by Blake Schmidt

Samuel Talavera’s mountainside coffee plantation in Jinotega is smack dab in the middle of one of the world’s fastest growing tourism industries, which is why this plantation manager has banned his workers from bathing in the river – the community’s water source.
It’s also why he has invested about $2,000 in hydroelectric energy, has sown 16,000 new plants, and is building houses for his workers. He wants to get certified, not only so that he can slap the Rainforest Alliance certification sticker on his coffee for export – a huge shot in the arm for small growers marketing their coffee abroad – but also so that he can bring more visitors onto his plantation. “They’re big investments,” he said, “very difficult, but not impossible.”
Talavera, who says he reads the Rainforest Alliance’s norms like the Bible, is one of many coffee producers hoping to bank off of the country’s burgeoning tourism industry with value-added tourism. “The idea is to make a plantation for tourists,” Talavera said.
The economy is still largely feudal in parts of the Western Hemisphere’s second poorest country, and coffee continues to reign as the top export. It continues to be a key income-producer in a country where 90% of the economically active population makes less than $160 a month. Tourism, an income generator that is said to rival exports and remittances as this impoverished country’s driving force, is catching the eye of small-scale coffee growers like Talavera, who are inspired by success stories like the nearby Selva Negra Hotel in Matagalpa that have been able to attract their percentage of the 800,000 tourists that arrive here each year while also integrating development into Nicaragua’s rainforest.
The organic Matagalpa eco-lodge’s owner Mausi Kuhl, says the hotel recycles its sewage, using it to produce methane gas before running it into the plantation’s underground irrigation system.
“We’re not contaminating our rivers,” said Kuhl as she passed a pair of tourists trotting on horses alongside the road in the Selva Negra plantation. The plantation’s worm farm, which started off with 50 worms in 1993, now has 250 million of them producing castings that are worked into the farm’s soil to revitalize it. It also includes an organic farming school that has trained more than 3,000 local producers.
Nicaragua’s tourists are also helping to drive a growing demand for gourmet coffee in Nicaragua, as is evident at the Selva Negra restaurant, where visitors take in the sounds of the rainforest while sipping on a cup of hot joe.
Coffee shops are popping up throughout the country, as domestic consumption creates alternative markets for producers, which in rough times like the international coffee prices crisis of 2002 offer more stable markets than export markets.
While recent hurricanes – from 1998’s disastrous Mitch to last year’s flood-inducing Felix – have largely hindered development in places like Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean coast, the coffee-producing highlands have taken off since the covert U.S.-backed war on the Sandinista government ended in 1990.
Travelers find rich history in Nicaragua’s northern highlands. Not far from Selva Negra in the Matagalpa region, there are reminders of the recent contra war and of the insurrection against the dictator Somoza’s National Guard, like the small armored car with a cannon mounted on top rusting away at the junction on the highway that passes near the plantation entrance. Further north, visitors can trace the footsteps of former rebel turned Nicaraguan hero Augusto Sandino as he skirmished with U.S. marines in the 1920s or they can hike into the hills to see the caves where FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca hid out during the insurrection in the 1970s.
Despite the large population of demobilized soldiers from both sides during the contra war still living in the northern region, violence is rare now.
“It’s easy to catch the bad guys in the north because all the people know each other and they’re sick of war,” said Salvador Talavera, a former contra rebel commander who is now a legislator in the National Assembly. Police were quick to catch five former contra rebels allegedly involved in a recent kidnapping of a Matagalpa coffee plantation owner.
Traditionally, Nicaraguan producers would send their best coffee to markets like the United States and Europe and would keep the leftovers for the local market. But here at Selva Negra, as in many other locales, the best of their coffee is now served at their own café or sold under their farm brand name in local supermarkets.
The tourism industry here is only half the size of neighboring Costa Rica, but the potential for growth in its different branches is there for those willing to enter that trade. Compared to other Latin coffee-producing countries like Brazil, with more than double per capita consumption, and Costa Rica, where the average consumer drinks 50% more coffee than the average Nica, coffee consumption is still low.
“Nicaraguans just don’t drink that much coffee, at least good coffee,” said Jan Howard. As a journalist reporting for CNN on the contra war, Howard once spent her days picking up wounded soldiers on the side of roads and taking cover from incoming mortar rounds between filing dispatches. Today, she’s the USAID (US Agency for International Development) spokesperson in Nicaragua, which is participating in a three-year, $3.7 million program in conjunction with the New York-based environmental organization Rainforest Alliance to certify local coffee farmers while inculcating small producers with the value-added coffee culture.
The certification project – which draws matching funds from foreign companies like Mitsubishi, Kellogs, and Kraft – puts producers through an exhaustive process with rigorous inspections to make sure the coffee farms meet international standards. The local growers end up with a product that is not only fit for export, but for marketing to locals and tourists in Nicaragua. USAID has also been training local Nicaraguans as coffee tasters who will test the quality of the output from the farms they work on.
The Specialty Coffee Association of Nicaragua sent Nicaragua’s champion taster Luis Lopez to represent the country in a worldwide coffee tasting competition in Denmark. It will be Nicaragua’s second year participating.
The Association also puts on the Tasa de Excelencia (Cup of Excellence), a competition to sniff out Nicaragua’s best brew of coffee.
Juan Carlos Munguía, 29, who co-owns his plantation with his father in Jinotega, is one of many coffee producers who have returned home to the region since the war. Truckloads of troops once rolled through this guerrilla-infested region on roads that are now traversed by cargo trucks laden with coffee beans and the occasional taxi full of tourists.
Like many exiled Nicaraguans who fled to Costa Rica or Miami, Munguía returned in 1991. He built a church on the plantation’s hilltop where Sandinista helicopters once dropped supplies and troops. “We came back to serve our country,” he said.
Back in business, he now plans to establish his own coffee brand to sell domestically and eventually in his own coffee shop.