Nicaraguans Plant the Seeds of Recovery

Just two weeks after torrential rain from tropical storm Mitch sent two-thirds of his coffee bushes sliding down a hillside, Pascual Salas went trudging back up that same foggy slope to try again--this time planting red beans.

The wiry farmer was struggling to ensure survival for his family of eight girls. But in the process he has become an important figure in a much larger cause.

Emergency food aid sent to Central America after last fall’s storm is in danger of running out before the main harvest in July and August. And the isolated Isabelia Range, where Salas lives, is the only place where farmers stand much chance of making up the shortfall because it is the only part of the battered region that gets much rain at the beginning of the year.

With only machetes to clear the brush and sharpened broom handles called estacas for planting, a legion of peasant farmers like Salas is trying to grow enough beans--a main source of protein for Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador--until that main, midyear harvest.

With some unaccustomed government attention and a bit of luck, they may succeed.

The story of such peasant farmers is just one element of Central America’s long-term struggle to survive Mitch. The most devastating natural disaster here in two centuries killed more than 9,000 people, destroyed farmland and homes, and washed out more than 100 bridges, schools and hospitals.

Families Weigh Options

Slowly, painfully and often without much help, Central Americans are trying to rebuild. From farmhands to factory workers, they are trying to replace homes and livelihoods. Many are reevaluating dreams for their children, weighing the family’s need for breadwinners against the costs and prospects of education.

The chronicle of their struggle begins in this tropical Appalachia dotted with wood-plank cabins, where rough hands coax food from the thin topsoil.

None of Mitch’s victims died here. In these mountains, the victims were the living.

Mitch struck after a year of drought and just as folks were about to harvest their biggest cash crop--coffee. It also ruined about half the corn and three-fourths of the beans that they normally would eat and store for seed. As a result, many families are eating only once a day--as they must do all too often anyway in Central America’s hardscrabble hamlets.

Salas quickly salvaged what little coffee he could, sold it, bought seed and, as soon as the mud had dried enough, was out with his four teenage daughters planting beans.

“I’m trying to recover a little of what I lost,” Salas said, tugging at the bill of his baseball cap.

That sentiment is echoed by other farmers across garden-sized plots here.

Their focus is on the red silk bean, a remarkable legume that softens enough to eat after just an hour and a half of cooking. Unlike other beans, it retains its texture through reheatings. Thus, it is perfectly suited to the Central American countryside, where families must gather wood to keep the cooking fire burning. By cooking a big batch of beans and reheating them for several days, they save fuel and time.

Tradition-bound peasants here are the only ones who grow the red silk bean, and they won’t eat other kinds.

Governments and relief agencies can import corn and rice to help feed Central Americans. But the beans must be grown locally, in fields clinging to panoramic hills that would not be farmed in countries with the luxury of worrying about erosion. Even in the best of times, Nicaragua is not such a country. It certainly isn’t now.

“Our only option is the apante harvest,” the bean crop planted at the end of the year for harvest this month and next, said Irwin Gutierrez, supervisor of rural extension services at the Nicaraguan Agriculture Ministry.

Nicaragua’s normal apante harvest would satisfy five months of domestic demand and provide enough seed for planting in May. An abundant harvest, however, would leave enough beans to export to its neighbors, in the process solving the region’s shortage and helping farmers recover their 1998 losses.

Focus of Government Aid

Matagalpa, the province that includes Las Escaleras, yields about 60% of the apante harvest, permitting the Nicaraguan government to concentrate its help here.

It offered seed, fertilizer, insecticide, a machete, a file to sharpen it and a pair of boots to each farmer. Farmers can pay back the loan with twice as much seed as they received, plus a nominal interest payment. In addition, farmers who can meet rigid quality standards can sell their seed to the government for a higher price than they would receive on the market.

Aid organizations such as CARE arranged for farmers who lost their crops elsewhere to plant land here that otherwise would lie fallow.

Salas was among the fortunate--or farsighted--farmers who, without waiting for the government, sowed early on rented land and appear likely to have a good harvest. Although his own land will require hard work to become useful again, he was able to rent a field just around the bend from the dirt-floor wooden house he shares with his wife and daughters, ages 1 to 16.

He proudly pointed out his bean patch, a square colored the unmistakable green of tender shoots, barely visible from the dirt road that winds up and down Las Escaleras, so steep its name means the Stairsteps.

“If the price stays high because of the scarcity, I can make up part of what I lost on the coffee,” Salas said. “The poor man has to find a way out.”

Less lucky farmers struggled to get seed on time. Shortages and bureaucracy forced many to plant late in December--far later than they would have liked to be sure of getting enough rain. As the season goes on, rain tends to be less frequent.

“We pray that God sends us a little rain, not too little and not too much,” said resident Angela del Carmen Moran, leaning on a rough wooden table that, along with a bench and two stools, is her only furniture.

Trinidad Rayos, a government agricultural expert, added: “If there is no water, we will have done nothing.”

Normally, Nicaragua has three harvests in different regions at different times of the year. If one is bad, another usually compensates. But even before Mitch, drought had damaged Nicaragua’s 1998 crops.

Then, in late October and early November, Mitch washed away much of the remaining crops in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, or pounded them into the soil, causing nearly $1 billion in losses. Half of Nicaragua’s crop and three-quarters of Honduras’ were destroyed.

In western Honduras, cornstalks lay broken on the ground, their ears rotting in mud puddles. In Nicaragua, just south of Las Escaleras in Sebaco, bean vines survived, but the rain battered off all their flowers--ensuring there would be no harvest.

Elsewhere, Mitch rearranged the landscape. Central American governments estimate that millions of acres of farmland were damaged.

A Loan of Farmland

On the shores of Lake Managua in central Nicaragua, Teofilo Orozco had grown corn and beans on five acres of rich bottom land with a view of the brilliant sunsets over the cone of the Momotombo Volcano. But Mitch turned the Mojarras River into a torrent, and when it subsided, the river had changed course. It took Orozco’s field and left him with the old, rocky riverbed, too sandy for planting.

Now, Orozco is cutting back scrub and tossing away rocks on 12 acres lent him by a neighbor who is too old to farm. That will take him until the May planting time.

Elsewhere in Central America, farmers will be doing much the same thing.

In the meantime, the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Managua, which is in charge of Nicaragua’s relief distribution, has gained promises of six months of international food aid--corn, rice and canned goods for the worst-hit regions.

Because Matagalpa province, where Salas lives, is a major producer of coffee, Nicaragua’s most lucrative export crop, its roads were among the first to be reopened.

However, roadwork stopped at the edge of coffee country, leaving many bean farmers cut off. That’s typical of an area used to government neglect. Farmers have grumbled, for instance, that the government has not regulated middlemen who buy crops at a low price and sell seed high.

The government says it now is on the farmers’ side. But turning lofty plans into real help for real people became an enormous quest for agricultural expert Rayos.

“This guy has been running all over the countryside trying to find seed for us,” farmer Marco Palacio said of Rayos. Even though rain diminishes as the season goes on, such farmers had little choice but to find seed and plant it.

Relief agencies pitched in. At the El Lular plantation near Las Escaleras, the 65 employee-owners were too busy with their coffee crop to work their individual subsistence plots. So, under a CARE-sponsored program, they agreed to lend the land free to farmers who lost crops.

CARE arranged for 3,000 acres to be lent to farmers such as cousins Ruben and Pedro Centeno, said Hugo Lopez, supervisor of CARE’s agricultural project in Matagalpa.

“Our land just slid down the hill, bean plants and all,” 22-year-old Ruben Centeno said. “We have to find something to do.”

They cleared land throughout much of December, realizing that they would be planting late. Yet it was their only chance to recover their losses.

“This will guarantee them food for the summer and seed for next winter,” Lopez said. “It mitigates the national problem. Instead of being a burden, these people become a help.”

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How to Help

Monetary donations are being accepted by these Los Angeles groups to help transport supplies to Central America and to provide other aid to victims of tropical storm Mitch:

United Way. Make checks out to United Way, Help Central America, 523 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, CA 90014.

The Consulate of Nicaragua. Make checks out to Nicaraguan Consulate Hurricane Mitch Transportation Fund, 3303 W. Wilshire Blvd., Suite 410, Los Angeles, CA 90010.

ASOSAL, the Assn. of Salvadorans, is accepting donations for hurricane relief aid in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. Make checks out to Central American Relief Fund, 660 S. Bonnie Brae St., Los Angeles, CA 90057.