In the 1960s and 70s, Nicaragua’s economic motor—cotton—also caused some of its most vexing environmental problems. Rivers and soils were heavily polluted with agrochemicals, and ground left bare after the cotton harvest fed swirling dust storms that regularly choked the northern city of León.

When the industry collapsed in the early 1990s, crippled by Nicaragua’s civil war, falling world cotton prices and deterioration of the national economy—the dust storms subsided. But cotton’s demise contributed to an economic meltdown that has left Nicaragua one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere.

Now, 20 years later, there is only one cotton producer in Nicaragua: a small, private cooperative. The cooperative, Coproexnic, serves 42 farmers who last year sold 400,000 pounds of organically produced seed cotton on individual plots of land outside Managua.

The cooperative’s success has prompted the government to attempt a large-scale revival of Nicaragua’s cotton industry. Authorities promise that this time, though, they’ll promote an environmentally friendly approach, starting with a pilot program on 4,783 acres of land along the northern Pacific coast.

“We are going to use new technology that doesn’t poison the land, the water or the people, as the cotton industry did here in the past,” President Daniel Ortega said in a May rollout of the pilot cotton program.

Says Manuel Álvarez, president of the Union of Agricultural Producers of Nicaragua (Upanic): “We are going to try to produce cotton organically. That’s the goal.”

Green details elusive

It remains unclear, though, how the government plans to ensure cotton will make a green friendly comeback. Authorities thus far have given no sign whether cotton will be grown in accordance with an internationally recognized environmental-certification standard—organic or otherwise. To underscore their environmentally responsible intentions, they allude to plans to grow genetically modified cotton varieties. While the cultivation of cotton that has been bioengineered to produce its own pesticide can at least temporarily reduce the need for agrochemicals, many green advocates do not regard genetically modified agriculture as environmentally sustainable.

Prompting the government’s interest are world cotton prices, which reached an all-time high last year. To prime the pump, authorities have announced US$15 million in Venezuelan-supplied financing will be used to back the pilot program on the northern Pacific coast.

Working with the government, the private-sector agricultural-industry group Upanic has identified 14 small cotton producers who will participate in the pilot project. Even Upanic, however, is unclear on the details of how the government pilot project will function.

For Cirilo Otero, head of Nicaragua’s non-governmental Center for Environmental Policy Initiatives (Cipa), the idea of reviving the cotton industry is “craziness” even if the government’s intentions are green. “There is nothing intelligent about producing cotton again and maintaining a failed agro-export model,” Otero says. “This model contaminates the land, poisons workers, impoverishes the population and reduces us to producers of primary material.”

However, Javier Chamorro, executive director of the investment-promotion agency ProNicaragua, says cotton production makes more sense than ever in Nicaragua. The country’s robust, $1 billion textile and apparel industry provides a local demand for cotton that never existed here in the past. “The demand for cotton already exists in Nicaragua, but also in Central America and Mexico,” Chamorro says. “In five years, we hope to ramp up cotton production to 20,000 manzanas [34,812 acres]. The land exists and cotton production won’t compete with other food crops.”

Crop-diversification goal

In the 1970s, cotton reigned supreme, consuming some 300,000 manzanas (522,183 acres) of prime Pacific coast farmland. But by reintroducing limited cotton production, Nicaraguan farmers could avoid repeating a similar mistake now with peanut and sugarcane production, Álvarez says. The government agrees.

“The idea is to have a diversified production where we can produce sugarcane, peanuts, soy, sorghum, rice and beans and also cotton,” says Agriculture Minister Ariel Bucardo. “We don’t want to plant 300,000 manzanas of cotton again like we did in the past. That would be to fall into the same problems.”

Mike Woodard, head of the organic cotton cooperative Coproexnic, argues that organically grown cotton can generate profits and spur economic development. He says families participating in Coproexnic that have included certified-organic cotton in their crop rotation have increased their household incomes by over 40%. Cotton, Woodard adds, isn’t the only opportunity. For instance, Coproexnic exports organic sesame grown on land also used for cotton, he says: “Cotton production requires crop rotation. So when you’re producing cotton organically, that snowballs into the organic production of other food crops.”