No tears for Nicaragua's onions.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: Sebaco, Nicaragua's sweet onion industry

The little town of Sebaco Nicaragua, is not much more than a truck stop along the Pan-American Highway. But if things go right, Sebaco could soon become the sweet-onion capital of Central America.

Agricultural experts believe that the land around Sebaco - fertile, flat, inexpensive, and low in sulfur - is among the world's best for cultivation of sweet onions. Last year, in fact, Nicaraguan sweet-onion exports jumped eightfold to 220,000 boxes, from the 30,000 boxes shipped in 1993. At an average US$17 per sixty-pound box, this comes to more than US$3.7 million in sales. Nothing to cry about.

Nicaragua's Sebaco Sweets label is already a familiar sight at Kroger's supermarket shelves up and down the U.S. East Coast. Meanwhile, independent producers, assisted by the U.S. Agency for International Development, have begun converting an obsolete, Bulgarian-built food-processing factory into a modern onion-sorting and packing facility for the entire Sebaco valley region.

The idea is to make Nicaragua the U.S.'s leading alternate source of sweet onions when Georgia's world-famous Vidalia sweet onions are not in season. This could give the Central American nation a potentially lucrative source of foreign exchange.

"Our marketing strategy is aimed at getting the American consumer to identify Sebaco valley with sweet onions as it now does with Vidalias," says Rend Ruiz Quezada, whose company, Vegetales de Valle Sebaco, employs ninety workers and currently exports 18 percent of Nicaragua's sweet onions. Adds Fernando Mansell, general manager of Manprosa, the country's largest exporter: "We have a gentleman's agreement with Georgia onion producers that we won't sell any onions within fifteen days of the beginning of their harvest."

Mansell, whose father, Samuel, started the family business thirty years ago, says Manprosa originally grew ice and cotton for local and regional markets but suffered financially through the civil war and then the U.S. embargo imposed during the Sandinistas' period of rule. In 1991 - with the embargo lifted - Manprosa began cultivating sweet onions, though almost by accident.

"McDonald's was looking for someone to grow large onions for onion rings during January and February, because in those months all they could get were storage onions, which were too small," says...