The Role of Agriculture in Caribbean Economies: A Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Abstract

Agriculture has always been integral to the economies of the Caribbean. Potter et al. (2004) posit that the evolution of regional societies and economies in the Caribbean has been fundamentally determined by the plantation era and the inequalities and inequities created by slavery and colonialism. After emancipation in 1838, “new rural land use patterns and agrarian structures emerged reflecting a different, though still unjust social order” (Potter et al., 2004, p. 97). In the Caribbean of the post-emancipation period, there emerged a local peasantry made up of ex-slaves who left the sugar plantations and established independent communities, called free villages, with economies based on small-scale agriculture and other informal activities such as small-scale retailing, fishing, and charcoal burning. With export agriculture based on sugar still dominant, there developed an agricultural system characterized by a structural dualism (Barker, 1989, 1993). The features of this system are a large-scale export-oriented sector based on traditional plantation crops like sugarcane and banana juxtaposed with a small-scale farming sector focusing on domestic food crops that are staples in local diets and local cuisine (Barker, 1993; Beckford and Bailey, 2009). This duality has persisted and characterizes agriculture in many Caribbean countries to this day.