Links between land access, land use, and hunger in today’s neoliberal Nicaragua

Despite a contemporary push to end hunger in rural spaces of Nicaragua, many people continue to experience hunger regularly as an outcome of power and asset inequalities that reflect contemporary agrarian policies and the persistence of hierarchal social relations through time. In this chapter we use data from six rural villages in the municipality of Somoto in the dry northwest of Nicaragua (and then compare two of those communities) to examine links between smallholder food insecurity and land access and tenure. Our findings, based on a household survey of 120 families in 2014 and 15 in-depth, semistructured interviews and 3 focus groups in 2015, show that food insecurity is a widespread problem in the study communities and, regardless of political alignments or current land-tenure arrangements, hunger emerges as a transversal problem among smallholders and the rural landless.