just one parent working at minimum wage - common enough - then the total income covers less than two-thirds of food costs, leaving no money for anything else. (A family of five is about average. Women start having children early - abut 18 per cent of women between 15 and 19 had children, according to the 2000 census. The Roman Catholic church oppose contraception. Sex education is lacking. And cultural factors support large families.)

Even someone earning the top minimum wage would see the entire amount go for food.

Of course, it’s not that straightfoward. Nothing is here. About half the population is rural, and many grow beans and corn, the staple foods. A tipico meal - breakfast, lunch or supper - virtually always includes corn tortillas and beans. 

But there was bad news on that front as well. Catholic Relief Services, along with a couple of expert food production groups, released a report on climate change and bean and corn production in the CA-4 countries - Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The forecast is disastrous. By 2020, Honduras is predicted to see a 12 to 30-per-cent drop in corn production, depending on soil quality. Bean production is forecast to decline by 15 per cent.

That’s not surprising once you’ve seen Hondurans farms. About 70 per cent are on steep slopes, with poor soil and no irrigation potential. Farming follows a pattern that’s hundreds of years old - plant corn in May, in anticipation of rain, and add beans in September, when rain increases again. It takes only a small change - rain that comes late, or temperatures that are too high - and the crops fail. 

And in rural communities, that means hunger. Even today, the World Bank reports 29 per cent of children under five are stunted - shorter than the range for their age because of malnutrition. I’ve given up on guessing kids' ages - six-year-olds are the size of four-year-olds in Canada.

Cuso International and its partners are doing a lot of work on improving food production, diversifying crops and increasing cash incomes. But it’s a huge challenge when people are focused on having enough corn and beans for the next 12 months, and worried that any experiment that goes wrong will mean daily hunger.

Footnote:

Canadians shouldn’t get too smug. The Dieticians of Canada do an annual report on food costs, and found a family of four needs to spend $868 a month in British Columbia. A person working for minimum wage makes $1,666 a month, leaving not much for everything else.

A disabled person in B.C. trying to raise three children - it happens - gets $700 for rent and $672 for everything else - 77 per cent of the amount needed for food alone.

This is worth reading

Over at the Gazetteer's.

Model city to use laws of Texas

Some supporters of a plan to build private cities in Honduras have described it as creating "a little Canada" in the country.
It turns out the backers of the first city to win government approval want to create a "little Texas" on the country's Caribbean coast.
I've written about the model city plan here and here. The notion is that the private cities would be a chance to start from scratch, with the rules made by technocrats and the investors. Instead of fixing Honduras' problems, you create new states within the country with different laws, policing, education and health systems and tax structures. Crime and corruption would be banished. The constitution would apply, but basically the owners would have something close to their own country to run.
That raises obvious concerns. The interests of the owners and investors might best be served in ways that are bad for Hondurans living in the new cities.
But the idea is appealing in a country facing widespread poverty and weak institutions of all kinds. 
The first developer - owner? - is off to bad start. 
MKG Group hasn't offered many details in Honduran news reports or on its website.
But CEO Michael Strong was more forthcoming with FoxNews.com, which presented this report.
 “Once we provide a sound legal system within which to do business, the whole job creation machine – the miracle of capitalism – will get going,” he said.
And the new legal system, separate from laws on the rest of Honduras, would be based on Texas state law, because it has few regulations.
“It will be Texas law with more freedom of contract," Strong told Fox News. "Texas scores well on state economic freedom rankings,” he explained.
Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth,” he said.
Music to libertarians' ears. But does that mean no minimum wage, no employment standards, no health and safety rules?
Strong also said the new city would have no income, sales or capital gains taxes. (Honduras' existing factory zones offer foreign business investors 10 years of no taxes, although income taxes still apply.)
Which raises questions about who will pay for the vision of better health care, education and policing. 
The biggest problem might be where MKG has chosen to share its plans for the new city.
The private city plan is controversial and facing political and legal challenges in Honduras.
Yet the FoxNews.com report is in English and available on the Internet. Few Hondurans speak English, and about 85 per cent don't have Internet access.
The concerns about private cities are, in part, that the owners won't care about the interests of Hondurans, or will at least put the interests of foreign investors first.
MKG's decision to share details with Fox News and an English-speaking audience, before informing Hondurans, will add to those concerns.

Dumb attack ads, and the real tax-cut winners

I'm baffled by the B.C. Liberals' focus on attacking the leaders of the other parties. So far, the efforts have looked amateurish and cynical, and have failed utterly to change public opinion.
Surely the critical issue for the party is finding ways to make people see Christy Clark more positively, not trying to slag the other guys.
The last Angus Reid poll found 28 per cent of British Columbians approve of Clark's work as premier; 53 per cent approve of the job Dix is doing as opposition leader. It's hard to see how any collection of low-budget attack ads are going to drag Dix down to less than 28 per cent.
There's certainly potential in pushing the NDP to commit to positions in advance of the election. (Though Dix will then remind people about the Liberals' promises not to bring in the HST, and ask what their positions are worth.)
But the attack ads seem pointless.
And they risk raising unintended issues.
The latest web attack, for example, says "When the NDP left government, a family of four earning $60,000 a year paid $1,970 more in provincial income tax than they do today," citing budget tables.
That's true enough. But the budget tables also calculate total provincial taxes - MSP, sales taxes, carbon tax.Those other taxes and fees went up $1,463 under the Liberals.
The family still pays less to the province - but $507 less, not $1,970. It's a dubious approach for a party trying to claim Dix is the one who can't be trusted.
And the ad opens the door to other tax questions.
The tax changes since 2001 under the Liberals have meant low income people pay much less to the province - 50 per cent less for a single person earning $25,000, 40 per cent less for a family of four earning $30,000.
But the next biggest beneficiary, given the budget examples, is a single person earning $80,000. He, or she, pays 28 per cent less than he did in 2001.
And a family of four earning $90,000 has received a bigger overall provincial tax cut - in dollars, and as a percentage - than a family earning $60,000.
Worse, the smallest reduction has been for a senior couple earning $30,000 in pension incomes. They're  paying three per cent less - $1.50 a week in tax relief.
Then, of course, there is the bigger assumption in the ads that tax cuts, in and of themselves, are automatically a good thing.
That family of four earning $60,000 is paying about $10 less a week to the province than it did in 2001. Maybe many of those families would consider it good value to pay the $10 if health care or education was improved for them and the people they care about.

Hey Honduras, you're making an airport mistake

I don't take public positions on what should or shouldn't happen in Honduras, mostly because I don't know anywhere near enough. (Though I've been surprised at the willingness of bloggers thousands of kilometres away in Canada to make firm and unsupported assertions about the country.)
But the plan to relocate the Tegucigalpa airport is an exception, in part because there's directly relevant Canadian experiences.
Tegucigalpa - Tegus - is the capital, a city of 1.3 million people. It's tightly nestled in a valley, and surrounded by mountains.
Which is not a good thing for airport construction. The existing airport, Toncontin, regularly makes the world's 10 scariest airport lists. A History Channel show, Extreme Airports, ranked it second. (Tenzing-Hillary Airport in Lukla, Nepal, topped the list.)
The Tegus approach requires pilots to skim the hills, make a sharp u-turn, plunge steeply and then hit the brakes hard once they're on the ground. Pilots receive special training if they're assigned to the route.
When we flew into the county in January, we were sitting next to a young Honduran flying back from the U.S. We took it as a bad sign when he began fervently praying as we started our approach.
But, on the positive side, the airport is just six kms from the city centre. And, while landings and takeoffs can be challenging, there hasn't been an 'incident,' as airlines like to say, since the runway was lengthened in 2009. (After a 2008 crash that killed five people.)
The government has decided it would be better to move the airport, which might not be a bad idea. But it has also decided to build a new $125 million airport at a military airfield at Comayagua, 80 kilometres from Tegucigalpa. (The airfield is used by the Honduran airforce and U.S. units.)
It's not an easy 80 kms to travel. The highway climbs through steep mountains and the entrance to the city is chronically congested. The trip is certainly over an hour. Anyone catching a flight out of Tegucigalpa would have to allow much more time in case of traffic problems.
This should all sound familiar to Canadians. In the mid-1970s, governments spent about $500 million building Mirabel Airport about 40 kms from Montreal. It was a complete flop, despite good highways, because travellers and airlines wanted to keep using the existing airport at Dorval, about 15 kilometres from the city. There is little or no use by airlines, and the runways have been leased for car racing.
ALG Europraxis, consultants hired by the Honduran Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Investment, have offered warnings about the plan. Anything over 40 kms is considered a remote airport, the firm warns.
So I'm breaking my rule about the airport plan. Don't do it, Honduras.

Honduras' mysterious private-city plan

So who’s behind the mystery Canadian company ready to put up big money to build a private city in Honduras?

The concept’s appeal is clear. The “charter cities” being promoted by the Honduran government are as close as you could come to setting up your own country, with your own rules.

The cities would mostly have their own laws and taxes and police forces. They might, for example, contract with Canada to provide policing. They would set up their own schools and health systems. 

There would be an appointed governor and, at some point, an elected council to approve the laws recommended by the governor and city investors. But, during the startup particularly, the investors will decide on policing and schools and taxes and most everything else, limited only by basic constitutional rules. (The private city law is here.)

I wrote about Honduras’ interest in the idea a few months ago. The plan has now, apparently, moved into the action phase. The government has announced three sites, and signed a letter of intent with an unknown U.S. company - MGK Group - to start development on a city, most likely on the Caribbean coast.

But MGK, while saying it’s a consortium, hasn’t said much about who is in the group. It’s putting up $15 million to start on infrastructure, and hopes businesses will quickly move into the city. That’s not enough money to do much.

Press reports also say a major Canadian investor will soon be revealed.

The whole idea has been pitched by libertarian and technocratic theorists who see it as a way for countries like Honduras to start fresh. Cities would work better, they argue, if smart people made the rules starting from scratch. For a country like Honduras, where most institutions work badly or not at all, it’s an appealing pitch.

Once safe, secure cities with working systems were established, proponents say, businesses and Hondurans would move to them, the economy would improve and everyone would be better off.

As I noted in a previous post, it’s the kind of idea I would have dismissed out of hand before I lived here. I’m not so sure anymore.

But now that the first proposal, sketchy as it is, is out there, the problems and becoming more evident and the debate more intense.

One obvious problem is that countries that need model cities are much less likely to be able to manage and control the process.

The government’s legislation calls for an independent Transparency Commission to oversee the development process, particularly until the cities are large enough to have elections. 

The commission would appoint the governors - though the country’s president gets to name the first one. It would approve or disapprove the governor’s decisions, oversee the appointment of judges and generally make sure things didn’t spin out of control.

The government signed a memorandum of understanding last year that established the first Transparency Commission, an attempt to reduce concerns about oversight. It was to be headed by economist Paul Romer, an advocate of the cities, well-respected as a good, independent choice.

But Romer and the group have, politely, backed away. Their positions were never made official, and they weren’t consulted on the agreement with MKG or any aspect of the plans for the first city.

A key safeguard has already broken down.

The private-city law is also already facing constitutional challenges, mainly arguing it undermines Honduran sovereignty. It’s become a political issue as the country moves through it’s 16-month-long election campaign. 

And there are almost certain to be disputes over ownership of whatever land is chosen for the city. MKG says it won’t rely on land grants from the government, so presumably will buy land or work with existing owners. But land title is murky in Honduras, and clashes are frequent, and often violent.

The vision was for shiny new cities in Honduras - a “little Canada” in the middle of the country, a proponent suggested in a Globe and Mail column, a place where people would live and work happily and the economy would thrive.

The reality, at the moment, looks a lot more like another factory zone, offering low or no taxes and few rules.

If the project moves forward at all.

The cancelled fall sitting bad for business community

David Schreck draws useful attention to a significant effect of the cancellation of the fall sitting of the legislature.
The rules for the return of the PST next April have still not been set, more than a year after a referendum ordered the HST's  repeal.
A fall sitting would allow a full debate of the planned tax regime, and a chance for businesses affected to identify issues.
But instead, according to the Finance Ministry, a proposed version of the legislation won't be introduced until December, and it will be passed in the abbreviated spring session, less than two months before the tax regime changes.
That is neither prudent, nor competent. The tax regime is important, and should be debated. Businesses need more than two months to prepare. The government has had lots of time to get the legislation ready.
And it is notable that the government took 11 months from the time it announced the HST until consumers started paying, but says it needs 19 months to return to the PST.
There are other reasons for a fall sitting. The Liberal government forced legislation through without real debate in the spring, and has admitted the rush produced flawed laws that have to be changed. It would have been better to put those bills off to the fall.
The government always claimed the fall sittings would be used to introduce bills and allow public comments before they were passed in the next session - a good idea.
And Finance Minister Mike De Jong announced this week that more than $1 billion in budget changes would be required because the government's forecasts were wrong. Those spending cuts, or tax increases, should be debated in the legislature, not behind closed doors.
The legislature serves another function. MLAs - of all parties - have the chance to raise issues important to people in their ridings, and ask questions.
But those chances have been increasingly curtailed by the current government.
Between 1992 and 2000, the legislature sat an average of 77 days. Since 2002, that has fallen to 59 days. In the last three years, the legislature has averaged 47 sitting days.
That suggests a government without much of an agenda. And one unwilling to have its policies and actions subjected to debate.

Shelter allowances, and the government as slum landlord

The CBC report on terrible problems in public housing in Vancouver's core is worth reading here.

It's shameful for government to be a slum landlord, taking 57 per cent of people's income for dirty, dangerous accommodation. The CBC reporters went into the BC Housing buildings, run by non-profit Atira Property Management, and found cockroaches and feces and dirty needles, doors with no locks and other problems.

The situation appears to be worst in three downtown buildings BC Housing bought five years ago, promising to renovate them. The promises weren't fulfilled. They haven't been fixed up,and there's not enough money to manage or maintain them properly. (The government announced a federal-provincial reno plan in the spring.)

The report also notes a potential conflict. The buildings are among 13 managed by Atira. Its CEO is Janice Abbott, who is married to BC Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay. The management contract has never been tendered. (The relationship began after the contract was awarded.)

Housing Minister Rich Coleman says Ramsay plays no role in any decision about Atira. But he's less clear about who does - people who work for Ramsay, or with him?

It's a problematic situation on other levels. Any organization dependent on government funding is reluctant to sound the alarm when things are going terribly wrong, fearing reprisals. But Abbott and Atira are in an even more complex situation, given the personal relationships.

But I wouldn't blame Atira. No one would could run these buildings with inadequate funding. The tenants are, to put it mildly, difficult, many with addictions and mental illnesses, diagnosed or not. The buildings are substandard.

There's another major issue here. Atira's residents are on disability or income assistance. They sign the shelter portion of their allowances over as their rent.

But those allowances are obscenely inadequate. A single person gets $375 a month for housing. As this case demonstrates, landlords - even subsidized nonprofits - can not even provide a desperately grim slum room at that rate. (Families are as badly off. A disabled mom trying to raise two children gets $660 a month for housing. Those kids are going to grow up in a dangerous, crappy apartment in a rundown building.)

The shelter allowances haven't increased since 2007. The Liberal government actually cut them in 2002. Rates today are basically where they were in 1995, despite soaring housing costs over the last 17 years.

Speaking of obscene, it's useful to look at what MLAs think they need for a second home in the capital. (The legislature met for 48 days last year.) MLAs voted to give themselves up to $1,583 a month for housing in Victoria. They think a disabled British Columbian should be able to find housing for $375.

If government wants to fix the problem, a start would be shelter allowances that reflect reality. That in turn would allow landlords - whether nonprofit, like Atira, or private - to cover their costs and offer something above slum-level housing.

Dire warnings of lost jobs because of minimum wage increases proved wrong

When Christy Clark made the long overdue commitment to raise the province's minimum wage, the warnings of job losses came from the usual suspects.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business predicted 32,760 to 199,560 lost jobs - a catastrophe. (That's based on CFIB's projection of jobs lost for each 10 per cent increase in the minimum wage.)
The Fraser Institute projected job losses of 26,097 to 57,194.
So what happened?
In April 2011, the month before the first of three phased minimum wage increases, 2,273,000 British Columbians were employed. Last month, StatsCan reported 2,323,000 people were working in the province.
You could argue that the jobs were still lost because of the minimum wage - that the number of people working would be even higher if the minimum wage was still frozen at $8, as it was since 2002.
But not very convincingly. B.C. job growth was 2.2 per cent, compared with a national average of 1.3 per cent. If the CFIB's mid-point projections were accurate, then employment in B.C. would have increased 5.5 per cent without the minimum wage hike - more than four times the Canadian average. That's not credible.
Minimum wage opponents could point to the loss of 29,000 part-time jobs in the period. But part-time work was down across Canada, and B.C. gained 79,000 full-time jobs.
The job numbers raise another question. The period covered is basically the same as Clark's time as premier, which has featured a jobs' focus. The increase in employment is better than the Canadian average, and growth in full-time employment is much better - up 4.5 per cent in B.C. compared with 1.9 per cent across Canada. (Part-time job performance was worse than the Canadian average.)
So why isn't Clark getting the credit? (A poll today confirmed her ranking as the second least popular premier in the country.)
Partly, perhaps, because the Liberal government's overall record is still worse than average.
There are still slightly fewer people working in B.C. than there were four years ago, when the recession was beginning to bite. Across Canada, employment has increased by 2.5 per cent in the same period.
The gap is even greater for full-time jobs. B.C. full-time employment is down two per cent; the Canadian average is up 1.9 per cent.
And partly because voters have come to recognize that governments have much less to do with job creation, and job losses, than politicians like to claim.

Cabinet shuffle, point one: Say you'll run again, and get extra pay

I make it 29 Liberal MLAs who have yet said they will not be running next year. The cabinet shuffle left only two without posts of some kind - Randy Hawes and Colin Hansen. You can now count them as retiring.
That means every one of the 27 Liberal MLAs who intend to run again got a position of some kind. (Which brings to mind this week's Time Colonist editorial on the MLAs' club.)
It's a pricey approach by Premier Christy Clark. She gets an extra $92,000 a year as premier, on top of MLAs' $102,000 base pay.
Sixteen full cabinet ministers will get an extra $51,000 a year each. Two junior ministers will get an extra $36,000 each. And nine parliamentary secretaries - sort of helpers to cabinet ministers in specific areas -  will get $15,000 each.
All in, the extra pay amounts to $1,115,000 on annual basis (though the election is next May, so they won't have the jobs for a full year).
The average extra salary for the 27 MLAs expected to run again is $41,300 - about $3,000 less then the average wage in the province.

Correction: Sorry, I forgot Liberal MLA John Slater (Boundary-Simalkameen) who is also left out of the money list and has not yet said he won't be running.

Media should ban the blight of email pap 'answers'

It's time for the media to push back at the epidemic of stupid, self-serving email responses to questions from politicians and government.
Once, not long ago, journalists called government for comment from officials or ministers They either got the chance to ask questions, or reported the government had no one available to comment.
Then the communications people came up with a better ploy - for them.
Email the questions, they said, and the minister or department will email answers.
And foolishly, many reporters and media outlets said yes.
Vancouver Sun columnist Peter O'Neil gave a great example of why that has been a really bad idea in his blog.
Last week, he reported the National Review Panel assessing the gateway pipeline is worried that Enbridge's various pledges to take extra measures to increase safety are all voluntary. The company, or future managers, could simply decide not to do them.
So the panel asked Transport Canada to look at ways of making the requirements binding. The most obvious solution would be to change the pipeline regulations.
O'Neil wanted to know if Transport Canada would do that. He tried to ask Transport Minister Denis Lebel.
Instead, he got this email response from "a spokeswoman:"

"I can tell you that our government is very supportive of the Joint Review Panel as it provides an independent and comprehensive evaluation conducted by scientists. Government officials are cooperating with the Joint Review Panel to ensure it has the information it needs. To that end TERMPOL (part of the panel review) recently responded in a clear and transparent fashion to an information request from the JRP. This kind of dialogue is essential to ensuring that this comprehensive evaluation is done scientifically, on an independent basis."

That kind of non-answer is the norm. And while O'Neil just reported Transport Canada had no comment on the issue, too often reporters actually use pieces of these emails, even when they say nothing.
And since the practice works so well in avoiding questions and managing information, it is spreading to companies and other organizations.
The solution is simple. The media should just say no when offered an email response and report the government or organization would not provide the minister or anyone to answer questions. If additional email answers are needed to provide technical information or detail, that's fine.
Politicians are brilliant at not answering questions - far better than most reporters are at asking them.
But they should at least get the chance to try to get answers.

Like the auto club, but with shotguns

I've spent a lot of time telling people that Honduras isn't really as dangerous as the news reports make it sound.
Yes, it has the highest murder rate in the world. But a lot of the killings involve disputes between gangs and people in the drug business. They're just as dead, of course, but if you aren't in those worlds, you aren't at risk. (In El Salvador, the two main gangs have reached a truce, and the murder rate has fallen by two-thirds.)
That's not to downplay the impact of crime in the major cities. The gangs are into extortion, and murder is part of the business model. And robbers are casual about killings.
Still, the crime reports are overblown, I've maintained. Copan Ruinas at 1 a.m. is safer than Victoria when the bar crowd hits the street on a Saturday.
But this week I was stopped by a half-page ad in La Prensa. It was for a BCAA-type service, I thought, based on the woman peering beneath the hood of her car, stopped at the roadside.
The company didn't offer roadside repairs.
Instead, it would dispatch two guys on motorcycles, with body armour and shotguns, to guard you. The pictures above tell the story. (Sorry about the poor quality.)
It's a good deal - $2.50 a month, and you can call them 10 times a year. It would certainly help in settling questions of responsibility after a fender bender. (Unless, of course, the other driver also had the service.)
But really, a country is in trouble when people feel it's worth paying for armed response when they run out of gas, rather than a service that would send a tow truck.
There are lots of signs that people have lost confidence in the state. In the big cities, razor wire and electrical fencing tops high walls around houses and armed guards open the doors for you at many restaurants. Go to buy a bag of chips at the corner stores, and you shop through a barred window.
There have been lots of efforts to fix things since we've been here. The government called in the Chilean police for advice on reducing corruption and improving efficiency. There's a new, controversial head of the national police force, who has re-assigned total departments. And there's a plan to investigate all police officers, with lie detector tests and financial audits, to identify problem officers. (Though that will take a long time, and so far 24 of the first 169 officers called for the tests just haven't showed up.)
It is safe in Copan. But when roadside armed response becomes a viable business, things are spinning out of control.

Minting a coin worth the equivalent of one-quarter of one cent

The Hondurans central bank has put out a tender call for 140 million coins, in four denominations.
Which I find puzzling. Coins are little used here. Prices are almost all rounded to the nearest lempira, with each one worth about five cents Canadian. In the big city, supermarkets sometimes give coins and on rare occasions I've received them here.
More puzzling are the denominations.
The bank wants 60 million coins in denominations of 50 and 20 centavos - roughly 2.5 cents and a penny in Canadian currency. Maybe those would be useful (though not based on my experience).
But it also wants 80 million coins of 10 and five centavos - about one-half and one-quarter cent Canadian.
All in, the coin production will likely cost something like $1.5 million.
And unless I'm missing something - which is not uncommon in my new home - it seems an odd way to spend money, especially for the low-value coins.

When a home is worth the risk of disaster

La Prensa

Tough choices. Let squatters build wood shanties on the banks of flood-prone rivers, even though they might die in the rainy season. Or push them on to Lord knows where.

In El Progreso about 100 families have settled on the banks of the Pelo River, cobbling together wood houses and planting gardens, La Prensa reported. It’s a common practice across Honduras, as people without money look for a free place to live., often on the banks of rivers and streams that could flow their banks.

The El Progreso families are building on deadly land. In 1989, Hurricane Mitch caused floods that swept 200 homes on the same site - and several people - into the muddy, raging river.

Mitch and the 2009 coup seem to be defining moments for Honduras. The country is usually touched by several hurricanes a year, mostly in the coastal regions. But Hurricane Mitch was ferocious and, critically, its progress stalled over Honduras, bringing days of rain - 18 inches in one day in one city - and damaging winds. Some 6,500 people were killed, about 20 per cent of the population was left homeless and 70 to 80 per cent of the transportation infrastructure destroyed. The president of the day estimated it knocked out 50 years worth of progress in a week. And it seems burned in many Hondurans’ minds as both a turning point for the country and a reminder of the its vulnerability to disaster.

CODEM, the municipal disaster planning agency, wants the squatters gone. Officials say even in normal rains they’re in danger, from flooding and collapsing river banks that will bring their houses down. Even prevention efforts, liked deepening the river channel, could destroy the houses.

Fine, say the families. Where will we go?

Maria Angela Guerrero told La Prensa she and her family settled on the river back because they ha nowhere to live and no money for rent.

"All of us here are aware of the danger we run in winter,” she said. “If the mayor wants to evicts us he will have to relocate us in a safe place," she said.

The World Bank says 18 per cent of Hondurans live on less $1.40 a day. Rent is impossible, so throwing up a shack - of wood, or corrugated tin or, with luck, adobe - is the only option. Some landowners don’t seem to mind. Other people, like the river community, choose public land. (There is a whole separate post to be done on land occupations across the country by organized campesino protests.)

The houses are often grim looking, without electricity or water. Life inside would be dark and dismal, with little real shelter in bad weather and no protection from insects.

But any house - even one that might get swept away when the river rises - is better than none. 

Stranger in a strange land

They do look like TV people

I was good at understanding how things worked in Canada, or thought I was.

In Honduras, I often feel like a visitor from another planet. I do a blog for volunteers in Honduras, and for anyone interested in development issues, mostly aggregating content. That involves scanning the news sources and blogs and websites.

Today, Front Line Defenders, a credible Irish human rights group, had a post about Donny Reyes, an activist for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) rights in Honduras. That's dangerous. At least 60 people in the community have been murdered in the last two years. Reyes has already suffered some brutal repercussions for his efforts.

Last month Reyes was tracked from his Tegicugalpa home by a man on a motorcycle, who he says was trying to kill him. He went to a rights organization, and they made an official complaint to the police so he could be escorted to a safe place. (He's already been granted protection, but it hasn't resulted in action.) The rights organization arranged a meeting the next day with police and a lawyer in the National State Security Agency. But 30 minutes before the meeting, the Human Rights Unit of the state security agency called and said they couldn't send anyone, because there was no gas for their official cars.

The rights organization offered to buy gas, but the unit said that would be unethical.

Five days later, Front Line Defenders reports, the Under Secretary of State wrote saying she was unhappy with the events.

"Firstly I want to tell how how sorry I am for this impasse which developed and which absolutely should never be allowed to happen again. I was out of the country at the time and was not notified of the problem which was caused by the fact that the garage which supplies petrol to the National Security Agency refused to give any more petrol because they had not been paid, a problem which is being resolved at this moment. However I acknowledge that this is not a valid reason for failing to deal with such a serious issue.

"I believe that your case was not adequately dealt with by the staff in my office and I have in the past left instructions that in these situations they can use the car which has been assigned for my personal use. We are taking all necessary steps to remedy this situation and I urge you to contact this office to reschedule the meeting as soon as possible."

It's fair to be skeptical about the explanation. But, based on seven months here, it's also possible that there was no gas. (OK, probably not.)

 The private contractor that provides dialysis turned away patients this week, because the government hasn't paid its bills. Roadwork halted across the country last week, because contractors hadn't seen government cheques in five months. (In neighbouring El Salvador, the government has announced it doesn't have the cash to issue tax refund cheques, hardly an incentive to pay taxes.)

It's a land of weird stories. 

Today, Nicaraguan police reported finding $7 million in smuggled cash hidden in six vans that were supposed to be carrying a Mexican TV crew with varying explanations of what they were to report on. They had cameras and satellite dishes and some of the vans had TV station logos. But come on. What TV stations sends six vans and 18 people 1,600 kilometres to cover a story? 

The vans and the money had passed through Honduras. Nobody in this country, or on the border, apparently considered the convoy of TV trucks suspicious.

Scanners come to Bodega Gloria

I had to walk home in the rain last week, because technology’s tentacles had reached Copan Ruinas.

I buy fruit and vegetables in the town market, a two-storey structure open to the sky, or sometimes from the people who park trucks full of fruit or other goods outside. (Though not from the guy with the live chickens in the back of his pickup, with a chicken wire lid to block escapes.) 

And Bodega Gloria is my main store for staples. It’s as close as we come to a supermarket. 

There’s no real rival. Commercial Cruz Bueso is almost as large, but sells clothes and cowboy hats and foam mattresses along with food staples.

Commercial Victoria was a contender, but it’s gone in a new direction, with stock that seem bought off late-night infomercials. There is actually an inflatable sled for sale, and hand warmers, those little chemical packets that generate heat while you wait to kill ducks. The temperature has never dipped below 20 degrees since we’ve been here.

Bodega Gloria is not big. Three aisles. One with cleaning stuff. One mostly cookies and candies, and pasta. The middle aisle has chips and such, non-refrigerated milk, oil and capers and other essentials and a spotty alcohol section. (The boast “Mexico’s best selling box wine” does not guarantee drinkability, even at $4 a litre.) In the back, there’s a big floor freezer full of unwrapped chicken parts and wall coolers with packaged meats and cheese and, sometimes, yoghurt. Gloria, if there is such a person, has added a meat counter in the last month. The chorizo is great.

Until last week, the process was simple. You picked your stuff, and one of the keen young staff tallied it up on a cheap calculator. You handed the money over, and the clerk took it to the woman who ruled the cash. She looked up from her newspaper or cellphone, made the correct change and it was counted, then passed to you. On good days, she smiled at you, in a Mona Lisa kind of way.

It wasn’t brilliantly efficient. Sometimes, a small woman from a pueblo in the hills would be buying vast amounts of staples, and need a hand-written receipt - factura - either because she was buying for the community, or her own pulperia. 

But it worked, sort of. There was a problem with inventory management. Any time yoghurt is in the coolers, I buy three containers, because it can mysteriously disappear for weeks. The pop cooler can be full of Diet Cokes one day, and sit empty and rusting for two weeks. I’m used to hoarding.

The registers

A couple of months ago, Gloria installed a couple of counters with cash registers and barcode scanners, but no one has used them until now. But one day last week, the bodega was closed for inventory. The next day, hesitant cashiers were scanning my half-dozen purchases, most of which weren’t in the system. It took so long I ended up walking home in the afternoon rain, which arrives about 2:30 these days.

It’s been almost a week, and I’m not sure how the experiment is going. When the two cashiers are busy - fairly often give the campesino bulk buying - you dump your stuff on a vacant counter, the calculator comes out and you hand over the cash. That seems to undermine inventory control.

Retailing, like everything else, is different in Honduras. When I lived in Montreal, I was amazed that every block in the older neighbourhoods had one or two depanneurs - marginal, small grocery-variety stores that served maybe 40 families in the adjacent three-story walk-up apartments with their outside iron stairways.

But pulperias, the Honduran equivalent, are way more common. Sometimes three in a block, set up in what would have been the front room of the house. A somewhat cynical long-term expat said that ,if nothing else, the pulperias let families get goods at wholesale price for their relatives. And if there is no other work, making a few dollars a day selling chips and coffee and plantains to the people on the block is worthwhile, especially as people with little money tend to buy just enough for the next meal. (The same is true for restaurants. In the next block, there were four places selling balleadas and chicken and basic meals. Another one opened this week.)

All things considered, I prefer Honduras shopping to a North American mall full of stuff I don’t want, in stores that look the same. (Though the big cities here have quite lavish malls, with the same overpriced brands.)

Not always, of course, Our electric toothbrush conked out, probably the victim of the erratic power supply here. Finding a replacement anywhere within three hours is unlikely. And I’m still baffled that in our hunt for small household appliances we walked past the tiny sign for Zapateria’s Faby - Faby’s Shoestore - a dozen times before someone told us the store had actually moved into selling household goods, motorcycles and more several years ago, but never changed the name or the sign.

I don’t know how the new registers are going to work out at Bodega Gloria. But if it means they’ll run out of yoghurt less often, I’m rooting for them.