Revolutionary Roots: Coffee Cooperatives in Nicaragua

By Claire O’Connell ‘10

In June 2008, I traveled to Nicaragua with my brother, Shane O’Connell, after receiving a Richter Scholars Grant to travel  and spend the summer researching, interviewing and documenting the lives of small coffee farmers. This radio documentary is the final product of our research, and it explores the difficulties of coffee farmers and their cooperatives in post-revolution Nicaragua.

The Sandinista Revolution of the 1970s successfully toppled the Somozan dictatorship and ushered in a socialist Sandinista government in 1980. The newly instated FSLN government redistributed thousands of acres of farmland owned by the 5 percent of the population that controlled Nicaragua’s wealth, handing the land over to the poorer majority of Nicaragua. These newly made small farms were organized into government cooperatives, mostly for farming coffee. The government oversight over these cooperatives was to ensure that no corporate farms capitalized the market. Although ambitious in design, these cooperatives eventually crumbled due to internal conflicts and lack of government support. This revolution was critical to the creation and existence of coffee cooperatives today.

After the coffee crisis of the 1990s, a movement to re-unionize coffee cooperatives gained momentum in Nicaragua. Many communities decided to organize again into their own cooperatives in order to protect their land. The Sandinista revolutionary ideals have been reborn within these cooperatives that are striving to unite, educate and provide for their communities. The Sandinista belief that one is stronger in numbers, united, was essential to the creation of these cooperatives. These coffee cooperatives have unionized to access the fair trade market and are actively changing what it means to be a small farmer in the developing world. Through social programs funded by fair trade’s social premium, farmers and community members are taking the initiative to improve their communities by funding schools, public health services, and roads.

However, as these coffee unions are an extension of the ideologies of the Sandinista revolution, they also carry parallel weaknesses. A lack of transparency and corruption threatens the future of these cooperatives. Through interviews with community members, cooperative members and activists, this radio documentary examines the problems that these coffee unions face.

Listen to the radio documentary here:

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Claire O’Connell ‘10 is a Diplomacy and World Affairs Major. She can be reached at claire.c.oconnell@gmail.com. Shane O’Connell is a Recording Engineer Major at Clive Davis School of Recorded Music in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He can be reached at shane.oconnell@nyu.edu.