A farming cooperative

Much of the facts in this article I have plagiarized from TeleSur to go with the pictures and information we go from the farmers we met

Production cooperatives were established in Nicaragua during the Sandinista land reform process of the 1980s. Landless families were encouraged to join coopera-tives rather than request a plot of land for individual farming. In the 1990 General Election the Sandinista Government was replaced by a free market-oriented government. Liberalization of the economy implied that former preferential treatment of agricultural cooperatives would be abandoned. Whereas some of the cooperatives split up into individual farms, not all farmers abandoned coop-erative membership

In 2006 the new Sandinista Government recognized access to land is the main determinant of well-being in rural communities. Giving rural people more land is the surest way of alleviating rural poverty, increasing incomes, and improving family welfare. To that end they allowed farmers to hang on to and farm their individual holdings and also form cooperatives to experiment with different crops work together to clear wild terrain for growing, which the government gives them and also provides loans for seeds and equipment from a special “bank” set up for the purpose. In addition advice is given on which crops to grow which will be most profitable.

Nicaragua is home to a unique phenomenon: over half of the national income comes from cooperatives and small family businesses together dubbed the “popular economy,” a huge employment generator in the country that has historically been one of the poorest in the Americas. With 59.3 percent of gross income from the popular economy 27.3 from the private sector, and 13.3 percent from the public sector, Nicaragua is a success story in cooperative development.

“Cooperatives fulfill a large part of the most immediate needs of the Nicaraguan people, especially those needs that the private sector has never been able to fill,” Nils McCune of Via Campesina in Nicaragua told teleSUR. “While the national and transnational private sector have concerned themselves with exporting, small producers and their organizations have guaranteed food.”

The success of cooperatives has been seen in the increase in national production of basic grains in recent years with positive impacts on Nicaragua’s food security and sovereignty. In 2012, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests announced that domestic production filled 80 percent of rice demand in the country, more than double the level of rice production just six years earlier before the election of the left-wing government that helped to boost the cooperative sector. Production of beans, another staple in the typical Nicaraguan diet, has fared even better, with production surpassing national demand in 2014 and 2015 despite adverse weather impacts as a result of El Niño, leaving the country with a surplus for export. There was a drought this year and the bean seeds used are ones provided by the government that dont need so much water

In the 1990’s, promises from the U.S.-backed government to invigorate the economy ushered in an era of neoliberalism that hit Nicaraguans hard — especially its vast agricultural sector where the cooperative system had taken off the decade before. Suffering the same fate as was brought on by neoliberalism in other traditionally agricultural economies in the region, Nicaraguan farmers increasingly were not able to complete in a domestic market flooded with cheap, subsidized imports, while access to credit dried up. The surging strength of the cooperative movement faltered, and the number of cooperatives stagnated for years and eventually declined during over a decade and a half of right-wing governments. The farmers told me they ate what the grew as Americal supermarket chanes were dumping cheap produce that had been overproduced in US and they could not compete on price in the shops.

From the 3,533 in 1989 on the brink of the neoliberal era, the number of cooperatives hit 3,825 in 1995 before falling to 3,285 in 2000. But despite being weakened, the cooperative movement managed to win a key piece of legislation during the same period, the General Law of Cooperatives, passed under the conservative government in 2004. The law institutionalized one of the central bodies of the cooperative movement, the National Council of Cooperatives, also known as Conacoop. Nevertheless, the number of cooperatives took a further plunge to 2,743 in 2006, the year before President Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, known as the FSLN, entered office in 2007.

Since then, the cooperative movement has exploded again. In seven years, the number of cooperatives surpassed the pre-neoliberal levels and hit 4,862. By 2014, the total sat at 5,006, more than double the pre-Ortega level. And the growth in the number of members in cooperatives grew even more exponentially, increasing by over 200 percent between 2006 and 2014 as the average number of members per cooperative spiked from 29 to 50 in the same period.