Nicaragua is on the brink of experiencing another coffee crisis. Another, you say? What was the first? Well, in 2001 prices for coffee plummeted, a result of World Bank sponsored programs in countries like Vietnam and Brazil that encouraged cheap growing and processing of corn for exportation. Corn? That's right, there's a certain kind of corn that when you roast it, it tastes an awful lot like coffee. Anyway, the WB decided that this crop might be their comparative advantage: they can grow a lot of it cheaply, and these countries can export it cheaply to companies like Kraft and Proctor and Gamble (Maxwell House, etc.). Well, the problem with that, is that these same institutions had told other countries, such as Nicaragua, that coffee was their comparative advantage, and up in coffee country, farms that had once produced basic grains such as beans and rice had changed into coffee growing countries to compete on the world market. Problem is, this high quality coffee is much more expensive than toasted corn, and once those products from Vietnam and Brazil started flooding the market, it drove down the price of coffee. Coffee farmers started going out of business and many moved to Managua; it created famine in the region and thousands of people starved to death. Since then, the price has gone up a little bit and small coffee farmers have started to grow crops for self consumption again. Coffee country is still situated in extreme poverty, but the situation has stabilized again.
Well, coffee prices are actually extremely high, and now it's the opposite problem: there aren't enough hands to work on big coffee plantations! Why? Well, the average monthly salary of a rural worker in Nicaragua is $46 a month, compared to $181 a month in Guatemala, $202 in Costa Rica, and $302 in Panama. Wages are extremely low, but worse than that, Nicaragua doesn't have the infrastructure to provide a standard of living for farmers (health centers, schools, transportation, etc.) to compete with neighboring countries, so massive migration has become a huge problem. The crisis? Either coffee producers raise salaries again (which they should do), or they will lose most of their now money-making crop.
The problem is thus structural: the reliance on one crop for exportation, rather than the development of infrastructure. These priorities are reinforced by IMF loans, which encourages production for exportation and which places caps on social spending. The US holds veto power in both of these institutions for the sheer amount of money it contributes. So all of those starving farmers were indirectly the result of policies made by US institutions, although the World Bank isn't of course the only culpirit.
I just got back from coffee growing country, which is why I'm so pepped up about this. We were visiting a community that is self-sufficient, but just lost a huge beans harvest. Every house we visited, though, they told us with elation that coffee farmers in Nicaragua were finally going to get paid more so they don't migrate, they'd actually be able to make a decent living off of what they grow. A nearby sweatshop recently fired all of its workers from that area for reasons we are still trying to figure out, and now all of those people that were unemployed without hope of employment have a chance of survival through February, when coffee growing season is done. Of course, who knows what will happen to all of those workers then, and next year if the prices fall again, but they are doing well now.
The word "food security" gets thrown about by development experts all the time. Well, I can tell you that this is not food security: if the price of a crop on the international market determines the livelihood of thousands of people, that is not food security. And with the implementation of CAFTA, other farmers are going to be out of luck as cheap US imports begin flooding, flooding.
There are so many layers to truth. There's the gut reaction, the visceral; the feeling I get when I visit these communities that are our friends and companeros and I hear their stories and I think it's so selfish to think I have anything to do with them or that by listening to them, I'll ever know what they are experiencing. There's the intellectual, when I think about these forces pulling them around and I remember all of that rhetoric from IR classes: greater GDP, greater development. More money in the country means more money for the people. There's this constant argumentation that happens in my head, trying to swim through what I've heard and what I'm seeing and what it means for me, a US citizen, an activist, a writer. How do I make sense of it all and then once I have, what do I do with it all? And see, this is the selfishness again. It comes back to me and my own feeling of overwhelming responsibility, not individual responsibility, but collective responsibility, for the ignorance of my country, for the damaging, hurtful ignorance that allows millions of people to get invaded by military invasions or killed slowly by starvation and poverty.
But sometimes this cycle doesn't happen, and I take all of that in, like the past few days. I listened and listened and filled myself with information, and I didn't reject it. It used to be incredibly painful to hear these stories, because the weight of it all was crushing, but these days, I have learned to not let my ego get in the way of this truth.
