Globalisation is driven by the liberalisation of trade, investment and capital flows, as well as by rapid technological change. Barriers to internal markets for foreign products are lowered and national producers increasingly compete with imported goods. Globalisation provides new opportunities created by larger global markets, but it also leads to an increase in economic risk and enhances the vulnerability of those with few assets. Its impacts are diverse and complex, not least in Latin America, which has integrated into the global economy more rapidly than many other developing regions.

Debates and discussions about the pace and impacts of globalisation largely ignore the voices of the vulnerable, the rural and the urban poor. More attention is given to national statistics and economic theories. Nell Farrell's Nicaragua Before Now is a welcome exception. She gives centre stage to the voices of the resource-poor in Nicaragua in the months prior to their government's ratification in October 2005 of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the United States (CAFTA subsequently became CAFTA-DR when the Dominican Republic joined).

Farrell spent three months interviewing and photographing young people who would be affected by CAFTA and whose lives were already shaped by their participation in the low-wage global economy. She focused on the daily lives of workers in four distinct parts of Nicaragua: young women in the textile assembly factories (maquilas) of Managua's Free Trade Zone; dairy farmers and cattlemen in the hilly central state of Matagalpa; sugar-cane labourers in the Pacific lowlands of Chinandega; and indigenous lobster divers on the Miskito Coast. As Farrell writes, she did not seek to ‘find out if free trade is bad or good, but rather to understand the co-existence of its effects, both negative and positive’ (p. 3). Her stories, together with black-and-white photographs of the people she met, paint a vivid picture of young people whose lives were about to be affected by a trade agreement between their region and the United States.

The chapter on maquilas captures the contradictions of engagement with the global economy: workers, predominantly young women, in dreary jobs assembling clothing for export, who are at the same time ‘glad for the job, and glad for the pay’ (p. 15). Furthermore, the factory jobs contribute to indirect jobs and, hence, economic growth. Critics accuse the maquilas of plundering Nicaragua's human resources by employing undereducated people whose jobs require no education. However, Farrell interviews one female worker who is adamant that had it not been for her job in the maquila she would not have had the financial resources to get educated. In a global economy, the owners of the maquilas can and do readily move production to alternative countries, but while they remain in Nicaragua they represent for many young women the most stable employment option and a stepping stone towards better jobs.

The chapter on the cattle industry captures the daily lives of milk and beef producers in the municipality of Matiguás. Spanish colonisers settled in this region in the mid-1800s, and raising cattle has been an important economic activity ever since. It expanded in the 1940s with the increased demand for beef in the United States. Land reform during the Sandinista government alienated many in this part of Nicaragua, yet Farrell has discovered that two decades later much of the confiscated land is back in the hands of a few large landowners. Local people tended to be optimistic about the effects of CAFTA, hopeful of increased beef sales in global markets and breaking into the international market for dairy products.

The Pacific north-west of Nicaragua is the setting for the chapter on sugar. Fertile soils meant that by the first half of the twentieth century, an agro-export economy had already been established. Cotton was the most important crop until the 1980s, when overuse of pesticides, depressed global prices and the war in Nicaragua gave rise to its decline. Since then sugar cane has replaced cotton, but the region remains deeply socially polarised. Sugar cane is cut manually, which in this hot, low-lying part of Nicaragua makes the work particularly demanding. Everyday life is made more precarious by labourers' exposure to chemically contaminated soils suspected to be the cause of very high levels of renal failure and death.

The spiny lobster is one of the most traditional exports for the indigenous people on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Farrell documents the precarious lives of the men who dive to collect the lobsters. Many of the divers are indigenous Miskito, and they face the constant risk of the bends, also known as decompression sickness, more so as overfishing in the shallows means that they have to dive ever deeper to find the lobsters. The Atlantic coast of Nicaragua has also witnessed the growth of another global economic activity, albeit a more pernicious one: the trafficking of cocaine from South America to feed the almost insatiable demand in the United States. The future of lobster fishing on the Miskito coast is very uncertain, partly due to overfishing. Farrell points out that many of the lobster divers may well turn to more lucrative albeit illegal activities linked to the drug trade.

Despite the richness of her book, Farrell relies too much on her interview material. The timing of her research in Nicaragua meant that she could not document the effects of CAFTA on the lives of those she interviewed, but she could perhaps have cited the experiences of the rural and urban poor in a country such as Mexico. By 2005, Mexicans had lived for more than ten years under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. Farrell cites a report that NAFTA caused 1.5 million Mexican farmers to abandon their land; the reality, however, is more nuanced. Experts, for example, had predicted that NAFTA would decimate the lives of smallholder Mexican maize farmers, but this did not happen, and subsistence maize production continues throughout the country.

Despite this minor criticism, Farrell's book is a valuable contribution to the literature on the effects of globalisation in the developing world and she is to be commended for telling her story through the lives of the men and women she interviewed.