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Land Activities in
Nicaragua
Agriculture
The country's relatively low population density and its wealth of
land resources have been the promise for solving to poverty but have
also been a major cause of it. The importance of one or two crops
has meant that the country's entire economy has undergone
boom-or-bust cycles determined primarily by worldwide prices for
agriculture exports.
In1870s coffee became the country's principal crop, a position it
still held in 1992 despite the growing importance of other crops. On
the other hand, cotton also gained importance in the late 1940s, and
in 1992 was the second biggest export earner. In the early 1900s,
Nicaraguan governments were reluctant to give concessions to the
large United States banana companies, and bananas never attained the
level of prominence in Nicaragua that they reached in Nicaragua's
Central American neighbors; bananas were grown in the country,
however, and were generally the third largest export earner in the
post-World War II period. Beef and animal byproducts was the most
important agricultural export for the three centuries before the
coffee boom of the late 1800s and it still was an important
commodity in 1992.
From the end of World War II to the early 1960s, the growth and
diversification of the agricultural sector drove the nation's
economic expansion. From the early 1960s until the increased
fighting in 1977 caused by the Sandinista revolution, agriculture
remained a robust and significant part of the economy, although its
growth slowed somewhat in comparison with the previous postwar
decades. Statistics for the next fifteen years, however, show
stagnation and then a drop in agricultural production.
However, the agricultural sector declined precipitously in the
1980s. Until the late 1970s, Nicaragua's agricultural export system
generated 40 percent of the country's GDP, 60 percent of national
employment, and 80 percent of foreign exchange earnings. Throughout
the 1980s, the Contras destroyed or disrupted coffee harvests as
well as other key income-generating crops. Private industry stopped
investing in agriculture because of uncertain returns. Land was
taken out of production of export crops to expand plantings of basic
grain. Many coffee plants succumbed to disease.
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