Food and Revolution

In Food and Revolution, Christiane Berth traces a compelling story of food policy and hunger in Nicaragua from the 1950s to the present, finding more continuity than one might expect across diverse governments. She credits the revolutionary Sandinista government as the only one to effectively address hunger, but just from 1979 to 1981, when the Contra war, US embargo, and poor management eroded their programs. However, one lasting outcome of the Sandinista era (1979–90) was the global movement for food security, an idea incorporated into the Nicaraguan Constitution in 1987 and revived in the 1990s by reorganized peasant networks that had learned to organize during the revolution.One of Berth's most interesting contributions is her emphasis not just on the nutritional importance of food but on its cultural role. She discusses Nicaraguans as consumers, with preferences that could not be reshaped by nutritionists or revolutionary policy. Whether the Sandinistas exhorted Nicaraguans to eschew imported food as a symbol of US imperialism (corn versus wheat) or to embrace food aid that brought unfamiliar imports (Soviet canned mackerel), Nicaraguans insisted on their own, more traditional choices. A classic example is the rejection of foreign beans over the favored small red beans central to the staple beans-and-rice dish gallo pinto. The consumer, Berth contends, is a category as important as student, worker, peasant, and elite. She also devotes a chapter to the oft-neglected Caribbean coast and emphasizes the way that the burden of food procurement fell disproportionately on women.Berth describes her focus as “on the overlooked story of how food and its scarcity shaped contemporary Nicaraguan history between the 1950s and 1993” (p. 5). While other authors have addressed poverty in Nicaragua, much of their focus has been on the erosion of subsistence farming. Land tenure studies imply inequality and hunger, but Berth addresses those issues directly. Throughout much of Nicaragua's history, a basic diet of corn, beans, and rice was grown on small plots of land. But starting in the 1950s, the expansion of agricultural exports forced many campesinos off the land, fostering migration to urban areas and leading to hunger in both the countryside and poor urban neighborhoods. At the same time, a scientific approach to nutrition centered on calorie consumption, micronutrients, and protein informed the first food surveys detailing widespread malnutrition. The ruling Somoza family refused to acknowledge the problem, and because of the Cold War context, aid from the United States enabled the Nicaraguan government to mask the problem while alleviating but not eliminating hunger.When the Sandinistas came to power, they would try to address hunger by encouraging self-sufficiency rather than dependency on foreign aid. Nonetheless, damage from the war against Somoza, the Contra war, and the withdrawal of US trade and aid made them depend on help from sympathetic foreign organizations. By 1984 the country suffered a “shortage economy” in which consumers constantly did without important goods.Berth is especially good in her discussion of “the revolutionary consumer,” targeted by propaganda identifying the ideal revolutionary as one who prioritizes the revolution over personal needs and favors local products, making consumption a field of revolutionary struggle. But as the corn campaign illustrated, wheat had become not just an upper-class status symbol but a fundamental part of the average diet in popular barrios, where people ate 73 rolls and 30 tortillas a month (p. 100). Those consumers, as Berth notes, “continued to demand wheat, powdered milk, maggi soups, Gerber baby foods, and breakfast cereals” (p. 6).Food and Revolution also dispels the notion that austerity programs were a neoliberal phenomenon beginning with the governments that succeeded the Sandinistas. The Sandinista government established the first austerity program in February 1985, which eliminated most food subsidies, and ended most Sandinista food programs with a second round of structural adjustment measures in 1988, prompting the return of hunger from 1988 to 1993.The 1990 elections did not change food insecurity and hunger, leading the Violeta Chamorro government to initially address inflation and unemployment by intervening in the market to set prices, an echo of Sandinista policies. But that intervention ended by June 1993. While Unión Nacional Opositora government policies helped middle-class consumers, there was no “coherent strategy and political will for addressing malnutrition,” a description that accurately depicts the following administrations (p. 166).When Daniel Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007, his government launched a Zero Hunger program, which helped address hunger but had limited results, in no small part because it was no longer part of a broader Sandinista strategy of structural economic change. While malnutrition declined from 22.3 percent in 2007 to 16.6 percent in 2015, it “stagnated at around 17 percent between 2016 and 2018,” one of “the highest rates of malnutrition in Latin America” (p. 204).Food and Revolution is engagingly written and makes excellent use of records from such international organizations as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, German and Swiss development assistance archives, newspapers, government documents, nutritional surveys, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional leaders' autobiographies, and previously gathered testimonies from Contras, peasants, and middle- and low-ranking Sandinistas. The end result is a welcome addition to studies of Nicaragua, the Sandinista Revolution, and its aftermath

Agricultural revolution · Agriculture · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Elite · Fell · Food prices · Food security · Geography · Government (linguistics) · Green Revolution · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · History · Law