Pacto Seco

Pacto Seco — the first self-executing line of a national budget.

When drought hits Honduras's Dry Corridor, 1.6 million people wait four to nine months for help. The sequence is fixed: crops fail, an NGO assesses, SEFIN reallocates, COPECO declares an emergency, the WFP appeals, the IDB approves a loan — and only then does cash arrive. By then children are stunted and families have migrated. The bottleneck is not satellite data. It is the institutional sequence between observation and action.

Pacto Seco replaces that nine-month sequence with a single line of code embedded in the budget law. When a four-sensor Copernicus consensus confirms drought at the municipality level for 20 consecutive days, an escrow controlled by the Secretaría de Finanzas auto-disburses cash to every enrolled household through the existing Bono Vida Mejor payment rails. No minister signs. No emergency is declared. From satellite pass to household phone: 11 minutes.

The Dry Corridor Stress Index (DCSI).

Four independent Copernicus signals must agree, at municipality resolution, for 20 consecutive days before the trigger fires. Sentinel-2 NDVI measures the collapse of crop greenness against a multi-year baseline. Sentinel-1 SAR gives cloud-immune confirmation of canopy failure through the canícula's persistent cover. Copernicus ERA5-Land supplies the rainfall and root-zone soil-moisture deficit (SPI-3) with decades of archive depth. Copernicus Global Land Service FAPAR adds an independent photosynthesis-activity signal.

Four independent physical signals keep the false-positive probability below 0.5% per municipality per year. That statistical defensibility is what lets the trigger be written into law — a finance minister cannot argue with four satellites.

Proven in real data.

We backtested the 2023 Dry Corridor drought using real Sentinel-2 NDVI for Choluteca. The 2023 El Niño, with the NOAA ONI index climbing to +2.06 by year-end, preceded the regional drought — and the NDVI collapse appears in exactly the April–May window the hemispheric signal predicted. The macro signal forecasts months ahead; the local sensors trigger precisely where to pay.

The disbursement architecture.

Pacto Seco builds no new payment infrastructure. A pre-positioned escrow held at a partner bank is released by a smart contract, fed by a Chainlink oracle pulling the live DCSI computed from Copernicus feeds. Payments flow through the Bono Vida Mejor registry — roughly 600,000 enrolled families already reachable via Tigo Money and BANADESA. Households can be enrolled or removed by SEFIN at any time.

The deliverable is legislation, not a report.

The pilot's output is a draft amendment to the Honduran budget law: Article 47-bis, "Activación paramétrica del Fondo Pacto Seco" — the parametric sovereign instrument itself, ready for Congressional review.

Why now.

The Sentinel-1 archive crossed ten years in 2024, the minimum for legally defensible municipality-level SAR baselines. The IDB's 2024–2030 Climate Action Plan explicitly prioritizes parametric and anticipatory instruments but has no working sovereign precedent in the region. Honduras's 2024 IMF Extended Fund Facility requires programmable-expenditure reform, opening a one-time legal window. Low-cost settlement makes per-trigger oracle calls economically trivial. The window is 2025 to 2027.

Impact.

1.6 million Hondurans in the corridor today; 10.5 million across the Central American Dry Corridor; a path to all 47 IDB member countries, each with a drought-exposed analog. Conservative IDB modeling on anticipatory cash transfers finds every dollar disbursed before a shock returns about 3.50 dollars in averted humanitarian cost. Pacto Seco turns satellite-to-phone drought response from nine months into eleven minutes.

The team.

Alexander Sorrell leads architecture, the satellite-data pipeline, the smart contract, and the demo. Juan Carlos Amador (UNAH, Facultad de Ciencias Espaciales, Tegucigalpa) leads remote-sensing validation, Dry Corridor ground-truth, and public-sector access to COPECO and SAG. A deliberately small team: the architect who builds the instrument, and the Honduran specialist who validates it on the ground.