By PAUL CONSTANCE, San Salvador

That was the unanimous conclusion of a regional workshop held last March in San Salvador, El Salvador, titled "Environmental Management and Reducing Vulnerability to Natural Disasters."

The workshop, organized by the IDB and the System for Central American Integration, brought together some 130 government officials and environmental experts from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, along with representatives from other governments and multilateral organizations.

The workshop was designed to highlight the environmental lessons learned as a result of Mitch and other natural disasters in the Central American region, with a view to incorporating those lessons in reconstruction plans then under development by governments in the most severely affected countries. The IDB pledged to organize the workshop last December, during the first meeting of the Consultative Group for the Reconstruction and Transformation of Central America in Washington, D.C.

"Mitch showed us that Central America was sitting on a time bomb caused by environmental abuse," said Miguel Martínez, the IDB operations manager for a group of countries that includes Central America. Uncontrolled deforestation, poor watershed management and inappropriate agricultural practices have severely degraded the water absorption and retention capacity of vast areas of Central America. This multiplied the destructive effect of Hurricane Mitch by increasing flooding and landslides, and will do so again unless preventive measures are taken, according to Martínez and other officials at the conference.

Recommendations drafted during the workshop emphasized the interdependence of Central America's countries and the importance of devising disaster mitigation plans across national boundaries. A bridge closure or a power outage in one of these countries inevitably affects commerce in its neighbors, for example. Likewise, the Lempa River drains into the Pacific Ocean in El Salvador but has a watershed that includes large portions of Honduras and Nicaragua. Effective policies to stem erosion and control flooding along the Lempa should consequently be coordinated by all three nations.

Workshop participants also stressed the need for environmental policies based on economic incentives in addition to laws or mandates, since the latter are rarely effective on their own. They also called for extensive participation by local communities in the development of disaster mitigation plans, in contrast to centralized, top-down approaches that have failed in the past.

The workshop included representatives from government agencies charged with drafting each country's national reconstruction plan. These plans were to be presented to the international donor community at a May meeting of the Consultative Group in Stockholm, Sweden. Based on the plans, governments and international organizations planned to earmark several billion dollars of aid they have pledged to the countries hardest hit by Hurricane Mitch.