Breaking the Chains: Coffee, Crisis, and Farmworker Struggle in Nicaragua

In the early 2000s the coffee crisis emerged as a central object of study for commodity chain scholars. In this paper I revisit the scene of the coffee crisis in Nicaragua to understand violent processes of devaluation and disinvestment that devastated the countryside for more than five years (2000–05). Employing a commodity disarticulations approach, I argue that conventional explanations of the coffee crisis as one of overproduction and devaluation generally failed to unravel the layered spatiality of dispossession that enables coffee chain formations. Digging below the surface text of the crisis narrative, I illustrate how the coffee crisis in the central highlands was exacerbated by an aggressive land grab by a consortium of agroindustrial capitalists called CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI that had dispossessed farmworkers of land rights and accumulated the spoils of the Sandinista-led agrarian reform over the previous decade. When CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI folded in 2000, an unemployed farmworkers movement surged to reclaim land promised to farmworkers in the popular revolution. Using this alternative reading of the crisis in Nicaragua, I aim to bring into focus the ongoing processes of dispossession that render coffee workers vulnerable to hunger, exploitation, and abuse.