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Describe a recent agricultural innovation in your country (include link for source and pictures)
Nutrition-Smart Agriculture: Between February 2015 and December 2019, communities in Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast improved their agricultural practices, technology, and nutritional knowledge. This allowed them to increase the production of nutrition-smart crops and products and enhance their food security and nutritional status. Predominantly smallholder-farmer associations gained capacity and technical skills in food security, nutrition, food production, post-harvest management, food processing, and marketing. A rigorous impact evaluation of the project showed agricultural productivity increased by 78%, with 10,675 families (5,188 led by women) adopting improved agricultural technologies.
Climate-Smart Farming: As part of hands-on training, farmers learned to create chemical-free insecticides and organic fertilizers, construct micro dams to capture and conserve water, build barriers to prevent soil erosion and protect crops from the increasingly erratic and extreme weather events to which Nicaragua is so vulnerable, and a host of other adaptive, climate-smart skills and approaches.
Describe describe recent environmental issues related to agriculture in your country. (include a link for source and pictures)
Deforestation: Nicaragua’s vast Caribbean forests have been destroyed by settlers clearing land for agriculture, ranchers pasturing cattle, and loggers harvesting precious wood. This deforestation has surged since 2014, when the government took direct control of Nicaragua’s national forestry agency. This environmental disaster has been fueled by corruption inside Nicaragua’s forestry agency, the Instituto Nacional Forestal (Infor), and enabled by the first family.
Water Contamination: Waterways have been contaminated by gold mining and damaging fishing practices.
Soil Erosion: Nicaragua’s major environmental problems are soil erosion, caused in part by the cultivation of annual crops on steep slopes, and depletion of upland pine forests for lumber, fuel, and human settlement.
Describe a change in food production and consumption in your country ((include link for source and pictures).
Agroecology: There has been a transition to agroecology, focusing on how the transition has been shaped by knowledge flows and intermediary actors. This approach has reached more than 13,000 smallholder farmers, boosting their income by 15 to 30%.
Food Sovereignty: Nicaragua’s food sovereignty model illustrates a system of food production that is completely antithetical to the industrial food chain. It has caused widespread disparities in hunger levels and destroyed the natural environment.
Describe a challenge of feeding the population of your country (include link for source and pictures)
Climate Change: Nicaragua is vulnerable to recurrent disasters including droughts and hurricanes, which severely damage agriculture. This climate emergency fuels food insecurity in the country.
Poverty: Almost 25 percent of families live in poverty and more than 8 percent in extreme poverty, living on less than US$1.25 a day. This economic hardship makes it difficult for many Nicaraguans to afford adequate food.
Malnutrition: The State of Food and Nutritional Security report showed a 17.8 percent prevalence rate of malnutrition in the population during 2020-2022. This indicates a significant portion of the population is not getting enough nutrients.
Dependence on International Food Industries: The pandemic has highlighted the ill of countries becoming too dependent on large international food industries and their international supply chains. For decades, governments did little to protect small farms and food producers which were pushed out of business by these growing dysfunctional corporate giants.
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