from envio, july 2003:
[on urbanization]: The invasion of trans-national companies stimulates migratory movement in various ways. To be more competitive, landowners in poor countries acquire more land, mechanize agricultural work, introduce high-yield seed varieties and apply industrially produced inputs. All of these transnational-inspired novelties make a large part of rural labor redundant and also leave small producers at a disadvantage by reducing the prices of agricultural production. Those displaced seek employment in other areas of the country as well as abroad.
(...) This growing outflow of people from our countryside is considerably reducing the rural population’s overall weight and is a symptom of well-known changes caused by various factors, of which rural unemployment, most recently aggravated by the coffee crisis, is undoubtedly the most drastic.
(...) The penetration of transnational companies and their methods into rural areas undermines the peasant economy’s structures, which are based on reciprocity and established roles, replacing them with a labor market rooted in more individualistic conceptions and private profit, cultural features that trigger the uprooting of peasant populations. The increasing monetization of the economy tends to bring about the disappearance of the traditional institutions based on family networks and community solidarity that have provided the social infrastructure for many other exchanges. Wages as the exclusive mediator of all labor purchases erodes such rural institutions as the practice of bartering for services with no monetary exchange involved. Although this deterioration of the peasant economy’s structures is perhaps not quite so attributable to the transnationals in Nicaragua’s case, it is already palpable.
(...) [free trade zones´ role in this] Some of the maquilas and other foreign companies also produce goods that compete with those manufactured by local industry while familiarizing their workers with certain goods not within their financial reach. In short, these companies displace labor while at the same time whetting the national appetite for a new range of consumer goods. The result is an uprooted population group prone to migrate because it cannot attain the living standard to which it aspires and ideological links have been forged with the places from which the capital originated.
(...) [education as path to mobility] The 2001 living standards survey conducted by Nicaragua’s National Institute of Statistics and Censuses contains figures on almost 900 emigrants, provided by relatives responding to the census. Of the 52 who are university graduates, only 25% are working abroad in jobs that correspond to their professional qualifications. Another 13.5% work as waiters, cooks, nannies and above all salespeople; 19% work as carpenters, cabinetmakers, painters, mechanics, electricians and particularly foremen; and 21% as menial workers, domestics, doormen, launderers, agricultural laborers, security guards and unskilled construction workers.