Sandinistas Blame Rebel War : Worker Shortage Jeopardizes Coffee Harvest in Nicaragua

A shortage of workers on Nicaragua’s coffee farms is jeopardizing much of the harvest and could exacerbate an already severe financial crisis.

The leftist Sandinista government blames the shortage on the guerrilla war being waged by U.S.-backed rebels known as contras. Authorities say thousands of potential coffee pickers have had to be mobilized for defense.

In some northern coffee-growing areas, they say, rebel operations have disrupted the harvest by hampering transportation and frightening farm workers away.

Midway through the coffee-picking season, the harvest has fallen far behind schedule, some experts say. They say the crop will produce far less export revenue than planned, further enlarging a huge deficit in Nicaragua’s trade balance.

Meanwhile, the country needs export revenue to pay for fuel, replacement parts for machinery and vehicles and other essential imports.

With the cotton harvest now starting, the shortage of farm workers could become even worse in coming weeks. Coffee and cotton are Nicaragua’s two main export earners.

At El Hular, a government farm east of Managua in the mountainous province of Matagalpa, most of the coffee beans on the chest-high bushes are red, waiting to be picked. Some have waited too long and are black and shriveled.

‘200 More Needed’

Jose Angel Escobar, a harvest foreman at El Hular, said about 220 people are picking coffee on the farm.

“Two hundred more are needed,” he said.

It was lunch time in the coffee groves, and Escobar, 25, sat under a tree near a truck that had brought beans, rice and tortillas for the pickers. Someone blew a cow’s horn to call the pickers in from among the coffee bushes that covered the slopes nearby. A militiaman stood guard with an AK-47 rifle, but no one seemed worried about a possible rebel attack.

Escobar did seem worried about the manpower shortage. He said more than half of the farm’s regular workers have been mobilized to fight rebels.

“They’re going around out there mobilized in the mountains,” he said, adding that the mobilization left only about 60 regular farm workers to pick coffee at El Hular.

An additional 120 Nicaraguans from nearby cities were picking coffee in volunteer brigades, along with 44 volunteers from Greece, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Finland.

The volunteers, however, are inefficient. Escobar said most of them can pick no more than three large tins of coffee a day; an experienced farm worker can pick 12 or 14.

During the last three weeks, the government has also mustered thousands of city residents into coffee-picking brigades, but the labor shortage has persisted.

Before the harvest started, in November, the government had planned to send 20,000 high school students from Managua and other cities to help. Instead, the students were formed into militia brigades to defend the cities against what Sandinista authorities said was a possible attack by the United States.

Invasion Scare

The public fretting about an invasion has faded, but most of the students have not yet gone to pick coffee.

About three-fourths of Nicaragua’s coffee grows in Matagalpa, Jinotega, Madriz and other northern provinces. In that region, “they’ll be doing well if they reach about 60% of the projected harvest,” the expert said.

In the rest of the country, he said, about 90% of the crop will be harvested, but that is only about one-fourth of the total crop.

The official Sandinista newspaper Barricada said not long ago that reaching the national harvest goal of 1.3 million sacks of coffee “will permit Nicaragua to earn $143,650,000, which represents 35.5% of the country’s total export revenue.”

But Nicolas Bolanos, head of the Nicaraguan Coffee Growers Union, said private growers believe that the harvest will bring in about half of the goal, “with a lot of luck.”