Rural Sustainable Development
The Problem
The good news is that Nicaragua has over 450,000 square miles of arable land, ample water supplies, and a very favorable climate for growing food. Also, due to the Agrarian Reformation that followed the Revolution in 1979, many thousands of families own land suitable for small scale agriculture.
Unfortunately, much of that land had been dedicated to monocropping export oriented agriculture. In the León region, the dominant export crop was cotton. In 1991 when the cost of producing cotton exceeded the international market price, farmers were left with no markets for their crops. Hundreds of thousands of acres fell fallow, and thousands of farmers, field hands, and support businesses lost their incomes. Now sugar cane and peanuts are the established agribusiness exports in the region. Agricultural services and banks tailor their products to the large industrial businesses. Small farmers growing native crops for subsistence or for regional markets lack access to technical assistance and appropriate technologies. Small and medium farmers tend to concentrate their investment on one cash crop and lack the support needed to diversify for economic stability.
The Solution
In 1995 SOSTENICA founder, Alan Wright, organized two series of field trainings on permaculture and sustainable agriculture in Nicaragua. In 1996 the UNAN (National Autonomous University of Nicaragua) department of biology began offering a new degree program: agroecology. Then in 1998 CEPRODEL began a pilot program to assist farmers devastated by Hurricane Mitch using credit and technical assistance to enable over 60 families to recover and reestablish their farms.
In February of 2002 these three paths all met and the Sustainable Rural Development Program was born as a collaboration between SOSTENICA, CEPRODEL, and the agroecology department of the UNAN. By the end of 2002, the staff of the León office of CEPRODEL had put together a consortium of several organizations to work with farmers to create business plans, provide ongoing technical assistance on ecological practices, and improve marketing. SOSTENICA loaned CEPRODEL the initial $300,000 to provide credit for participants and made a $34,000 grant to help fund the initial technical assistance.
In 2008, while attending an agroecology training at Las Cañadas in Mexico, several of CEPRODEL’s office managers and top administrators began discussing the relevance of water preservation to their current work . They asked themselves what value a micro-loan has to a farmer -– to purchase more cattle, for example -– if the river upon which they depend dries up before the next rainy season? If the natural resources available today to small farmers disappear, a secure future is impossible regardless of how much credit is available. That discussion fueled the creation of SOSTENICA’s Reforestation and Water Source Protection project in Nagarote, Nicaragua. The 35 farmers currently in the project receive trainings, technical assistance, and loans of trees that they pay back “in-kind” by producing seedlings on their farms. In its second year, the project has already helped plant over 19,000 trees and has a payback rate of 92%. The long term effects of this project will be to increase the quality of life for farm families and workers, diversify the food supply, preserve the soil, and make the “countryside” a viable and sustainable economic sector.
In 2011 our effort toward greater food security and crop diversification extended into the urban centers of two small towns in the Pacific region and the capital city of Managua. A grant from SOSTENICA made possible the establishment of thirty kitchen gardens and a community garden, providing urban families with the opportunity to harvest a portion of their own food, or earn a small income, from their patio. SOSTENICA plans to continue supporting both rural and urban diversified sustainable agriculture.
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