Coffee crises

Coffee pickers consider return to roadsides

Thousands of desperate coffee workers are threatening to return to major intersections and the roadside along the Pan-American highway in northern Nicaragua.

Text and photo: Erika Brenner, MS information worker in Nicaragua

11. September 2003

Thousands of desperate coffee workers are threatening to return to major intersections and the roadside along the Pan-American highway in northern Nicaragua. Only a month ago, the government narrowly averted a march to Managua, by re-working the agreement it made with coffee workers brought to desperation by the collapse in world coffee prices.

This situation has sent desperate coffeeworkers on marches and roadblocks three years in a row, always with the same result: the government promises jobs; financing, land, food. Each times it fails, only partly accomplishing agreements. Also this year; the government has only progressed somewhat with regards to access to land.

- The government only used the agreements the neutralise the mobilisation; real intentions of fulfilling the promises from part of the officials are weak, says Xavier Pérez, director of the Nicaraguan Centre of Human Rights (CENIDH).

The unfulfilled agreements has left the workers in a dead-end situation; they have no other option but to set off for the roadside again, states the director whose organisation as perhaps the only one, has been monitoring the situation of the coffeepickers since the last agreement was signed the 8^th of August.

A recent follow-up gave the following failure of delivery of promises:

Jobs
The government has, as promised, created some 3,350 temporary jobs, until the workers supposedly could return to the coffee plantations in October. But to date the government has sent only sufficient funds to cover the wages of 2,500 workers for one week at only US$9.00 each, leaving some 900 head of families without a salary.

Food packages
The government was also supposed to deliver food packages consisting of rice, oil, beans, sugar and cereal to the starving families. According to Pérez, the packages, which might be delivered in two weeks, will only consist of rice, oil and cereals. This selection does not correspond to the basic alimentary basket and the coffeeworkers are refusing the offer, saying that not even the dogs of the ministers would eat this food.

Health care
With regards to health-care not one of the promised medical brigades has visited the suffering zone and according to the investigation made by the CENIDH, 29 children are suffering from extremely serious health problems.

These infants are all children of single, unemployed mothers "who have nothing", as Pérez says, thus representing the extreme bottom-line of the 800 000 Nicaraguans who live in extreme poverty.
Due to this "situation of emergency", CENIDH for the second time is asking the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (CIDH) to oblige the Nicaraguan government to take immediate action, mostly in favour of the sick children.

- The government should take responsibility of the situation under all circumstances, says Pérez, with or without agreements, referring to a UN resolution of 1969 which among other things states that any society should guarantee its members adequate nutrition and health-care.

Pérez, nevertheless, is not expecting a solution neither in near nor in more distant future. Since he sees no possibilities of reactivation of the coffee production, other measures have to be taken.
The people must be fed and their health taken care of, here and now, and, obviously, the government also has to fulfil the other components of the agreement which consists of work, seeds and land, housing and education.

- Otherwise we will have cyclic mobilisation, every three or four months, the director of the human rights organisation predicts.