Nicaragua's Great Leap Forward (Time)

In Nicaragua's impoverished countryside, peasants toil under the sun using the same farming techniques as their ancestors did 300 years ago. Shuffling through small plots of land, farmers use a stick to poke holes in the ground into which seeds are dropped, before scraping the dirt back into place with their foot. Then it's time to pray for rain and hope God delivers consistently through the germination period. It's hard to imagine Nicaragua's rustic peasants being called on to save the day as the global food crisis has doubled average food prices in Latin America over the past year. But riding the campesinos to the rescue is exactly what President Daniel Ortega aims to do in his bid to assume a regional leadership role in confronting the food crisis.

The former revolutionary has promised to make Nicaragua, a country that has experienced famine in recent years, the great breadbasket to supply all of Central America and his leftist allies further south. And he's calling on Nicaraguan farmers to rise to the challenge.

"Our great challenge, our great battle, is to produce food in Nicaragua," Ortega said. "We have to fill Nicaragua with food, even in our yards at home, we have to plant a little bit of beans and corn. This will mean income, and will assure us food... it will allow us to export to international markets, to the rich countries that have money to pay for these products."

Ortega had earlier signed a food-security pact with his fellow travelers in the ALBA alliance, a socialist cooperation agreement between Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia. ALBA is blaming the food crisis on the "tyranny of global capitalism," and is using the situation as a teaching moment for its regional propaganda campaign.

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"The fact that no modernization, no technology and no industry has ever arrived in Nicaragua is now a great advantage for the country," says Cirilo Otero, head of the Center for Research on Environmental Policy. With rich volcanic soils, some 443,000 hectares of fallow farm land waiting to be put back to work, and a long agricultural tradition of growing basic food products, Nicaragua "has the best conditions in Central America" to become a regional breadbasket, Otero says.

"Nicaragua's weakness has become its strength," adds Ivan Saballos, former director of the national export promotion agency, in reference to Nicaragua's dramatic increase in food exports to other Central American countries. "There will never be an industrial revolution here. That would be giving up our competitive advantage."

Otero, however, stresses that Nicaragua must first invest massive amounts of money into agricultural credits, transport infrastructure and education, as well as resolve the land disputes left over from the Sandinista confiscations in the 1980s. More basically, he says, Nicaragua needs a plan — something he claims the Ortega government has not articulated, despite its political pomp. Without one, the agricultural expert says, Ortega is just "promising others something he hasn't been able to do at home."

For the complete article, go to http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1738460,00.html?xid=rss-wo...