The New York Times 

August 29, 2001

A Coffee Crisis' Devastating Domino Effect in Nicaragua

By DAVID GONZALEZ

EL TUMA-LA DALIA, Nicaragua, Aug. 25 ‹ With no land and no work, thousands of coffee-field hands here can plant only one thing: themselves, on the roadside, as they beg for food, jobs or attention to their needs.

A steep drop in coffee prices on the world market has led to a crisis in Central America, forcing growers to scale back or to close down. Thousands of landless agricultural workers, who relied on the farms and their own two hands to feed and clothe their families, are now jobless.

About 16,000 people ‹ a quarter of the residents of this city and its surrounding villages ‹ are unemployed, according to local officials, and many of them are still owed wages for last year's harvest. Countless others from Matagalpa and neighboring Jinotega Provinces have streamed to the bigger cities and to Managua, the capital, where they hope to pressure the government into heeding their pleas for help.

In the coffee areas, migrant farm workers huddle dazed and tired under plastic tents while their children dart into the road and try futilely to stop passing cars with a frayed string barricade and an outstretched cup.

"We have no food," said Yamileth Dávila, who, like several dozen of her neighbors from El Puente de las Cañas, south of here, had gone without eating that day. "The children cry from hunger. There is no work. The coffee growers cannot get money to pay us."

Coffee growers in Matagalpa and Jinotega have long prided themselves on producing more than 80 percent of Nicaragua's coffee exports, which in good years totaled 120 million pounds of beans. In Matagalpa, most of the 44,000 growers are small farmers with only a few acres to cultivate.

But they are the lifeline for tens of thousands of landless workers who tend the fields, local officials said. In the fall, the number swells to 400,000 as families with their children and itinerant workers come from neighboring areas for the coffee harvest, usually earning as little as $3 a day for their labors.

This area has been spared the worst of the drought in the region. But over the last two years, a glut of coffee from Vietnam and Indonesia has driven down prices on the world market, sending the market price plummeting to about $50 per hundred pounds from $140 two years ago. The immediate result is that the farmers here cannot even recoup their production costs ‹ $83 per hundred pounds.

"Coffee is the spinal column of this region," said José González, who represents Matagalpa in the National Assembly. "What is happening here now is the most humiliating thing for the community."

The collapse of the market has set off a chain reaction that is felt throughout the region. Towns have been left to scrape by as tax receipts drop, forcing them to scale back services and lay off workers. Farms have scaled back or closed, leaving thousands of the area's most vulnerable people with no money to buy food or clothes or to pay their rent. Small growers, in debt to banks and coffee processors who lent them money to care for the crops and workers, have been idled, and some of them are facing the loss of their land.

The pastures around Concepción Hernández's 30-acre coffee farm are overgrown with thick weeds because he already has sold off his few cows to pay the bills. He used to employ 15 people at his farm, El Paraisito, or Little Paradise, but they, too, have been sent away. His farm has become nothing less than a big nightmare: $12,000 in debt, he has not made a single payment since January.

"We planted some lettuce and tomatoes for ourselves," said Mr. Hernández said. "That is how we survive, but it is not enough. If one of us gets sick, there is no way to get better. There is no money here."

He surveyed his land, the place where he was born and where he worked ever since he reached the age of reason. Now, he said, little makes sense anymore.

"If coffee prices do not go up, we cannot go on like this," he said. "In my case, if I cannot pay, I will have to hand over my land."

The hundreds of people who have taken to the roadsides had no land to lose, only their hope. Forlorn and weak from hunger and illness, they perk up at the sight of a passing jeep or pickup truck, hoping that it belongs to one of the relief groups that have been distributing corn, oil and soy meal.

On a recent afternoon, a few miles south of here, dozens of people sitting by the roadside said they had not eaten anything that day. Some complained of ulcers, while others said their children were sweaty with fever or weak from diarrhea.

"The Franciscan priests came by and gave some crackers to the children," said Tomás Báez Sosa, who has been unable to provide for his wife and six children since the last coffee harvest. "That food was for the children. We adults are here with upturned hands. We have no land to plant. We want the government to give us land."

But what many of the protesters wanted more urgently was for the government to help their employers, which would allow them to be rehired. The government has offered to make small payments in some cases, but farmers complained that the money went to their creditors and not to them. Members of the National Assembly are hoping to get the government to make some payments directly to the farmers that would help them resume limited production.

Facing a crisis, the government has created 800 jobs, giving people brooms and rakes to clean the streets for a little more than $2 a day. But that help is minuscule compared with the need that was evident in the city of Matagalpa, where several hundred families have been camped out on the fringes of an athletic field since early July.

Mothers sleep on the concrete floor of an old warehouse, their children dozing off on slabs of cardboard. Doctors have come to treat the children, leaving parents with prescriptions for medicines they cannot afford. Food aid is unpredictable ‹ families here went without any emergency supplies for six days this week.

"We were laid off from our jobs at the farms," said Xiomara López, 22, as she waited with her two barefoot, crying children for some bread and soft drinks brought by a university group. "We had no food. Instead, we go to the market and get some vegetables from the garbage. We take the best part and give it to the children."

Some people have already left here, intent on taking their cause to the capital. José Ángel Pérez, the leader of the encampment in Matagalpa, had already visited Managua once to ask the government and others for help.

"People in Managua thought we didn't exist anymore," he said. "The government has done nothing. But if there is no response, we will go on to Managua."