Hungry Dreams: The Failure of Food Policy in Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1990

The Sandinista Front for National Liberation, upon assuming power in 1979, declared its commitment to redressing Nicaragua's vast social and economic inequities. Yet although the Sandinistas commanded a wide range of policy instruments, the poor were substantially poorer at the end of the Sandinistas' tenure in 1990.Drawing on extensive interviews and groundbreaking archival research, Brizio N. Biondi-Morra provides an even-handed and penetrating account of how the Sandanistas' well-intentioned agricultural and economic policies ended in failure. He shows how the regime attempted to balance export volume against its political goals of domestic food security and land redistribution, and how this strategy led to strongly interventionist policies concerning exchange rates, domestic prices, wages, and interest rates. By nationalizing the banking system and marketing channels for agricultural exports, the state itself became an important producer. Biondi-Morra attributes the eventual collapse of this state enterprise to the inability of policymakers to link the "macro" design of government decisions to their consequences at the "micro" implementational level-so that policy designed in Managua actually frustrated production in the farms and plants.A major contribution to our understanding of the effective balance of macro and micro policies, Hungry Dreams will be welcomed by readers working in the areas of food policy analysis, agricultural economics, rural sociology, and Latin American history, as well as anyone concerned with debates about the course and the consequences of the Nicaraguan Revolution.

Frontmatter --; Contents --; Tables and Figures --; Acknowledgments --; Bibliographical Note --; Abbreviations --; I. Introduction --; 2. Food Policy Formulation: Objectives and Strategy --; 3. Foreign Exchange --; 4. Food Prices --; 5. Wages --; 6. Credit --; 7. Palliatives --; 8. Outcomes and Conclusions --; Appendix --; Index