Dissertation Information for Julie A. CharlipNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: Cultivating coffee: Farmers, land and money in Nicaragua, 1877-1930 Abstract: In the stereotype of nineteenth-century Latin American development, the state made public lands available for the consolidation of latifundio, displacing the peasantry and launching the incipient struggle of the boss and the newly proletarianized worker. For Nicaragua, however, this stereotype is wrong. This study of the coffee economy in Carazo, the first coffee-growing province in Nicaragua, reveals an economy populated by small and medium landholders, who produced most of the coffee. Access to land posed no significant problem; land was available and prices were relatively low. Furthermore, most public land did not end up in coffee production, instead remaining in the smallholder subsistence economy. Coffee growers faced not the problem of access to land but access to financing: They needed money to raise their crops, and they could not always afford to pay back their debts. While smaller farmers faced more onerous loan terms, the precarious nature of the coffee business and debt manifested itself across all size categories, with medium and large farms most likely to lose their properties. However, the land confiscated for nonpayment of debt was usually sold, rather than consolidated into latifundio, suggesting that it was more profitable to finance coffee than to produce it. This study makes use for the first time of Nicaragua's Registro de Propiedad, or property registry, and contributes to an important debate about Nicaragua's economic structure, particularly significant during the Sandinista agrarian reform, and to a revisionist view of national-period economic development in Latin America. |
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