A major step forward for the revolution AT THE START OF 1986, a new agrarian reform law was enacted. It codified the changes in distribution of the land that were initiated in practice in 1985 and opened the way for extending them. In the new assemblies of poor peasants getting land, two slogans predominate: "In Nicaragua no peasant will be left without land," and "We want the land and guns, to produce and fight."
In addition, the National Union of Farmers and Stock Raisers (UNAG) is building a first national congress of peasants on this question, which is to take place April 25-26 in Managua.
The tone has been set. Defence of the revolution against the military campaign of the contras and access to the land for thousands of families are the two sides of the policy of the Sandinista revolutionary leadership.
The following article on this process is from the March 29 issue of La Breche, the French language newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (PSO/SAP), Swiss section of the Fourth International.
NICARAGUA property of Somoza and his clan were confiscated. It was transferred to the People's Property Sector(APP), which amounted to nationalization. The holdings of the Somozaists were concentrated in the production of sugar, rice, tobacco and large-scale stock-raising. This initial measure, therefore, represented a blow to the very big, often absentee, landlords (latifundistas).
On the other hand, the capitalists remained very powerful in the production of coffee, cotton, and in large-scale stock-raising, which are major sources of foreign currency.
The Sandinista government is going to offer easier access to credit, including for big producers. It is lowering land rents for the benefit of various types of tenant farmers and sharecroppers. It is taking control of the export of agricultural products and organizing a distribution circuit to supply the peasants.
At the same time, the government is encouraging peasants to organize to defend their interests, first of all in a common organization. Then the agricultural laborers will have their Association of Workers on the Land (ACT), and the small and middle peasants will have their UNAG, which was set up in May 1981. (1) The course of the FSLN's agrarian reform
In July 1981, the first agrarian law was enacted. One of its objectives was to go after big landowners who were not producing enough. This law made it possible to confiscate land left lying fallow by owners holding more than 350 hectares of land on the Pacific Coast and 750 hectares on the Atlantic Coast. (2)
The tracts expropriated will increase the stock of lands distributed to production cooperatives and to service and credit cooperatives (which do not produce in common but cooperate in receiving technical assislies in the cooperatives among the small producers. "
2. Figures provided by the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA) at the end of 1985 americana' January 30, 1986, show very and cited in Infopress Centroclearly the evolution of the agrarian structure after the Sandinista victory. In 1978, according to a study by the Center for Research and Study in Agrarian Reform (CIERA), the available agricultural land was entirely private and more than half of this (52%) was large holdings. This private sector had been reduced by 60% by the end of 1985. According to the statistical data published in the bulletin of the Agencia Nueva Nicaragua (ANN), published in Paris on March 22, 1986, the big agricultural and stock-raising estates represented only 11% of the country's land under production in 1985; and in 1986, that will be only 9.5%. On the other hand, the small owners with less than 7 hectares, who held 2% of the land in 1979, today hold 30%.
13
CHARLES ANDRE UDRY
The agrarian reform is central to the social and political transformations in Nicaragua. It could hardly be otherwise given the weight of the agricultural sector. Some 50% of the economically active population are employed on the land, and they produce 80% of the volume of products. Four-fifths of Nicaragua's exports are agricultural.
The agrarian reform does not involve only the forms of redistributing the land (individual plots, cooperatives, state farms) but also access for the rural population to services (health, education, technical aid). Finally it offers dignity: "being able to go to the banks and make yourself at home and not just be hustled out," "the right to discuss prices without facing repression" - that is the way this big transformation looks to small farmers.
When it took power in July 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) opted for an original road in applying agrarian reform. That was for various reasons. They included the following: the type of alliance forged in the struggle against Somoza (involving middle peasants and capitalist peasants), the role of the middle peasants and the small capitalist peasants in the production of export crops (coffee and cotton); the export crops (corree and colon), the
International Viewpoint 21 April 1986 demands of rebuilding a country devastated by civil war and the urgency of getting a productive effort from these layers of export producers; the scarcity of professionals and technical . resources; the necessity of getting financial aid from diversified sources in order to stave off financial strangulation by imperialism; the conclusions drawn from the difficulties encountered by other agrarian reforms. Finally, the FSLN knew that the United States would launch a military counteroffensive. That happened in 1982.
So, at the beginning, only the
1. The UNAG has 124,000 members, who produce 65% of the coffee, 68% of the meat, 60% of the cotton, 83% of the maize, 98% of the beans and all of the vegetables produced in the country. This union brings together small individual farmers, as well as those organized in cooperatives; middle-sized land owners, some of whom employ agricultural wage earners; and some big capitalist landowners. Last year, the cotton planters in the Chinandega region, who had previously belonged to the Supreme Council of Private Enteprise (COSEP) joined UNAG. While maintaining this unity in the name of an "alliance of producers," UNAG aims above all to defend the interests of the small peasants. This is apparent from the statements of the
Daniel Nunez, who eyes and the heart of the poorest peasants and an indefatigable force acting on their behalf ... We want this to be clear once and for all for everybody, our main strength
The new reform will strengthen the revolution's popular base (DR)
tance and credits).
Thus, Nicaragua has an agrarian structure in which state ownership is in the minority. However, around the APP, big agri-industrial projects have built up, which have not always delivered the results counted on.
Alongside the APP, an associative sector has taken form. At the end of 1985, these cooperatives occupied 19% of the land, the same as the APP. There also remained a strong, heterogeneous private sector, in which small and middle peasants (holdings under 140 hectares) occupied 38% of the land, and big landowners, 24%.
In 1983, e pecially in the east and north of the country, the Sandinista government speeded up the handing over of land titles to the poor peasants. In many cases, it simply legalized "wildcat" land occupations. Between 1981 and 1985, land was distributed in various forms (cooperatives, individual ownership, ownership by ethnic communities), to 47,000 families in the central zone (Matagalpa, Esteli, Chontales), to 20,000 families in the Pacific zone (Leon, Managua, Masaya) and 8,400 in the Atlantic zone (Zelaya, Rio San Juan). (3)
The 1981 agrarian reform law was becoming a real obstacle to poor peasants and agricultural workers gaining access to the land. It could have endangered the defence of the revolution by undermining the regime's peasant base. (4)
The new law, which is the result of experiments in various regions including Masaya, removes the threshold of 350 and 750 hectares above which uncultivated land could be confiscated. In fact, a lot of landowners with less land left a part of it fallow.
From now on, big landowners 14 who do not plan for more or less efficient production can be expropriated. In some cases, this can be done without compensation. In others, compensation will be given in the form of Agrarian Reform Bonds. The amount of the compensation will be calculated on the basis of the last three years' tax statements. So, the tax evaders will get their just deserts! A weapon for defending the revolution
The land will be distributed in the following order: to tenants and sharecroppers, to landless peasants or those without enough land to provide subsistence for their families, to peasant cooperatives and to families that have lost relatives in fighting the contras.
Agricultural workers employed on state farms are also demanding private plots to grow produce for their own consumption. "Sufficient land" is to be put at the disposition of the Miskitos, Sumos, Ramas and other ethnic groups on the Atlantic coast.
There are several reasons for this new stage of the agrarian reform.
Either "spontaneously," or because the government evacuated them, some 250,000 peasants have left the regions hardest hit by the war. The demand for land could only mount. Left unanswered, it would threaten to disorganize still more the productive effort based on the alliance between the APP, the cooperatives and the multiform private sector. • If the land were not distributed, the influx of peasants into the cities - above all Managua - would only swell. This would further increase shortages of goods and services and reduce productive work in agriculture.
According to the minister of agriculture, Jaime Wheelock, the agrarian reform has still not answered the pressing problems of 20% of the peasant population who have no land or suffer from a severe lack of it.
The distribution of the land - and of guns to defend it — is a social and political weapon against those inside the country and outside of it who want to strangle the revolution.
The landowners who have gotten generous credits from the national financial system and have taken advantage of this to export their capital or waste it, should be punished.
The Nicaraguan agrarian reform is being carried out in the context of a war economy where a major part of the budget is alloted to the military effort. This complicates what is already by nature a complicated task - the transformation of the countryside.
The new agrarian reform law, therefore, is only one element in solving a delicate equation. The production and property relations have to be changed in agriculture at tempos and by means that will assure the maintenance and growth of production. At the same time, this process has to be compatible with holding the support of the middle peasants for the Sandinista revolution. It is, moreover, necessary to strengthen the alliance between the workers (both agricultural and industrial) with broad strata of the peasantry in a context where industrial and technical aid to agriculture remains very weak. (6)
3. Since 1981, the agrarian reform has made possible the distribution more than 2 million hectares to 83,167 families. This involved expropriating the lands of 490 landowners.
Sandinista leaders, over say that the 1981 law "was no longer functional," in particular to meet the demands for land by 40,000 peasant families who had none, or not enough.
In this regard, the chairperson of UNAG, Daniel Nunez, proposed that this organization oppose the payment in dollars of export bonuses to farmers. In fact, such currency has gone in large amounts biggest producers. Nuner argued that these payments should be made in cordobas, the national currency, and that the government should keep its dollars for building up the infrastructure, for social projects, or for importing agricultural equipment.
6. Putting his finger on the problem of relations between the cities and the countryside, Comandante Victor Tirado said at a UNAG assembly in January that an aspect of the worker-peasant alliance was "to fight speculators, to make sure DO.S that supplies reach those for whom they are really intended, that the workers' movement produces products that reach the peasants at a just price and, vice versa, that the peasant movement produces the essential foods and gets them to the workers' movement at a fair price. "
International Viewpoint 21 April 1986