Small farming and radical imaginations in the Caribbean today

Abstract

Forged and still scarred by slavery, Caribbean agricultural landscapes are now being made redundant in an era of global market integration. The demise of preferential trade agreements is exposing the uncompetitiveness of the plantation sector while small farmers, still largely confined to marginal positions within highly inequitable landscapes, are being pushed into a new vulnerability by market integration, as rising food imports flood local markets. Unfortunately, political attention continues to revolve around the ailing plantation sector. In contrast, it is argued here that the current crisis of Caribbean agriculture contains a historic opportunity for restructuring in the interests of the region's small farmers and that, in the process, the sector could be helped to gain a new vitality.

Keywords

agriculture Cuba food land reform market integration plantation sector trade

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References

Various ideas and arguments presented here are developed elsewhere. See Tony Weis , `The rise, fall and future of the Jamaican peasantry', Journal of Peasant Studies (Vol. 33, no. 1, 2006), pp. 61—88; Tony Weis , `Restructuring and redundancy: the impact and illogic of neoliberal agricultural reforms in Jamaica', Journal of Agrarian Change (Vol. 4, no. 4, 2004), pp. 461—91; Tony Weis , `(Re-)making the case for land reform in Jamaica', Social and Economic Studies (Vol. 53, no. 1, 2004), pp. 35—72; Tony Weis , `Agrarian decline and breadbasket dependence in the Caribbean: confronting illusions of inevitability', Labour, Capital and Society (Vol. 36, no. 2, 2003), pp. 174—99.

These trends have been well documented by the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute, the Caribbean Commission on Health and Development and the Pan-American Health Organisation

Richard Hart , Slaves Who Abolished Slavery, Vol. II: blacks in rebellion ( Mona, Institute for Social and Economic Research, 1985), p. 336. Hart likens any European moral awakening to `pin pricks' against the pressures from slaves, in stark contrast to the liberal historiography surrounding Emancipation.

See especially Kari Levitt and Michael Witter (eds), The Critical Tradition of Caribbean Political Economy: the legacy of George Beckford ( Kingston, Ian Randle, 1996); George L. Beckford , Persistent Poverty: underdevelopment in plantation economies of the Third World (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972); Lloyd Best , `Outlines of a model of pure plantation economy', Social and Economic Studies (Vol. 17, no. 3, 1968), pp. 283—324. More recently, attention has also been drawn to the environmental implications of the plantation landscape, both on- and off-farm; see Tony Weis , `Contradictions and change in Jamaica: theorizing ecosocial resistance amidst ecological crisis', Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (Vol. 12, no. 2, 2001), pp. 85—131.

George Lamming , `Beckford and the predicaments of Caribbean culture', in Levitt and Witter, op. cit., pp. 26—7.

Fernando Funes , Luis García , Martin Bourque , Nilda Pérez and Peter Rosset , Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: transforming food production in Cuba (San Francisco, Food First Books, 2002) and Peter M. Rosset , `Cuba: a successful case study of alternative agriculture', in Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Frederick H. Buttel (eds), Hungry for Profit: the agribusiness threat to farmers, food and the environment (New York, Monthly Review, 2000), pp. 203—13.

7 This stems from the interplay of a number of factors, including the powerful lobby of the tourism industry and merchant elites, the conditionalities of structural adjustment and the food security demands of the urban poor.