Free Trade and Lack of Land  Bring Hunger to Poor Farmers in Nicaragua

Nan McCurdy

When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Luke 14:13

(January 27, 2004) To the question of why it’s raining in March when it never rains until May here in Nicaragua, campesino (peasant farmer) leader Jorge Alberto Mayorga thoughtfully answered, “It’s raining because God is protesting the injustice against the campesinos who work the land to produce food for all the people in the cities and yet are being pushed off the land.”

How can it be that in this rich agricultural country of 5,000,000 inhabitants, 2,000,000 people live malnourished in extreme poverty and 800,000 are so poor and malnourished that they’re on the brink of disappearing. Last year 20 Nicaraguans, mainly children, died of starvation. And those are only the official statistics. 

Mayorga and hundreds of other men, women and children from the campesino cooperative, Rafaela Herrera, on Nicaragua’s Pacific plains walked 140 kilometers to Managua during five days in February (2003) to demand legal title to their land.

Thirty members of the group spent their first week in the capital city crucified (tied up on large crosses) in front of the Nicaraguan Congress. Then they embarked on a hunger strike. When that didn’t get action from the government, 40 campesinos began a nude protest march but were quickly beaten and rounded up by hundreds of police.

For the campesino families, the land symbolizes the struggle between food or hunger for their children.

Land ownership key factor in hunger

The number one reason for hunger in Nicaragua, according to Carlos Pacheco of the Center for International Studies, is land: who owns it, who works it, who benefits from the production. Low farm-worker wages, lack of bank credit and high interest rates, especially for small-scale farmers, conspire against the campesinos.

Ten years ago people began suggesting that with the growing exploitation of many Central American countries by transnational corporations, some of the countries would soon be as grossly impoverished and deformed as many countries of Africa. Today, with hunger and starvation, an increase in the incidence of disease due to malnutrition, over-exploitation of land and concomitant reduction in its productive capacity, concentration of land in agribusinesses and deforestation, the prediction is beginning to come to pass.

Leonsia Tremenio is a health promoter with the Women and Community Association, an ecumenical farm women’s group in San Francisco Libre (SFL), Nicaragua, that received support from the United Methodist Committee on Relief to build 350 homes after Hurricane Mitch in October 1998. 

In response to malnutrition and disease Tremenio promotes alternative high protein beans like soy, medicines made from local plants, and family planning as means for survival of her community in a most cruel moment in the desert. Her husband, Ramon Godines, is a poorly-paid cattle hand (earning less than $2 a day) for a foreign business that owns 1500 manzanas (about 2,400 acres) of land in San Francisco Libre.

Until five years ago, they were one of 26 families who cooperatively owned this piece of land. When I asked them how much they sold the land for, Ramon looked down, shook his head and answered , “We gave away the land to them for 200 cordobas a manzana ($15 an acre).”

Their reason for selling was that they couldn’t get credit. Then Ramon shyly looked at me and added, “The truth is we were scared we’d lose the land and be left with nothing.” They lost their land and are left with nothing except remorse. Now they understand that they were fooled. 

The U.S. government has played a very active role since 1990 in pressuring the Nicaraguan government to return property to former land owners from the Somoza dictatorship years instead of supporting a consensus solution to the volatile property issue.

With the overthrow of the 45-year-reign of the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua and the beginning of a revolution in 1979, all properties belonging to the Somozas and their cronies were confiscated. Other owners’ lands were confiscated for decapitalization (taking loans and sending the money out of the country instead of investing it in your land or business).

Property was massively redistributed in the 1980s to over 120,000 families representing one-third of the country’s population. Many people whose lands were confiscated went to the U.S. and became citizens. The U.S. defends property rights of naturalized citizens and most property claims in the U.S. are by people who recently became citizens. Over 1,000 U.S. claims have been resolved. There are about 800 more claims in process. During the 1990s the U.S. regularly threatened to cut off aid if the property claims were not resolved.

With this threat as a backdrop, the Nicaraguan governments of the 1990s made its own threats to poor peasants who had received land in the 1980s, threats that they would take the land and return it to former owners without paying the campesinos anything. This scare tactic worked and poor land owners and many cooperatives have been fooled or scared into “selling” their land all over Nicaragua.

The beneficiaries are well-off nationals and foreigners who swallow up the land for a song. And the people whose land was confiscated more than 20 years ago get their property back and/or monetary compensation that leaves Nicaragua’s debt grave, many millions deeper. And most of the beneficiaries of the earlier agrarian reform are back to eating dust. 

Thousands of campesino families, on losing their land, move to the circles of misery around the cities. The reconcentration of land in the hands of the wealthy has resulted in increased unemployment, crime, gangs and emigration of over a million people to Costa Rica and the United States in the last decade. The growing sweat shop industry in the free trade zones in Nicaragua enjoys the cheap labor that results from massive unemployment and immigration to the cities. Thousands of youth end up fighting over jobs where they often work 12-hour days in subhuman conditions for slave wages.

Who benefits from free trade agreements?

Next to land issues, the biggest threat to food security in Nicaragua is the free trade agreement with the United States, CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement}. In a free trade agreement goods are bought and sold between two or more partners without any kind of trade barriers or protectionism. The U.S. is pressuring the countries of Central America to capitulate and sign a free trade agreement where the big winner would be U.S.-based transnational companies and agribusinesses in particular.

What happens when a wealthier country with more power and technology forms a free trade agreement with an unequal partner goes something like this: Mexico and Nicaragua signed a limited free-trade agreement in 1998 in which each country agreed to buy certain products from the other. In reality the agreement has favored Mexico to the tune of 70 million dollars in exports to Nicaragua per year while Nicaragua has only exported 10 million a year to Mexico.

Mexico agreed it would buy thousands of tons of black beans from Nicaragua. Nicaraguan campesinos traditionally produce red beans because that’s what Nicaraguans eat. The World Bank encouraged the Nicaraguan government to get campesinos to produce for the export market, instead of producing red beans for local consumption. The Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Inter-American Development Bank gave loans to campesinos to produce black beans. But at the same time, the U.S. flooded Mexico with cheap black beans, produced with agricultural subsidies. So in January 2003 Mexico refused to buy the crop of black beans from Nicaragua. Some of these farmers will lose their land because of being tricked into producing for export instead of for the local market.

In May of 2002 a U.S. farm bill passed providing $248 billion dollars in subsidies for U.S. farmers over the next few years (much of this money is really for big agribusinesses like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland). The Center for Rural Affairs says that this farm bill provides a larger share of payments to the nation’s largest farms (agribusiness) than any bill in history. The subsidies allow U.S. farmers to sell corn 20 percent below the cost of production and wheat at 46 percent below the cost of production.

Large companies have other advantages over third world farmers such as modern mechanization on a large scale.  Peasant farmers from exploited nations, even middle-sized farmers, cannot compete. It’s cheaper to buy U.S. corn and rice in Nicaragua than to buy locally produced corn and rice. It’s cheaper to buy U.S. rice in Haiti than locally-produced rice. In fact the Haitian rice producers have almost all been put out of business.

It’s the same sad story in dozens of third world countries: Cheap, subsidized corn, rice, beans, wheat, soy, etc. from the United States inhibits the sale of local production. Farmers lose their land and move to the cities. Wealthy families and foreign corporations come in and buy up the land. 

Improved seed, better yield but more costly

Governments of the exploited nations, on recommendation from the U.S. government, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), encourage campesinos to buy improved seed from transnational companies like Monsanto. 

Miguel Mairena grew up in a poor farm family on an island in Lake Nicaragua. “My dad and all the farmers we knew selected the best corn and beans each year to store carefully for planting the next season.

 “Farmers throughout the country, and all around the world, have local seeds they’ve genetically modified over generations so that they are well adapted to their particular zone. The (purchased) improved seeds usually provide a better yield. The problem is that the farmer cannot select seed from the crop to plant the next year because of patent rights, and if they do, the company can force them to pay. Many campesinos cannot afford to buy seed every year.”

If Monsanto and similar companies succeed, the farmers will become dependent on the foreign-bought seed and lose their own indigenous seed.

“It’s all so perverse.” exclaims Carlos Pacheco. “The U.S. is creating a captive market for their transnational companies. On the one hand, local farmers are becoming dependent on foreign seeds. On the other hand cheap U.S. corn, beans, rice, and other commodities are putting third-world farmers out of business and forcing them off the land. The same companies can then buy up the land, mechanize and exploit the cheap labor (of people who no longer have land) to produce corn and beans to sell to a captive local population. The people of these countries are losing their sovereignty because they are losing their food security.” 

Where is justice for the exploited?

As a backdrop to this theatre of the absurd, the debt of the exploited nations continues to bleed their people. Ninety percent of Nicaragua’s population exist on two dollars or less a day. In 2003 in Nicaragua, 35 cents of every dollar collected in taxes will go to pay interest on the debt. In 2004, 66 cents will go to pay interest. For the last 15 years or more, the exploited countries have been paying interest on the debt instead of investing in their children.

The former Nicaraguan Assistant Secretary of State, Alejandro Bendańa, says that if Nicaragua continues to pay, it has no future. “We shouldn’t pay the interest on the debt as long as one child is without health care and education.”

Nan McCurdy has worked in Central America for the last 20 years.  She and her husband are missionaries with the United Methodist Church.  She assists and promotes women's organizations, empowering women through programs to prevent domestic/gender violence, promote integral community-based health care and education.

A similar article written by Nan McCurdy was published in the July 2003 New World Outlook.

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