Reuters
July 16, 2001
By Ivan Castro

MATAGALPA, Nicaragua -- On the road between Matagalpa and El Tuma-La Dalia, the most common sight has always been coffee plantations.

Now there's a new element: small groups of people walking through the rain toward uncertain futures. A rural exodus, provoked by a crisis in the coffee industry, now threatens to overwhelm urban centers in northwestern Nicaragua. Hundreds of unemployed coffee workers and their families live in provisional housing, and at least six children have died from hunger in recent weeks, according to local press reports.

In the eye of the storm is the town of Matagalpa, the self-styled "capital of Nicaraguan (coffee) production," about 90 miles north of the capital city of Managua.

"We had work until December," said Francisco Rivera, one of the thousands of coffee workers who have emigrated to urban areas in search of work.

Rivera, 22, traveled about 25 miles to Matagalpa with his two young children and dozens of other farm workers. Most have found temporary lodging in open sheds and city parks, where dozens of children suffering from malnutrition and diarrhea sleep alongside their mothers on improvised beds of cardboard.

The rural exodus is stark proof of the crisis that now plagues Nicaragua's coffee industry. Low world prices, a lack of credit and poor weather have nearly brought the coffee industry to a standstill in this part of the country.

"We want to work so we can eat," Luisa Espinosa told Reuters.

Espinosa, 32, a veteran of harvesting and pruning work on Nicaraguan coffee "fincas" or plantations, joined the desperate diaspora to Matagalpa.

She and her seven offspring are part of a group of 260 people, almost half of them children, who now live in an open shed next to a Matagalpa park. Neighborhood and religious groups send them food whenever possible. The situation is much the same farther north in the city of El Tuma-La Dalia, about 114 miles north of Managua.

"The situation is alarming, like nothing before in this city's history," said Socorro Mendoza, vice mayor of El Tuma-La Dalia.

A small coffee grower herself, Mendoza said about 12,000 coffee workers have lost their jobs in her municipality alone, because finca owners are unable to pay for the maintenance of their coffee plantations.

"There's work, but there's no money," said Mendoza. Dozens of coffee growers are facing bankruptcy because of their indebtedness, she said. As a result, production in the area has slowed to a near standstill.

"People are emigrating to population centers, and what they do is come and get even poorer," said Mendoza, who called for government and international aid to reactivate coffee production in the region.

Largest Coffee-Growing Area Hit Hardest

Although the department of Matagalpa has suffered the worst during the current crisis, the neighboring department of Jinotega also has high rates of unemployment, hunger and delinquency, said Eduardo Rizo, a deputy in the National Assembly who also is a coffee producer.

Jinotega and Matagalpa, both in northern Nicaragua, lie in the heart of the country's coffee-growing region. The two departments have about 138,000 acres (56,000 hectares) of coffee under cultivation and produce about 60 percent of the national harvest.

In 2000, Nicaragua exported about $169 million worth of coffee, but the lack of bank credit has led to a work stoppage on most fincas. The country's more than 30,000 coffee producers are demanding refinancing of their debts, which total about $116 million.

Problems are even worse for the more than 29,000 small- and medium-sized growers who produce this poor Central American nation's major export crop.

National Problem Requires Action

"We're talking about more than 5,000 people," who since January have arrived in this city, said the mayor of Matagalpa, Sadrach Zeledon.

He said support from nongovernmental organizations is needed to help confront the crisis.

Zeledon said several mayors in the departments of Matagalpa and Jinotega have agreed that a national emergency plan is required to provide coffee growers with financing.

Fredy Torres, one of Nicaragua's biggest coffee producers, told the local press that he initially thought the rural exodus had political roots, but then he met several of his former workers in Matagalpa who asked him for work.

"That proved to me that these people weren't put there by anybody, that it was a spontaneous event," said Torres. "At some point (a similar exodus) is going to take place in the rest of Nicaragua's departments."

Torres complained about the apathy of the financial system in dealing with the problem. If the authorities and private banks fail to make financing available to coffee producers, he said, there will be no way to avoid economic disaster.