Nicaragua’s Great Leap Forward

In Nicaragua’s impoverished countryside, peasants toil under the sun using the same farming techniques as their ancestors did 300 years ago. Shuffling through small plots of land, farmers use a stick to poke holes in the ground into which seeds are dropped, before scraping the dirt back into place with their foot. Then it’s time to pray for rain and hope God delivers consistently through the germination period. It’s hard to imagine Nicaragua’s rustic peasants being called on to save the day as the global food crisis has doubled average food prices in Latin America over the past year. But riding the campesinos to the rescue is exactly what President Daniel Ortega aims to do in his bid to assume a regional leadership role in confronting the food crisis.

The former revolutionary has promised to make Nicaragua, a country that has experienced famine in recent years, the great breadbasket to supply all of Central America and his leftist allies further south. And he’s calling on Nicaraguan farmers to rise to the challenge.

“Our great challenge, our great battle, is to produce food in Nicaragua,” Ortega said. “We have to fill Nicaragua with food, even in our yards at home, we have to plant a little bit of beans and corn. This will mean income, and will assure us food… it will allow us to export to international markets, to the rich countries that have money to pay for these products.”

Ortega had earlier signed a food-security pact with his fellow travelers in the ALBA alliance, a socialist cooperation agreement between Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia. ALBA is blaming the food crisis on the “tyranny of global capitalism,” and is using the situation as a teaching moment for its regional propaganda campaign.

ALBA appears to have found a captive audience. During a May 7 food-security summit in Managua involving the ALBA countries and Nicaragua’s neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean, various Presidents spoke of the failure of a free-market globalization model promoted by the United States. Even more conservative leaders, such as Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, appeared to side with the leftists leaders, with whom he is normally at odds, in criticizing the values and priorities of the United States. Arias criticized the United States’s offer of $1 billion in food aid as insufficient compared to the amount it spends on war in Iraq. “Their actions are wrong because their values are wrong,” Arias said of the U.S.

At the Managua summit, the regional leaders looked at ways to coordinate agricultural policies to ensure that each country’s basic food needs are met. The Nicaraguan government has said that the region will need to invest $600 million during the upcoming planting cycle that starts this month, though it’s not yet clear where that money would come from or how the financing would work. But analysts suggest that of the participating countries, Nicaragua — precisely because of its agrarian backwardness — offers the best conditions for a major boost to regional agricultural output.

“The fact that no modernization, no technology and no industry has ever arrived in Nicaragua is now a great advantage for the country,” says Cirilo Otero, head of the Center for Research on Environmental Policy. With rich volcanic soils, some 443,000 hectares of fallow farm land waiting to be put back to work, and a long agricultural tradition of growing basic food products, Nicaragua “has the best conditions in Central America” to become a regional breadbasket, Otero says.

“Nicaragua’s weakness has become its strength,” adds Ivan Saballos, former director of the national export promotion agency, in reference to Nicaragua’s dramatic increase in food exports to other Central American countries. “There will never be an industrial revolution here. That would be giving up our competitive advantage.”

Otero, however, stresses that Nicaragua must first invest massive amounts of money into agricultural credits, transport infrastructure and education, as well as resolve the land disputes left over from the Sandinista confiscations in the 1980s. More basically, he says, Nicaragua needs a plan — something he claims the Ortega government has not articulated, despite its political pomp. Without one, the agricultural expert says, Ortega is just “promising others something he hasn’t been able to do at home.”