Thoughts on the Final Presentations:
This last week of classes we have been presenting our final group projects. There have been a variety of projects, to name a few: The Role of Alcohol Consumption in Nicaragua, Cross-Cultural Maternal Mental Health, and Cooperatives in Nicaragua. This blog post however will be focusing on the latter of these three; this presentation was given by Eric Greenlee and Titus Kabega.
A cooperative is an organization that is run together by several members who also distribute the profits amongst themselves. In the case of this presentation, the cooperatives they focused on were specifically joint run farms. Because agriculture is so engrained in Nicaragua's economy this is a very important topic. Many individual's make their living and get food for themselves and their families through farming, thus being able to make and maximize profits is crucial to their wellbeing. Titus and Eric spoke a lot about the difficulties that come with being a smallholder farmer and ways in which the cooperative model can be improved.
A few of the major problems that smallholder farmers in Nicaragua face are: their lack of access to credit, the amount of land they possess, and the distribution of their profits. To elaborate a little more, their data showed that most of the money they were making was going towards buying food for themselves and family. This makes their life harder because it means that they have little wiggle room to dedicate money to anything else, but food. Due to this it becomes difficult to afford things that would otherwise improve their quality of life. Their lack of access to credit furthers this problem because it keeps them stuck in this constant cycle of barely making ends meet. Another related problem is that they do not possess enough land to dedicate their farms to both sustaining themselves and selling crops. Instead, they often have to make a choice about how they will utilize the land they have.
Titus and Eric explained that the issue of having small amounts of land is an interesting one. This is because the cooperative model of business allows for a fix that works perfectly in an agricultural economy such as the one in Nicaragua. By having several smallholder farmers team up, they collectively have more land to cultivate and dedicate to making profits. However, this alone cannot solve the issue because through the distribution of profits they would most likely still be getting the same income as they would alone. This is where Eric and Titus said that the cooperative model could be tweaked to maximize the amount of profits made for crops. For example, they could combine another portion of their money to afford a unified storage of their crops once they have been harvested. This would not only allow them to keep them fresh and sellable for longer, but they could also look at market trends and pick the best time to sell these crops. A similar approach could be taken for the purchasing of agricultural products such as seeds and fertilizer because buying in bulk would lower the cost of these items.
While they did state that their data was not as specific as they would have liked to the parts of Nicaragua that we will be visiting in December (this is mainly due to issues of lack of research into these small towns), I found their insights to be interesting and hopeful. This is because it suggests that Nicaraguans do not have to heavily industrialize in order to improve their quality of life. This is great because it means that they do not have to wait on tons of government money/funding and it also means that they could avoid things such as pollution and deforestation.
Final Reflections
I came into this class to not only be more prepared for the upcoming trip to Nicaragua, but also because I was hoping that it would help me understand if service trips were in fact some type of solution. I believe that The Politics and Ethics of Development in Latin America: The Nicaraguan Context has allowed me to gain more clarity on this subject. While I do not have a definitive answer yet, I am more hopeful than I was a few months ago. Throughout this course one of the many things that has been made clear is that adequate preparation/education can make all the difference between mutual benefit/exchange and a glorified tourist visit. I also think it is impossible to measure the effectiveness of this type of approach until the trip is actually over; however, after speaking with students who have been on this trip before, I believe that this trip will be special and a lot of that is because of everything that we learned in this course. I also feel more prepared for this trip than I did a few months ago and not to mention more excited than ever to be in Nicaragua. With all this research comes a certain type of respect, admiration, and curiosity to experience and see at least a part of what I have been reading about. I am still a little nervous about possibly doing damage even with all of our good intentions, however, I think this will always exist on some level-even when we are in Nicaragua maybe especially when we are in Nicaragua. But maybe this is not a bad thing, perhaps this nervousness is just an awareness of how complex these trips are and in the end it is this very nervousness that will help prevent us from doing damage.