Love and a Machete

By Mike Danna
Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation Public Relations

A man who really loves his family, I mean really loves them, will chop sugarcane with a machete 10 hours a day in 95-degree heat.

He’ll even leave his home in Nicaragua and walk to where the work is: in Costa Rica.

Friday we toured a Costa Rican sugar operation where 20 percent of the crop is cut by hand by workers hailing almost exclusively from Nicaragua.  Nearly half of the money they earn here is sent back home to their families in Nicaragua.

As I mentioned in the post about the Nicaraguan cigar factory, labor dominated Friday’s discussion as the members of Class 13 watched dozens of Nicaraguans wielding razor-sharp machetes attacking the 12-foot stalks of cane.

The farm manager said workers get paid by the number of metric tons of cane they cut.  A good cane harvester can cut three metric tons a day.  That’s nearly 6,000 pounds of cane for which he’s paid $20 a day.

These kinds of labor costs, or lack thereof, just stagger the mind.  Like many farming operations in Central American countries, securing farm labor isn’t given much more thought than the time of day.  In fact, securing and keeping a plentiful, affordable labor force is perhaps the easiest thing about farming here.

Some class members just shook their heads when the sugar manager nonchalantly mentioned the cost of labor.  But what was most eye opening was a comment made by our guide Jenny Villalobos about why so many Nicaraguans come to Costa Rica to work.

“They come here to do the jobs no one from Costa Rica wants to do,” she said.

Sound familiar?

There are so many Nicaraguans here in Costa Rica that they threaten to outpace the domestic population in the next 20 years.  According to Villalobos, Nicaraguans account for 2 million of Costa Rica’s 5 million residents, according to the 2010 census.  That’s 40 percent and the number is growing.

The farm manager said securing labor amounts to nothing more than letting the government know that workers are needed.  A few simple documents later the Nicaraguans start flowing in.

“It just amazes me that here you can pay someone in a day what our workers make almost per hour back home,” said class member Katie Ramagos, who managers her farm’s H2A labor program.  “And the process isn’t nearly as complicated as what we go through.  They just tell the government how many they need and here they are.”

But unlike some prevailing attitudes toward workers from Mexico working on U.S. farms, Nicaraguan farm workers have melded into the Costa Rican population and are welcomed by the country.

“We really appreciate them,” Villalobos continued.  “We know that without them our farms and ranches couldn’t work.”

That sounds all too familiar as well.

Until next time…