The department of Matagalpa has 14 municipalities and has administrative functions in the municipality of Waslala, on the North Caribbean Coast, and Paiwas, in the jurisdiction of the South Caribbean Coast. San Ramon, a quaint location that promotes alternative economies to aid the survival of its people, lies between these municipalities.
Besides being a tourist town, San Ramon promotes non-traditional crops. One of these crops is the passion fruit, which is positioning itself as the second most important product in their economy, after coffee.
The cultivation of passion fruit started when there was a coffee crisis, after a group of seven producers, hit by the low coffee prices in the international markets, decided to seek an alternative to face the situation and began growing passion fruit. No one knew how to grow it, but they quickly learned.
Another problem they had was finding a market for the fruit, but they gradually opened doors in different Central American markets, such as Costa Rica and El Salvador. Now there are more than one hundred producers engaged in this crop and they have a cooperative that collects all the passion fruit and distributes it to different markets around the country.
Members of the Passion Fruit Cooperative in San Ramon, Comanor, have stated that they have made alliances with organizations and state institutions to certify that the farms are producing passion fruit via good agricultural practices.
Source: elnuevodiario.com