Ownership of sea shrimp production and perceptions of economic opportunity in a Nicaraguan Miskitu village.

Abstract

This article on the catching and processing of sea shrimp investigates the relationship between differing degrees of access to the means of production and the generation of economic inequalities among the Miskitu people of Kakabila in Nicaragua's Pearl Lagoon. The widely held Kakabila notion that the production of wealth among some entails a concomitant impoverishment of others(Foster's “image of the limited good”) is shown, in the context of the local sea-shrimp economy, to have a verifiable basis in truth.