Globalization, Agriculture and Food in the Caribbean

Globalization, Agriculture and Food in the Caribbean Clinton L. Beckford • Kevon Rhiney Editors Globalization, Agriculture and Food in the Caribbean Climate Change, Gender and Geography Editors Clinton L. Beckford Kevon Rhiney Faculty of Education Department of Geography and Geology University of Windsor University of the West Indies Windsor, ON, Canada Kingston, Jamaica ISBN 978-1-137-53836-9 ISBN 978-1-137-53837-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53837-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935827 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London We would like to pause here to recognize the contribution to geography education, research, and scholarship in the Caribbean of outstanding geographer Professor David Barker. Professor Barker has put in nearly 40 years of dedicated service to the development of geography in the Caribbean through his teaching, research and scholarship, and, perhaps most importantly, guidance and mentorship of numerous graduate students. Professor Barker has influenced all of the contributors to this volume in some way with most of them benefitting from his mentorship in their graduate studies. As an agricultural geographer, Professor Barker has influenced the careers of hundreds of students at the undergraduate and graduate levels and today his students are making significant contributions around the world in the field of geography and beyond. Through his involvement with the Jamaica Geographical Society, the journal Caribbean Geography, which he edits, and the British Caribbean Seminar Series, Professor Barker has been at the forefront of the dissemination of Caribbean geographical research. His work in the field of agricultural geography is well known. This volume showcases the work of some of Professor Barker’s many graduate students and pays homage to him as a master teacher, mentor, researcher, and scholar on the eve of his retirement from the University of the West Indies. Foreword It was my great pleasure to accept the invitation to write the Foreword for this important collection of contributions on Globalization, Agriculture, and Food in the Caribbean. Dr Clinton L. Beckford was my first doctoral student at the University of the West Indies (UWI), and together we have published extensively on Caribbean small-scale farming, indig- enous knowledge, and the yam stick problem in Jamaica, the third being the theme of his doctoral dissertation and a postdoctoral fellowship. Dr Kevon Rhiney, another of my doctoral students, was the first of an impressive line of human geography PhDs who, over the last decade, have honed their skills at the Department of Geography and Geology, UWI, Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica. The research of this group of young scholars, on Caribbean food security and small-scale farming and global change, has been well received at high-profile international confer- ences and in the published literature. This latest volume includes some of the research output of this group of talented researchers. The timely relevance of the volume is worthy of a brief commentary. Since the onset of economic globalization in the 1980s, the Caribbean region of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has entered a new era of economic and environmental vulnerability quite different in scope from that of the colonial period. It has impacted all territories, large and small, all sectors of the economy—industry, tourism, and agriculture— and both urban and rural areas. Though the impacts can have positive vii viii Foreword outcomes, most are negative and probably no sector has felt these effects more severely than the agricultural sector. Trade liberalization has posed the most significant of the challenges of economic globalization to the agricultural sector. Its impacts have complex implications for food security and rural livelihoods. For most Caribbean countries, agricultural exports are a major source of foreign exchange and employment-based income-earning opportunities. Moreover, for any given territory, they often comprise only one or two commodities, such as sugar, bananas, or coffee. Such dependency on a single commodity deep- ens economic vulnerability. The negative impacts of trade liberalization are exemplified by the ‘banana wars’ of the 1990s, and the subsequent retreat from export bananas which affected the Windward Islands and Jamaica in particular. Caribbean sugar also fared badly through increased competition on the world market, with Trinidad and Tobago and St Kitts closing their sugar industries since the turn of the century, the latter after a turbulent 350-year history. There are a number of contributions in the volume, which focus on the ramifications of economic globalization on traditional export crops. The general decrease in agricultural tariffs as a result of trade liberalization not only affected traditional exports like bananas and sugar, but also opened up domestic markets to a flood of food imports. Historically, Caribbean territories were always dependent on imported food, and food imports are necessary and critical to nutritional and food supply stabil- ity. But trade liberalization ushered in a regime of imports that included fresh produce from North America such as potatoes, carrots, red peas, and onions which hitherto were produced in the islands by small-scale producers. These imports were often cheaper than local produce and not surprisingly had disastrous consequences for local farmers and their families with limited income-earning opportunities outside their rural communities. The vicissitudes of economic globalization have been stalked by the looming spectre of climate change, and the region’s vulnerable open economies have found themselves on the front line of this battlefront too. The region has experienced increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and extreme meteorological hazards; the series of severe hurricanes of the first decade of the new century were often preceded by anextensive Foreword ix drought, and occasionally followed by another prolonged drought. Seasonal precipitation patterns appear to be shifting in the western half of the Caribbean Basin, affecting the timing and duration of the short early rainy season, a critical period in the farming cycle for many small- scale producers. The present drought affecting the Caribbean Basin and attributed to El Niño is one of the worst on record. Robin Leichenko and Karen O’Brien have characterized economic globalization and climate change as a process of double exposure in its impacts on people and places. They argue it triggers a range of exter- nal economic and environmental factors which interact in complex ways and have differential impacts on locations at different scales, and on particular groups, institutions, and individuals. When considered together rather than separately, the impacts of globalization and climate change have the potential to amplify benefits and losses to the winners and losers respectively. It is noteworthy that these two scholars are geographers; at geography’s epistemological core is an interdisciplinary approach which synthesizes ideas from the social sciences and environmental sciences. Teasing out the reciprocal consequences of economic globalization and climate change on food security and the agricultural sector is a good example of how to engage a creative synthesis of concepts and research methods that cut across the natural sciences and the social sciences. The Caribbean region of SIDS has felt the full force of double exposure over the last 25 years, and so is an ideal arena for empirical research on the impacts of global change. It is equally noteworthy that much of the Caribbean-based research which uses the lens of double exposure was pioneered by geographers based at the Department of Geography and Geology at the UWI, Mona Campus. Several contributions in this volume are representative of this new wave of geographical research and its focus on sustainable livelihoods, livelihood coping strategies, adaptive capacity, and livelihood resilience, among other things. They are based on rigorous ethnographic research methodologies

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