EL SALVADOR
Mangrove Honey: Salvadoran Fishermen Bet on Making a Living from Restoration
After more than two decades restoring the Barra de Santiago mangroves, communities along El Salvador's Pacific Coast found that beekeeping was a solution to strengthening their economy. Today, climate change and the end of international cooperation are testing the continuity of a model that seeks to prove that conservation can also improve livelihoods.
By: Jorge Rodríguez
Raccoons, iguanas, crabs and even crocodiles. Incredible as it may seem, these are not the most exotic footprints in the mangrove forest along El Salvador's Pacific Coast. No, that honor belongs to the rubber boots of local fishermen searching for crabs in the mud. “We use these traps to catch blue crabs,” says Carlos Martínez as he leans down to check if any have been caught.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the communities of Barra de Santiago have carried out voluntary community work to restore the mangroves. Before that, Martínez recalls, cutting of the mangrove forest, agricultural expansion and the accumulation of sediment and debris upstream were the norm. “We didn’t know what a degraded mangrove meant for our lives,” he says. But the communities’ efforts helped reverse that situation and, over time, cutting was considerably reduced, crab populations began to recover and people started protecting species such as parrots, crocodiles and caimans.
Photos: Jorge Rodríguez.
However, ecological recovery did not solve the other great challenge for these communities. “The mangrove products weren’t yielding the economic results we expected,” says William Recinos, another local fisherman. Restoring the mangroves had been possible. Living off them was another story.
The search for alternatives aligned with the arrival of several projects in 2017, driven by local and international organizations that promoted sustainable activities within the mangrove. One of the options was uncommon in Central American mangroves: honey production. No one in the community thought of it as a productive alternative. “We had no connection to bees and nobody believed it would work,” says Recinos.
Despite their initial doubts, the fishermen accepted the challenge. Seven communities, including El Mango—to which Martínez and Recinos belong—participated in a beekeeping pilot project. Recinos received technical training at the National School of Agriculture and 30 hives were distributed among the communities. Each group received five hives and the necessary equipment to start production. But the uncertainty continued. “[After receiving the certification] I came back without believing in the bees,” confesses the now-beekeeper.
The distrust was not unfounded. For decades, the families of Barra de Santiago had lived on fishing, subsistence agriculture and construction. Bees were never a part of their daily lives. However, the years of work restoring the mangroves—gathering red mangrove seedlings, planting trees and walking through the mangrove—allowed them to observe something that had previously gone unnoticed.
“We realized the mangrove was rich in flowering,” Recinos says.
The pilot was strengthened by the arrival of the Regional Coastal Biodiversity Project, led by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which increased the number of hives and benefited 32 families in the region. At first, the learning was technical: how to maintain the hives, control pests and handle them to extract honey.
By 2020, they had already produced two harvests, producing about 140 quarts of honey. El Mango grew to have more than 80 hives, which produced up to 300 quart-size bottles per season. Bees became a part of daily life.
With international funding, the model was successful. But when the funding started to decrease, significant cracks began to appear. “Beekeeping supplies are very expensive,” Martínez notes. Although the income from the sale of honey contributed to improving household income, production costs exceeded profits.
