From Honduran forest to United States guitars, how low interest loans support grassroots development in agroforestry
Juan Vigil teaches mallet turning to local youth.
For more than 25 years GreenWood has worked with artisans in Honduras, the Peruvian Amazon and now Puerto Rico to produce high-quality wood products from well-managed forests. They founded MaderaVerde, an independent nonprofit in Honduras that conducts community forest inventories, prepares management plans and supervises harvests. GreenWood trains woodworkers in those same communities to use appropriate tools and technologies, and connects their products to good markets. The goal: Return as much value as possible from every harvested tree to the folks who depend upon—and help sustain—some of earth’s most endangered forest resources.
Since 1993 GreenWood artisans have produced everything from chairs and carved bowls to boats and guitar parts. In the last two years we installed two innovative bicycle lathes and conducted several woodturning workshops in off-the-grid forest communities in Honduras. One recent trainee, Juan Vigil, has produced 1,000 carving mallets for export to Canada, generating critical income for his family. He’s now training others to join this productive enterprise. GreenWood initiatives like this are adding value to lesser-known but abundant wood species that would otherwise have little or no market demand.
Supporting Agroforestry Cooperatives
This PVC pipe carries water to community’s hydro-electric generator.
In 2004 GreenWood launched a community forest enterprise in the harvest, production and export of high-value Honduras mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) in the buffer zone of Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, one of the most remote and challenging regions of the country. To get this project off the ground, GreenWood solicited low-interest loans from the Arthur B. Schultz Foundation for three agroforestry cooperatives. These loans were used to purchase and install portable bandsaw mills in each community, which have been used ever since to process more than 250,000 board feet of musical-instrument wood, whose harvest and export—from forest to shipping container—is supervised by MaderaVerde. Loan principal and interest for all three groups was repaid, in full, in less than two years from proceeds generated by the groups’ production.
In its latest harvest, the Miraveza Cooperative was compelled by a long-delayed government permitting process to begin cutting last September. The rainy season in Honduras typically runs from September to December, when work in the woods is precarious for both loggers and the mules they rely on to haul equipment and lumber. The Miraveza harvest site was a full six hours by foot (or hoof) from the community, a location determined, in part, by the fact that illegal invaders had occupied and cleared forest areas closer to the village. Such an arduous trip was made even more perilous by wet weather. As a result, the group left most of its harvest under cover in the forest, once the initial oversize blocks had been roughed out with chainsaws. Sawyers and teamsters resumed hauling wood in February and March, a process that eventually stretched for six more months.
By June, the protracted transport had exhausted the advance payment provided by the client. GreenWood requested a $10,000 loan from 3rd Creek Foundation to keep the mules on the trail and cover final milling costs. GreenWood acts as an intermediary in these low-interest loans, which help underwrite the costs of production. By the end of November, all of Miraveza’s wood had been milled to final dimensions and trucked out of the valley in preparation for export.
Mahogany is loaded for transport, after being sawn to dimension for guitar neck stock at the community mill.
It's hauled by truck from Mosquitia to La Ceiba, where it's collected, regraded and packed in shipping containers for export.
In the last 15 years GreenWood and MaderaVerde have coordinated the harvest, processing and export of 31 separate containers of mahogany, leading to total gross sales of approximately $1.75M. More than 90 percent of that wood has been sold to Taylor Guitars, of California, and other leaders in the U.S. guitar industry. And an estimated 65 percent of sales (more than $1M) has been returned directly to local cooperative members and their communities. Sales of high-value mahogany have helped to fund everything from forest management, village schools and roads to the construction of a micro-hydro system, which relies on water piped long-distances from protected forest areas to generate electricity for household lighting and refrigeration. Grassroots development like this doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and it follows a line no straighter than the trail of Miraveza’s mules. But fruit borne by seeds planted last year—or 15 years ago—is often the most rewarding.
Hauling lumber by mules.
“Grassroots development like this doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and it follows a line no straighter than the trail of Miraveza’s mules. But fruit borne by seeds planted last year—or 15 years ago—is often the most rewarding. ”
Scott Landis is the President of Greenwood. He is pictured here with Melvin Cruz and Javier Zapata of MaderaVerde.
GreenWood
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