Current Honduras child mortality MALE/FEMALE rate

(per 1000) is 44/42 -- World Health Organization

Honduras, a tropical Central American republic situated between Guatemala and El Salvador, to the west, and Nicaragua to the south and east. The Caribbean washes its northern coast and the Pacific its narrow coast to the south. With an area of 43,277 square miles (112,088 square kilometres) and a population of only 6.9 million Honduras is also one of the smallest countries in Latin America.

Inhabited since well before the Christian era, ruins in the west of Honduras indicate the area was the centre of Mayan civilization before migrating to the Yucatan Peninsula. Now, only small, isolated groups of non-Spanish speaking Indians remain and the majority of the population is mestizo (a mixture of Spanish and Mesquitan Indian).

Honduras’s main exports are coffee, bananas, palm oil, meat, zinc and shrimp. With a national economy heavily geared towards agricultural export ordinary Hondurans are highly vulnerable to the extreme fluctuations in the global commodity markets. Equally, any change in trade policy by superpowers such as the US has an enormous impact on the national economy. One tragic example is the plight of coffee growers in Honduras. Many of them are facing starvation because of a decision supported by the international community to encourage coffee production in Vietnam.

Honduras’s economic and social problems were compounded in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch struck. More than 5,000 people were killed and 70% of the country’s crops were destroyed. Damage was estimated at $3 billion dollars and economic and social development was set back decades. The poverty and unemployment has caused a dramatic rise in gang warfare throughout Honduras since Mitch struck. Police estimate that more than 33,000 gang members stalk the country.

Vulnerability to the rising tide of globalization and its resulting instability has left a society rife with inequality. Close to 85% of Hondurans live below the poverty line with malnutrition, poor housing and domestic violence rampant.