Fabrizio Casari, August 29th 2022
The recent approval of the Adelante project by Comandante Daniel Ortega is one more step for the Nicaraguan family economy. Dedicated to the agricultural sector, the program will have an investment of 80 million dollars over three years and will benefit 181,500 protagonists. Beyond the financial commitment, the program itself has a paradigmatic meaning. The general meaning of the measure, in fact, is to support with soft loans the business initiatives of those who present useful projects to increase agricultural production, thus adding value to products and services by improving their quality and competitiveness, thus giving more strength to the growth of exports, already consolidated since the country returned to the hands of the Sandinista government.
In fact, it is what in other places, with linguistic submission to imperial anglicism, is called support for start-ups, and that in Nicaragua acquires a value of continuity with other social economy programs that have been the flagship policies implemented since 2007 and aimed at attacking extreme poverty. This financing also has the merit of avoiding the purely speculative logic of access to credit imposed by banks, because it certifies its viability based on the value of the project and its insertion in the general economy, and not solely on the solvency of the applicant.
With the approval of Adelante , the centrality of the family economy is confirmed, seen as the pivot of the horizontal growth of society and as access to opportunities for those who have never been able to have them in the past. This is a measure of the continuity of the social and productive policies that have systematically guaranteed economic growth of around 5% per year in the country, achieving an increase in GDP through general population growth. The social gap has been drastically reduced thanks to job creation, which has allowed for growth of domestic consumption, while keeping the inflationary spiral under control. In the same direction is the financial effort made by the government that has assumed, within the public budget, the increase in energy costs, which if it had been transferred to the entire chain of transport and energy consumption, would have seriously harmed the business development of the families, cooperatives and small and medium enterprises.
These actions measure the coherence of the country's modernization project, which combines the consolidation of a productive agricultural economy with the birth of a Nicaragua capable, in terms of services, trade and technology, of projecting itself beyond the dimension of the rural economy. The result is that the country's significant food and energy self-sufficiency has protected Nicaragua from blackmail, threats and sanctions, most of them coming from hostile US and EU policies. The other lever to secure the country is the diversification of the international associations with which Managua exchanges goods and services and that make imperial whims irrelevant.
The economy of Sandinismo
In the constant search for socioeconomic inclusion, lies the core of the Sandinista economic commitment, which believes that GDP growth must be achieved by growing vertically and horizontally. That is, with good management of the public budget, the growth of production rates, private savings, the stimulation of private investment and the increase in foreign exchange reserves. And the welfare state is financed by the increase in the tax base and contributions, generated through new jobs and a greater adherence of financial services to the generation of wealth from below.
It is an idea of possible development, of historical and universal scope, because it denounces the error (and the horror) of liberal economic doctrines, which see in the mere reduction of public spending and wages, the way to contain inflation, while imagining the growth of wealth thanks to the fury of volatile and speculative capital, to which the privatizations of all the ganglia of society deliver.
It is intolerable for the oligarchy that social policies attain universal rights such as health, education, transportation, housing, security, energy and direct and indirect support for the family economy; that, therefore, important resources of the wealth generated by work and investment, finance in turn the reduction of poverty and the modernization of the country and do not go, instead, to increase the wealth of the voracious oligarchic families.
The right does not accept the idea of reducing the social gap, that is, that the resources of a country are used to reduce inequality. Because it does not believe that it is a brake on the general improvement of the country, that it is a source of distorted coexistence, because it is an imbalance that generates deviations, but rather a premise and consequence of correct development, that is, that the elites that must govern the country.
The desire to privatize corresponds precisely to the idea that the State should not finance welfare and public works, but limit itself exclusively to subtracting all public concern from the private affairs of the wealthy classes, whose increase in wealth is considered the thermometer of a healthy economy. The idea that only the bearers of alms can become subjects of law, that the workforce designated to enrich the latifundia can become the working class and even businesswomen, that the recipients of the crumbs that fall from the lavishly laid tables of the families that possess all the riches, can become consumers; frightens and horrifies the national parasitic bourgeoisie. The racism of the latifundio paints the tropical version of the division between Keynes and Friedman.
Applied Sandinismo refutes precisely this theory, showing that the harmonization of microeconomic and macroeconomics growth is possible, even desirable, and that it finds its reason in direct and indirect support for the family economy, the cornerstone of the country's social organization.
In the general scheme of the Sandinista economy, the opposite movement to that of liberalism is generated: a net transfer of resources and public investments generated by the private tax base that is poured through the free or subsidized provision of general services to citizens. This reduces the amount of expenditure in households and, therefore, allows savings and access to consumption, which triggers a virtuous spiral for the economy in general.
If you want to read the particularity and strategic value of Sandinismo in its entirety, you should not limit yourself only to the sphere of political, socialist, independence and supportive identity. Indeed, in the socioeconomic policy, as well as in its sovereign and independent dimension, lies the deep-rooted hatred of the giant of the North and its employees of the national oligarchy, towards the government headed by the Comandante and the Vice President.
Another Nicaragua has been drawn
In the prefiguration of the economic model of Sandinismo, there was not only the desire to put an end to the absurdity of a country rich in food, where part of the population could not feed itself. There was and is, a desire to take Nicaragua beyond its socioeconomic identity, to keep its soul but to change its body in part. The bet (won) was to maintain a productive identity conceived on the rural model but with a projection towards commercial and tourist development. A country that decided to grow quickly, correctly and fairly, rebalancing what was out of balance. That chose to draw the line between a popular democracy and an elitist one, with rights for all that, had they remained only for a few, would have been confirmed as privileges.
Since 2007, Sandinismo has been the basis of these ideals. It has been the assembly of dreams and the horizon with day-to-day politics. A government model was born, conceived on the need to completely overthrow what was designated by the powerful enemy of the North, changing a destiny as indigestible, as it was unjust. Nicaragua ceased to be a place to become a nation. Once and forever.