Volcanoes, vines and a little more campo

Greetings from Jinotega, the lush mountainous region of Northern Nicaragua!

I returned here yesterday after adventuring around Nicaragua with Mom and Maeve for a few exciting days! We spent the first part of our time together in the colorful colonial city of Granada where we enjoyed exquisite meals, a bit of shopping and a challenging trek up Volcán Mombacho, located just a few kilometers outside of the city! Then we braved the hot and crowded Nicaraguan buses to get to San Jorge, a port town on Lake Cocibolca, where we boarded a boat for the Isla de Ometepe. This island, comprised of two stunning volcanoes (one of which is active) and the stretch of land connecting them, is in the running as the world’s eighth natural wonder. It is truly spectacular and we spent our time there meandering along the coast, monkey watching, hydrating (the heat was oppressive!) and relishing this oasis in the middle of an enormous lake, where we could watch the sun rise and set on opposite horizons from the balcony of our hotel. Next we spent a long day waiting for buses and traveling north to Matagalpa and then even farther north to Selva Negra, a virgin cloud forest and German-Nicaraguan coffee hacienda and resort off of the scenic highway between Matagalpa and Jinotega. We swung on vines that hung from the enormous Guanacaste trees, admired orchids and the royal blue butterflies with a six-inch wingspans and did our best to avoid encounters with rattle and coral snakes (fortunately we were successful!). We enjoyed delicious organic coffee (I don’t even like coffee and I can appreciate the rich flavor of the beans here) and smoothies, and then we parted ways. I made my way back up to Jinotega to continue working on my independent project and Mom and Maeve did a Coffee Tour, spent the night at Selva Negra, and if all goes as planned, are making their way to Leon right now. They’ll spend the afternoon exploring this lovely colonial city and will catch an early bus to Managua tomorrow morning, in time for their flight home. We had so much fun together and I am REALLY happy they came to visit! Now they too have a sense of the charm and warmth of Nicaraguan people, beauty of the Nicaraguan countryside and the many difficulties this impoverished country faces.

I am now in Jinotega for about twenty days to work on my independent study project. I’m based at an organization called Cuculmeca, which collaborates with local campo communities to improve education and agricultural practices with an emphasis on environmental stewardship, sustainability, food sovereignty, food security and nutrition. As I’m sure you know, in the 1940s and 50s when hunger worldwide was pervasive and plagues and famines destructive to local food systems across the globe, the Green Revolution emerged (engineered by Norman Borlaug), which, based on a relatively new understanding of the requisite components to plant growth (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium), promoted the use of chemical fertilizers, as well as pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, according to the notion that although the latter three kill the soil and everything in it, the former replenishes it sufficiently to permit desired growth. This model was meant to increase yield in order to feed the burgeoning and starving populations of initially India and Mexico and later many other “developing” countries. While yield did increase, at least in the beginning, and global hunger was curbed slightly, a series of new and very serious problems surfaced. First, this new system concentrated land, seeds, fertilizers and weed and pest management in the hands of few multinational corporations. Specifically, at the beginning, peasant farmers in many countries, including Nicaragua, were offered free fertilizers and pest control by programs such as USAID and other international development agencies. They applied these agrochemicals to their fields for a few growing seasons, which caused the soil to become lifeless, a mere vessel to hold the plants’ weak roots, which were absorbing the synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to enable growth, and if and when they attempted to grow crops without synthetic fertilizers, the fields remained bare. So, once yield increased, and international development agencies were satisfied that global hunger was diminishing, subsidies for agrochemicals diminished markedly, and farmers were left to their own devices: either buy the agrochemicals or stop farming (their fields were dead and replenishing soil organically was not a well-known option). Peasants were at the whim of the multinational agro-industry. Second, because this was inherently a multinational effort, monocrops and industrial agriculture systems were favored to polycrops and geographically and climatically appropriate growing and irrigation systems. As a result, major food crops became even more susceptible to disease than they were before and local food crop varieties and indigenous knowledge of effective farming practices diminished. Third, malnutrition swelled. Even though food was more plentiful, variety reduced markedly and the micronutrients that are found in plants grown in healthy soil are virtually nonexistent in those grown in chemically fertilized soils. Again, Nicaragua is no exception, and, although the Green Revolution attempted to improve the well-being of the world’s poor, in retrospect it seems to have done more harm than good.

The campesinos in Jinotega are malnourished and impoverished. They use their meager earnings to buy agrochemicals rather than to send their children to school. Although I was unaware of this when I decided to base my project at Cuculmeca, this organization is just beginning an initiative to promote sustainable agriculture practices in six highly vulnerable communities that have been completely dependent on agrochemicals for over 50 years, and it is on this conversion to organic agriculture that I am basing my research. I am interviewing campesino families who are partaking in the project and attending workshops that teach them how to build compost piles, use organic material to replenish the soil, diversify crops, conserve soil, eat a balanced diet and organize as a community to promote their needs and interests. Many people in these communities suffer from cancer and children are severely malnourished, so as far as I can tell, they are open to and eager for change. I am interested in how they will approach these changes, and how Cuculmeca will make the changes sustainable. After all, a good way to determine whether a humanitarian organization is doing is job is if it’s out of a job within a few years- that’s success! On a broader level, I’m trying to understand what it really means to live day in and day out to simply survive. What does it mean to be a campesino today? They’re the people at the very bottom of free trade policies, such as CAFTA, and they are the ones who take the brunt of environmental degradation, stemming from climate change, natural disasters, and contaminated water. How do they sustain themselves emotionally and spiritually, or is physical sustenance challenge enough? Do they deal with the same existential crises as their counterparts in “developed” countries? What gives them their will to survive? Of course, I don’t expect to answer these questions in a mere twenty-day period, but perhaps I’ll gain a few insights. I hope the prospect of converting to organic agriculture will give them some hope- an inkling that their children’s lives may be better. Maybe this will serve as an opportunity for me to get a glimpse of campesino-hood. Is hope a new feeling for them? Is it hope that they feel? Will this future-oriented strategy be embraced by people who live entirely in the present? Oh, I have so much to learn and ideally I’ll have a bit more to share with you in a few weeks time!!

My love to you!

Em