Seattle group helping the poor buy land in Nicaragua

The Seattle Post Intelligencer

280-acre 'El Eden' supports 29 families

By TOM PAULSON

EDITOR'S NOTE: For decades, Seattle and the Northwest have had connections with Nicaragua in health care, economic development and political activism. During the civil war in the 1980s, many in Seattle and the Northwest became involved in the Sandinista-Contra struggle.

Some assistance projects and relationships created by those turbulent times have persisted. Meanwhile, newer bridges between the Northwest and Nicaragua are being built.

The Seattle P-I recently visited a handful of projects that represent the Northwest's continuing connection to the poorest nation in Central America.

NEAR MATAGALPA, Nicaragua -- The inequitable ownership of land has been at the root of many of Nicaragua's conflicts. Today, a little-known organization started by a Seattle attorney and community activist is working to reduce this inequity by helping the poorest of the poor buy land in these lush green hills.

"We are planting maracuya (passion fruit) as part of our plan to diversify crops," said farmer Leandro Hernandez, speaking with obvious pride while walking across a few acres of land to which he and his campesino family one day hope to hold title.

The land, for now, is owned by a Seattle non-profit organization called Agros International. Created in 1982 by Chi-Dooh "Skip" Li, a Seattle attorney, Agros bought this land for $170,000 and is selling it back to poor families who agree to make it productive.

Across the field, higher up on a hillside, Hernandez pointed to rows of tomato and jalapeno plants, as well as to the water tank they had built for irrigation. Elsewhere in this new 280-acre community, dubbed El Eden, that he and 29 other poor families recently have settled are crops of corn, avocado, beans, plantains, watermelon and coffee, some of which is headed for Camano Island Coffee Roasters.

"We will wait until the rains come, in May, to plant some of them," Hernandez said, explaining that the idea is to always have some produce to sell in the market, no matter what the season.

This is the first piece of land he -- or anyone in his family -- has ever owned and he is determined to make it a success.

"Before this, I had to rent a place for my family to live and work at a factory (farm) where I was paid 50 cordobas (less than $3) a day," he said.

With this land from Agros, he said, he makes only a little bit more money every day selling his produce. But he doesn't have to pay rent or buy food, so he is able to save money.

"I can send my children to school now," Hernandez said.

He and the other families in El Eden farm and live off the land as a sort of loan from Agros. Each family is required to pay Agros an average of $300 every year toward the purchase of the land. In less than a decade, if all goes well, the land will be theirs.

"We want to show them that they can take care of themselves and make progress on their own initiative, rather than to expect charity," said Kira Lopez, a financial manager at the Agros office in Managua.

"We have been working with this community for about 16 months," said Mario Gaitan, an agronomist and executive director of the Agros programs in Nicaragua. Gaitan and his colleagues help the farmers develop a master agricultural plan aimed at making the best use of the soil, water resources and local market demand.

"Before the Sandinistas, all the land in Nicaragua was owned by the big producers," Gaitan said.

After the revolution toppled the dictator Anastasio Somoza (who alone owned a huge chunk of the country), Gaitan said, the Sandinistas seized much of the land to redistribute it among the people. They formed farming collectives, but didn't give individuals ownership of land. There wasn't much done with legal title transfer. Many of the poor who received the land weren't trained sufficiently to take over the large farms.

The Sandinista plan largely imploded, leading to decay in the agricultural sector and increasing poverty. When conservatives regained power in 1990, their solution was to return the land to big landowners -- which threw even more peasants deeper into poverty.

"Land reform was failing," Li said.

When a friend and classmate from the University of Washington law school was killed in an El Salvador hotel while volunteering to work on land reform there, Li felt prompted to take up the cause.

"I didn't want to get involved in the politics, but I wanted to do something," said Li, who occasionally writes as a community columnist for the Seattle P-I editorial page.

After a visiting minister from Argentina spoke at his church suggesting individuals could buy land directly and give it to the poor, he started Agros to do that. Though its impetus was faith-based, Agros has no religious litmus test for deciding which families to help.

"We started in Guatemala and moved into Nicaragua in the mid-1990s," Li said.

The organization has grown very quietly, he said, into a sizable operation that is expected to reach $4 million in income by June with 30 sponsored communities throughout Latin America.

Some of the coffee beans grown by Hernandez and his neighbors in this mountain village are already showing up in Seattle cups.

"I really like what Agros is doing," said Jeff Ericson, owner of Camano Island Coffee Roasters. The company, which sells organic, shade-grown, freely traded beans, buys them from Agros-sponsored farmers in Nicaragua.

"This is not your typical charity at the trough," Ericson said. "This is about creating sustainable businesses and communities."

After examining Hernandez' jalapeno crop and some coffee plants that had recently been whacked by a tornado, Gaitan wandered back down into the center of the village. Workers were struggling to irrigate a field of young plantains effectively as the water flowed too fast here, backed up there or headed in the wrong direction.

Gaitan grabbed a hoe, began digging and deftly demonstrated how a different configuration of the ditch path allowed for better, more efficient flow. He handed back the hoe and the men went to work.

"We can help here and there," Gaitan said. "But it will be up to them for it to succeed."

TOMORROW

Efforts in Nicaragua to deal with a potentially deadly illness that overwhelms the poor country's health care system are largely the result of action by Seattle-based PATH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
LEARN MORE

agros.org: How to donate, how to get your group involved with a village, how you can work with a family and how you can help buy land and build housing.

globalpartnerships.org: Upcoming trips, how to donate, how to get news, how to get involved.

P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattlepi.com.