SEASONAL MIGRATION, THE FARM-HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY AND NUTRITION IN RURAL JAMAICA by Louise Renee Dankerlin A.B., Wellesley College (1975) M.A., Goddard College (1978) Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Urban and Regional Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology June 1990 Cd Louise Renee Dankerlin, 1981. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute copies of this thesis document in whole or in part. Signature of Author. Department of Urban Studies and Planning June, 1990 Certified by.................................................... Lisa Redfield Peattie Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer, Urban Anthropology Thesis Supervisor Accepted by. Langley Keyes, Chairman Ph.D. Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning 1 Dedicated to my mother Georgine Elfride Dankerlin and to my late father Nicolas H. G. Dankerlin ii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I was drawn to the study of labor migration because it illuminates the process of social change more than most social phenomena. I also had a personal interest in the subject matter, which stemmed from my background as a West Indian, born in Suriname. Twenty years after slavery was abolished in 1863, my maternal grandfather, still a toddler, became a young migrant when he was strapped onto his father's back and taken from a small farm near Waterloo plantation into the interior of western Suriname, where my great-grandfather owned a lumber concession company. In 1917 my father was sent to Holland by his father for further education in engineering, only to become an organizer of one of the unions of the American Federation of Labor in New York in the 1930s. My mother met my father in the United States, where she travelled in the 1940s to negotiate with American firms which imported natural rubber from her father's company in Suriname. As young adults, in the late 1960s and early 1970s my cousins and I were also sent abroad from Suriname by our parents. My cousins left for the Netherlands, while I chose to return to the United States where I had spent some years as a child. The two years I lived in Jamaica were invaluable to my understanding of the process of household and individual decision-making and of labor circulation between the West iii Indies and the United States. It has convinced me that we can only fully comprehend the dynamics of migration when we have actually lived in migrants' communities over an extended period of time. The challenge of this regional study was that I needed to spend sufficient time in -each community to understand its political and social dynamics. This led to my being made a "part" of these communities over time. Being incorporated into a group of communities means that one is "assigned" a role. My functions were to provide transportation between communities and when asked, to act as a liaison between health care professionals and the people, bridging as it were a spatial as well as a socio-economic distance. This, in turn, enabled me to become acquainted with a far greater number of people in these communities than I otherwise would have. There is, unfortunately, a paucity of research at the regional level in Jamaica. From the point of view of migration, research on Jamaica has focused on the individual or household level and at the national level. By including an analysis of the effects of migration on a homogeneous population from a regional level as well, I was able to trace different production and consumption patterns at the household level. Moreover, networks between communities through extended families, schools, regional sports tournaments, the juridico-political structure, and regional markets form an integrated system. This kind of research provides a basis for fine-tuning social and economic policy to the specific needs of a rural population. A project of this nature entails the cooperation of a large number of dedicated people. I wish to, therefore, take this opportunity to thank them indivually. At this juncture, I will express my gratitude and appreciation to the following members of my dissertation committee. My thanks to my advisor, Professor Lisa Peattie, who first introduced me to the subject of rural undernutrition prior to migration and to the study of household economics. My sincerest thanks to Professor Nevin Scrimshaw, whom as Director of the Harvard- MIT International Food and Nutrition Program, gave his assistance in helping to fund and organize the research project, visiting the country personally on one occasion. I sincerely appreciate his guidance and continued support of my research and my studies over the years both at MIT and at Harvard. My sincerest thanks to Professor Martin Diskin, for encouraging me to pursue the study of economic anthropology, for his insights into the research design and overall analysis and for his support. I wish to give special recognition to the important contribution of Professor Jonathan Haughton, who has guided me in my studies in economics at Harvard and in most of the data analysis and writing. I deeply appreciate his support and advice during the final two years of my studies. My thanks to the other faculty and researchers who have contributed to this study. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Pertti Pelto of the Anthropology Department of the University of Connecticut at Storrs for training me in research design and methodology at MIT and for making field trips to Jamaica on two occasions so as to guide me in the collection and preliminary analysis of data. I wish to also thank him for his feedback in the last phase of data analysis and interpretation upon the completion of the dissertation. I would also like to thank Dr. Barbara Miller of Cornell University for her help in giving me information and comments, particularly as regards Jamaican household consumption patterns. I would also like to thank Dr. Mary Scrimshaw and Dr. Ellen Messer for their comments on the household time allocation studies, women and nutrition, and nutritional anthropology. My thanks to Ms. Edwina Murray of the Harvard Population Studies Center for further training me in dietary analysis before my departure to Jamaica in 1986; to Mr. William Oliver, Sr. of the Clinical Research Center of MIT, Mr. Ron Hersey of Lincoln Laboraties and especially Mr. William Oliver, Jr., for their technical support with the computer software. My sincerest thanks to Dr. Ray Gleason of the Clinical Research Center of MIT for his help with the statistical analysis. My special thanks to Dr. David Griffith and to Professor Charles Wood of the University of Florida for their comments and advice when I started the field research. The comments of Professor Oded Stark of Harvard University during various stages of-the research were very helpful and I also thank Professor Myron Weiner of MIT for information as I explored the subject. I also wish to acknowlege the contribution of Professors Victor Pich6 and Joel Gregory of the University of Montreal, during the preliminary stage of my research. My thanks to Dr. Chris de Beet of the University of Utrecht who, while in Jamaica, gave very helpful comments in the final stage of my field research. I am very grateful to Professor Glenn Jenkins of Harvard University for his comments on the benefit-cost approach and for his support in the final phase of the study, after I returned from Jamaica. My thanks to Dr. Michael Bamberger of the World Bank for his comments. I wish to thank the United Nations University and the Social Science Research Council for funding this research. I wish to also thank the staff of the Pan American Health Organization and their Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute vii for assisting me in the administration of the project. My special thanks to Dr. George Alleyne, Assistant Director of PAHO, for his comments on the study. My thanks to Ms. Clare Forrester of the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute in assisting me with information in implementing the research project. My thanks to current and former members of the faculty of the University of the West Indies Institute for Social and Economic Research for their encouragement and comments on my research. My special thanks toDrs. Derick Gordon, Omar Davies, Carl Stone, Peter Phillips, Pat Anderson and Eddy Green for their comments and advice on the design and implementation of the study, as well as to Dr. Don Robotham, who also helped me to arrange housing in Kingston when I first arrived and for his advice on the historical and ethnographic research. I especially acknowledge and thank Dr. Derick Boyd for his continued help in providing critical information and feedback, in the analysis of the data particularly as it concerned labor economics, welfare measures and living standards of the Jamaican population. My special thanks to Dr. David Barker of the University of the West Indies Department of Geography for assisting me in analyzing the physical and social geography of the region and to Dr. Duncan McGregor of the Geography Department of the viii University of London, for analyzing soil samples of the research area. I wish to also express my gratitude to Professor Peter Bacon of the Zoology Department of the University of the West Indies in helping me to analyze the physical ecology, especially the vegetation of the region. I wish to thank the staff of the Ministry of Labor in Jamaica, especially Mr. Tony Ironns, who gave me access to the migrant farm workers. My special thanks to the staff of the Ministry of Health in Kingston and in St. Thomas Parish, particularly Ms.