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Nicaragua Table of Contents

Nicaragua

Agricultural Policy

In 1979 the new Sandinista administration quickly identified food as a national priority in order that the country's chronically malnourished rural population could be fed. The government planned to increase production to attain selfsufficiency in grains by 1990. Self-sufficiency in other dietary necessities was planned for the year 2000. For a variety of reasons, however, including the private sector's retention of 60 percent of arable land, the Sandinista government continued to import food and grow cash crops. In 1993 the goal of selfsufficiency in food production was still far from being achieved.

To generate essential foreign exchange, the Ortega administration continued to support an upscale, high-tech agroexport sector, but returns on its investment diminished. By 1990 only one-quarter of the pre-1979 hectarage planted in cotton, one of the leading foreign exchange earners in the 1970s, was still under cultivation. Despite an established priority for food production, food imports to Nicaragua grew enormously from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

In general, the Sandinistas made little progress in reducing economic dependence on traditional export crops (see table 8, Appendix A). To the contrary, faced with the need for food selfsufficiency versus the need for essential foreign exchange earnings, the Ortega administration, demonstrating scant economic expertise, continued to prop up the country's traditional agroindustrial export system. They did so despite expensive foreign imports, diminished export markets, and a powerful opposing private sector. However, revenues from traditional export crops continued their rapid decline throughout the 1980s. Despite this drop, agriculture accounted for 29 percent of the GDP in 1989 and an estimated 24 percent in 1991. Agriculture still employed about 45 percent of the work force in 1991.

Data as of December 1993