Sandinistas Scoring Victories in ‘Coffee Battle’

Angela Davila, 18, rises at dawn each day and picks coffee beans until dusk. Working in a war zone, surrounded by armed militiamen, she fills 11 baskets a day, 10 pounds per basket, or slightly more than her own weight and nearly double her production quota.

In the language of revolutionary Nicaragua, Angela is the “vanguard” among women on this state-run collective farm. If she stays ahead in the coffee-picking competition, she will win a radio when the four-month harvest ends this month.

For four years, the Nicaraguan economy has deteriorated along with the state of its coffee farms, which earn half the country’s export dollars. Production has been disrupted by the Sandinista government’s war against U.S.-backed contras and, some producers say, by its land redistribution program.

But with the 1986-87 harvest estimated at 96 million pounds, about 10 million more than last year’s, the downward slide is being reversed. Nicaragua expects to sell $133 million in coffee abroad, its best earnings since 1984, despite a sharp decline in world prices.

The leftist government attributes the upturn to its efforts to recover abandoned farmland, put more workers in the field under army protection and get each of them to pick more coffee.

The “Coffee Battle,” as this paramilitary campaign is called, has relied more on manpower and revolutionary zeal than on technology. It has been given more national attention, if fewer resources, than the war effort.

In a recent speech to workers on this farm in northern Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega declared the harvest “a success, another victory for our people” and said that the rebels failed to disrupt it “because they are being defeated.”

Although rebel leaders have denied making systematic attacks against the coffee harvest, their forces burned 17,000 pounds of coffee beans at two cooperatives in March after telling farmers that the export crop earned money for the Sandinista army to buy weapons.

Such raids have become less frequent in the last two years, however, as the Sandinistas put more troops and militiamen in the northern war zones, where 80% of the coffee crop grows.

At the same time, the National Farmers and Cattlemen’s Union, which helps the government make agricultural policy, has campaigned to reverse a wartime migration of farmers to the cities.

“The contras are terrorists who want the peasants to abandon their land and bankrupt the country,” union president Daniel Nunez said. “We are persuading the peasants to stay and help win the war.”

About 70,000 workers have taken part in the current harvest, 8,000 more than last year, according to Julio Munoz of the Farm Workers Assn.

The government raised each picker’s workday from eight hours to 10 and the daily individual production quota from five 10-pound baskets to six. Wages were set at the equivalent of 14 cents per basket, with prizes offered for “vanguard” producers.

At La Fundadora and seven affiliated cooperatives once owned by former President Anastasio Somoza, 48 men have been drafted into the army in the last two months, and most of the 1,010 coffee workers are women and children.

Andres Herrera, production manager for the eight farms, said the construction of three day-care centers has enabled more women to work the fields and helped the farms meet their overall quota.

A sign on the wall of the La Fundadora coffee warehouse offers additional inspiration: “1987--Nobody Surrenders Here. The Fruit of Our Sacrifices Will Guide Us Down the Glorious Road to Victory. Free Fatherland or Death!”

Asked why she picked so much coffee, Davila said she had a mother and seven siblings to help support. But she was quick to add: “Nicaragua is poor. The more coffee we pick, the more foreign exchange we bring to the country.”

Coffee production still lags far behind the record 156 million pounds that Nicaragua harvested in 1982-83, the season before the war began to take its toll.

Sandinista officials say the war effort has drained much of the manpower and technical resources needed to keep plantations, roads and trucks in top condition.

Many leading private growers say there is little incentive to make new investments as long as they are required to sell their harvests to the government at controlled prices that barely exceed production costs. They say they are also discouraged by fear that the government will confiscate their land.

An agrarian reform program has distributed 40% of Nicaragua’s productive land in individual or collective titles to about 90,000 landless peasant families since the Sandinistas came to power in 1979.

“Most of this land has fallen into the hands of people who don’t know how to produce,” said Nicolas Bolanos, president of the Nicaraguan Agricultural Producers Union. “The state-managed coffee plantations are in bad shape. And the private growers are unwilling to put up the bucks to improve what might be taken away.”

The government has accused private farmers of diverting at least 4 million pounds of this year’s coffee harvest from the state-controlled export market into the black market for domestic consumption at three times the official price.

Nunez, whose union represents 124,000 small private farmers, many of them beneficiaries of land reform, says most of the big growers’ complaints would disappear if the United States cooperated.

“The principal enemy of private producers in this country is Ronald Reagan,” he said. “He has sent the contras here to destroy our farms, and his economic embargo has brought our tractors to a halt. No country involved in a war like this can bring in a decent crop.”