| With these pictures and stories we wish to introduce
you to a group of Nicaraguan farmers, their lives, hopes and aspirations.
In the region of Matagalpa in Nicaragua, where these people live,
most people are as they are: small-scale farmers living at or beneath
the poverty line, farming rain-washed mountainsides as more wealthy
ranchers and plantation owners monopolise valleys and river basins.
Typically they grow corn and beans, but all aspire to bigger things:
a few cattle, a row of coffee bushes, or a vegetable plot. Some
succeed.
Nicaragua is a paradise for humans, Nicaraguans say. In the rainy
season the mountains of Matagalpa show the truth of it, so green
and fertile do they appear. However, this picture changes drastically
in the dry season, when the soil dries out and the degradation becomes
visible.
Farming these mountains is for many a life of poverty and for
all it is a hard one. It is also unpredictable, as nature, economics
and politics play games of chance with the lives of the poor, games
that they only rarely can hope to influence. It is a life that sometimes
breeds despair but also a very necessary optimism and a great sense
of irony, humour and fun. To live this life is to be an artist at
survival, and only a survivor truly appreciates what she (or he)
has.
Most of the people you will meet in this book are community leaders
in one way or another, organisers and mainstays of associations
and cooperatives, of women’s groups and churches. We hope
that you, as we were, are impressed by the strength of their lives
as well as by the poverty.
We met them in November 2002 as part of a delegation from the
Danish Committee for Solidarity with Central America. Together with
Hedy Grønager and Lillah Emmik we were collecting inter-views
and photographs for a large photo exhibition called World Visit,
organised by the Danish development community in the summer of 2003.
We felt that the material merited a more perma-nent record - so
here it is.
We wish to thank the Matagalpa offices of the National Union of
Farmers (UNAG) and the Farm Workers’ Association (ATC) for
their hospitality, but above all Mercedes, Reynaldo, Damaso, Christina,
José, Bertilda, Fran, Ramona, Gregoria, Antonio, Nicasio,
and Francisca, who let us into their homes and lives. Not to mention
their children, who were all too often displaced from their beds
to make room for us and our overflowing camera bags and rucksacks.
Half the sale price of this book will be used to support
their continuing efforts to develop their communities.
About PROMAT
The people you have met in this book all participate in the
development project PROMAT, which is a cooperation between
the Danish Committee for Solidarity with Central America,
MAK, and two Nicaraguan farmers’ organisations; the
National Union of Farmers, UNAG, and the Farm Worker’s
Association, ATC. PROMAT is fully funded by the Danish International
Develop-ment Agency, DANIDA.
The Nicaraguan small-scale farmers and farm workers seldom
possess the capacity to manage environmentally and economic-ally
sustainable agricultural development. The reasons for this
are many and reflect the complexity of poverty. Many farmers
come from a background as labourers and subsistence farmers
and lack experience in analysing and finding solutions to
the problems they face in the emerging free market, globalised
economy. With a historical background of working in an economy
controlled either by the state og by the large landowners,
the farmers’ organisations have dealt with political
conflicts for 20 years but have not built skills in mobilising
local economic and market resources in favour of their members,
and they are inadequately trained in managing credit institutions
as well as organising their own marketing.
PROMAT works to solve these problems by strengthening the
capacity of local farmers’ associations and marketing
cooperatives affiliated to UNAG and ATC in Matagalpa. The
focus is not on providing expensive and non-sustainable professional
advisors, but on helping the farmers themselves acquire the
necessary eco-nomic and leadership skills and experiences.
The objective is to help farmers develop self-managed organisations
with the capacity to take initiatives and manage activities
related to economy in agriculture on behalf of their members.
PROMAT started in 1999 and reaches its termination in January
2004. However, the Danish Committee for Solidarity with Central
America has applied to DANIDA for a continuation of PROMAT
in order to secure the sustainability of the project activities
and experiences.
The stories in this book reflect why we think the effort
is worth continuing.
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