Slipping Away

Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean

Mark Moberg

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781845451974, 9781845451455
• eBook ISBN: 9781845458744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

During the 1990s, the Eastern Caribbean was caught in a bitter trade dispute between the US and EU over the European banana market. When the World Trade Organization rejected preferential access for Caribbean growers in 1998 the effect on the region's rural communities was devastating. This volume examines the "banana wars" from the vantage point of St. Lucia's Mabouya Valley, whose recent, turbulent history reveals the impact of global forces. The author investigates how the contemporary structure of the island's banana industry originated in colonial policies to create a politically "stable" peasantry, followed by politicians' efforts to mobilize rural voters. These political strategies left farmers dependent on institutional and market protection, leaving them vulnerable to any alteration in trade policy. This history gave way to a new harsh reality, in which neoliberal policies privilege price and quantity over human rights and the environment. However, against these challenges, the author shows how the rural poor have responded in creative ways, including new social movements and Fair Trade farming, in order to negotiate a stronger position for themselves in the in a shifting global economy.

— Chapter One —

LINKING THE PERSONAL, THE LOCAL, AND THE GLOBAL

Case studies of individuals reveal suffering, they tell us what happens to one or many people; but to explain suffering, one must embed individual biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy.

—Paul Farmer, “On Suffering and Structural Violence” (1996)

Dislocations, Societal and First-Hand

My first visit to the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia ended on an un-settling and nearly tragic note. It was the end of May, 2000, and my wife and I were winding up a month of preliminary research on the country's banana industry. On the Windward Islands of St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Grenada, banana production is unique in that it rests almost entirely in the hands of smallholding family farmers. Unlike Central and South America, where bananas are grown on estates often comprising thousands of acres,¹ most Windward Island farmers make a living on plots averaging just a few acres in size. In place of the armies of desperately low-paid and vulnerable immigrant workers employed on Latin American plantations, farmers in the Windwards rely on the labor of family members and a few hired workers, usually their neighbors and friends.

Because of the small scale of their production, relatively high wages paid to their employees, and absence of chemical-intensive methods, Caribbean farmers produce fruit at a unit cost nearly twice that of Chiquita and other Latin American producers. For decades, their survival in a world market dominated by the three major American banana companies had been ensured by a complex system of tariffs, quotas, and licenses that had guaranteed island growers a place in the British market. As a result of a trade war brought by the United States in the World Trade Organization, most of these market preferences were soon to end. Before long, tens of thousands of family farmers would face much more direct competition with Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, and their vast Latin American holdings. Still to be determined was what form of protection, if any, the WTO would allow in the aftermath of the trade war. We had come to St. Lucia in 2000 to learn how the region's farmers were dealing with that uncertainty and to lay the groundwork for the longer field project that would eventually result in this book.

Given our plans to interview government and industry officials as well as the farmers themselves, we opted to reside in the island's largest town, the capital of Castries, which would afford easy access to both. There we rented the bottom floor of a house in the Biseé neighborhood of town. From our house it was a ten-minute walk to the Gros Islet highway, and then a quick trip via minibus to the banana-growing areas to the south. In these communities, we had encountered farmers who were already traumatized by the changes wrought by the encroaching deregulation of the banana trade, a process begun seven years before with the Single European Market. Many had asked us why a wealthy country like the United States now wanted to strip them of livelihoods that had enabled them to educate their children and to escape the poverty of their grandparents' generation. We could offer little in response to their anguished pleas, other than to tell their story. After four weeks of recording interviews, visiting farms, and combing through government reports and archives, we reviewed our material to ensure that we had enough for a full-fledged research proposal. Two days before our planned departure, we arranged to revisit an industry official to clarify a detail from his earlier interview. Having made an appointment with him that morning, we set off for his office in town.

St. Lucia is a country of breathtaking natural beauty, and for that reason it is justly acclaimed as a tourist destination. Our house was situated toward the top of one of the many hills in town. As we left it that morning, we encountered the now-familiar panorama of sheer verdant slopes to either side of the quiet residential street leading down to the highway and the Caribbean Sea just beyond it. This steep, lengthy walk was one that we had made many times over the previous weeks, but we never tired of the spectacular view it afforded. Those who lived along the street had long been aware of our comings and goings, and many greeted us from their doorways and front yards along the route. In front of us walked a young man who periodically glanced at us over his shoulder. I took no particular notice of him, aware that in Biseé (unlike the tourist areas of the island), white foreigners remained a curiosity for most people.

As we passed an uninhabited area near the highway, the man slowed his pace to come alongside me on the right. I turned, expecting him to speak. Instead, he lunged toward me. He had timed his assault with care, for my escape was blocked by a concrete wall to my left. A machete (known locally as a “cutlass”) had suddenly appeared in his upraised right hand. He cocked his arm back and swung it forward, the blade moving swiftly and inexorably toward my upper body. I flinched, fearing a fatal blow, but the blade stopped short just inches from my throat. Meanwhile, with his left hand, he deftly relieved me of my book bag, which I had slung over just one shoulder when I left the house. He was sprinting back up the street before I even realized that my life was no longer in danger.

We never made it to our appointment that morning, being instead diverted to file a police report for the theft of the bag's contents, a few dollars and a camera belonging to my university. I am thankful for my safe emergence from an incident that might have ended very differently, as well as for the fact that nothing like it has recurred over several return visits to the Windwards. On each of our trips to St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Dominica, we have known steadfast cooperation, patience, and friendship among many banana farmers and others struggling to survive in a changing world economy. Yet I cannot pretend that the incident has not affected me at some deep, lasting level. Years later, I remember the indelible look on the young man's face as his eyes met mine, a puzzling mixture of fear and fury. The memory also involuntarily evokes the same surge of anger I felt in that instant when I thought my life was about to end.

It is perhaps inevitable that victims of crime personalize an event that leaves persisting emotional, if not physical, scars. Yet as anthropologists, the holistic perspective compels us to place any action—whether societal or personal, criminal or charitable, hurtful or loving—within a broader sociocultural context. The robbery that morning was tallied as one of 6,828 “crimes against property” reported to the Royal St. Lucia Police in the year 2000 (St. Lucia 1995–2003). The number of such crimes (mostly theft, burglary, and robbery) had risen on the island nearly 21 percent over the previous five years. In tandem with such offenses, “crimes against the person” (mostly murder, assaults, or threats) had increased nearly 36 percent over the same period, and the incidence of drug-related crimes (possession, cultivation, or trafficking) had exploded by an extraordinary 304 percent. Some crimes on the island achieved international notoriety, as when two emotionally disturbed men attacked worshippers in the Castries Cathedral on New Year's Eve, 2000, bludgeoning an elderly nun to death and using gasoline to set a dozen other people on fire. That story made it to the pages of the New York Times, but it was a more prosaic, if no less deadly, crime wave affecting all areas of the country that allowed the island's newspapers to offer up a daily diet of graphic, full-color photos of cutlass and gunshot victims. Meanwhile, St. Lucia's prison population had burgeoned, reportedly doubling between 1990 and 2000 (Francois, personal communication 2004).

Was there a link between the anthropological problem that I had set out to study—the effect of “free trade” policies on Caribbean farming communities—and a surging crime wave that had touched me personally during the course of the study? From the perspective of numerous reports commissioned by the governments of the Windwards and other institutions to prepare for the loss of market preferences, the connection between the two was indisputable. As early as 1997 a survey discerned growing levels of crime, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, and child neglect after the initial effects of market liberalization had forced one quarter of the country's banana farmers from production over the previous four years (Cargill 1998: 14). These trends had especially affected the young, landless men who once made up the rural wage labor force. Lacking ready alternatives to steady work on banana farms, many had drifted to town only to turn to theft and drug sales as a way or life. Perhaps this applied as well to my young assailant. The dislocations from the declining banana industry, the study warned soberly, “threaten to destroy the social fabric of the society” (Cargill 1998: 14). Since then, the hemorrhage of banana farmers has continued. Of more than 9,000 farmers active on St. Lucia in 1992, only 1,400 remained in production eleven years later. Not until the year 2004 did the region's banana production and grower base finally show signs of stabilizing at a level just a fraction of its historic high reached in 1992.

This is an ethnography of a region in transition, one whose story is still being written at the local level throughout the Eastern Caribbean. Because this story originates with the decisions of powerful actors that have restructured the global economy, the experiences of the Windwards could be considered an archetype for communities in much of the “developing world.”² But although the ideology of free trade predominates worldwide, seldom has it gone unchallenged, nor are its effects everywhere the same, even on adjacent Caribbean islands that have experienced similar macro-economic processes. Economic restructuring in the Windwards is hardly a novel experience; since the origin of the region's banana industry in the 1950s, it has been felt through a series of ever-greater demands on banana farmers by external agents (see especially Slocum 1996, 2006; Grossman 1998; Moberg 2005). Such demands were first issued by the banana company that purchased their fruit, and they continue to this day with the British supermarkets that remain their sole export outlet. Yet it is the most recent series of mandates, originating with the World Trade Organization, that have called the survival of farming communities themselves into question, for it has dictated an end to the policies that had formerly assured family farmers a small but relatively secure place in the world market.

Globalization and Local Response

The concept of globalization has spread from the scholarly literature into the broader culture to become an almost clichéd description of contemporary social change. These clichés are represented, for example, by anthropology textbook covers that show Amazonian Indians operating laptop computers while dressed in tribal regalia. Such representations aside, if globalization remains an ambiguous concept in many people's minds, it may be because it embraces so many seemingly distinct aspects of daily life. In the Windward Islands, globalization is, like the textbook image, reflected in consumption patterns, behaviors, and a “structure of feeling” that not only lack local precedent, but often sit uneasily beside West Indian cultural patterns based on Afro-Caribbean rural traditions. A generation ago, residents of the Mabouya Valley in St. Lucia relied on kerosene lanterns and candles for lighting, cooked with charcoal in outdoor kitchens, and carried water from wells or a nearby river. A fortunate few owned AM radios, which they tuned to Radio St. Lucia, the country's only broadcast medium at the time. By the time of my research from 2001 to 2004, I was able to arrange interviews with farmers by calling them on their cell phones. Occasionally I arrived at their homes while family members watched BET or Nickelodeon on satellite TV. In the background, North American rap and hip-hop increasingly supplanted the rhythms of calypso, reggae, and zouk that are more rooted in the Caribbean experience.

To some observers, these cultural juxtapositions are striking or even amusing indications that the far-flung corners of the world are becoming more and more alike in aesthetics and consumption patterns under the impact of mass media emanating from the developed nations. At a time when the US and Europe appear to be threatened by terrorism and anti-Western fundamentalism, some North Americans may find solace in the global spread of aesthetics, music, and fashions that originated in the US. Less often considered are the effects of such seductive images and desires in societies where most people lack the means to attain them. In the Windwards, the cell phone has moved from being a status symbol of the very wealthy to a socially necessary marker of modernity for all, much as the color television did in the US forty years ago. On the islands themselves, few seem to question the advisability of very poor people spending US $50 or more per month to maintain such prestigious symbols of modernity.³ Perhaps this is because, as a St. Lucian teen told me in an accent Americanized for my benefit, “[A]t the end of the day, you're nobody without one.” Nor is there any easy way to describe the bewilderment expressed by a devoutly religious banana farmer, who had grown up during the time of kerosene lamps, after he discovered his grandson staying awake late at night to surf internet porn sites. However great the impact of the telecommunications and internet revolutions in the societies that spawned them, it is impossible to overstate the extent to which these technologies create generational and cultural chasms in societies previously governed by entirely different value systems. Indeed, as some have asserted (Barber 1995, Gray 2003), such clashes may in part underlie the fundamentalist backlash fueling terrorist acts against Western targets.

Yet this story is less about the cultural dimensions of globalization than its economic and political consequences. In the Windwards, these have been especially destabilizing to cultural traditions built upon farming as a way of life, for in economic terms globalization has threatened the continued survival of that foundation. In one sense, this is a process of great antiquity, for social historians and anthropologists have long documented the ways in which traditional cultural values and social relations were transformed by their incorporation into a unitary world system of production and commerce (Polanyi 1957; Wallerstein 1980; Wolf 1982; Abu-Lughod 1989). This process continues apace in the contemporary world, leading some to question whether globalization is not merely a novel label for the venerable practice of colonial domination (Miyoshi 1993). Yet many scholars insist that there is something quite new about the disorienting pace of contemporary global change, which has resulted in an unprecedented “compression of our spatial and temporal worlds” (Harvey 1989: 240). They describe globalization as a process involving accelerating and unimpeded flows—of investment capital, commodities, and to a much lesser degree, labor—across national borders, to the extent that such borders virtually cease to exist in economic terms (Basch, Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Bauman 1998; Greider 1997; French 2000; Brennan 2003). In part, these trends are the outcome of recent technological innovations in transportation and communications. We see this when, for example, American florists import fresh cut flowers from Colombia on 747 cargo planes (Friedemann-Sánchez 2006), US airlines employ reservations agents in the Caribbean to staff their ticketing call centers (Freeman 2000), and broccoli picked in Guatemala is sold in Nashville supermarkets the following afternoon (Fischer and Benson 2006).

While improvements in telecommunications and transportation technology have been necessary for this kind of global integration of production and consumption, they have not been sufficient conditions. In order to implement these changes, it is also necessary to greatly restrict the abili ty of national governments to regulate investment and trade across their borders. For the economic concomitants of globalization to occur, in other words, governments have to be stripped of most of their governance over national economies. This has involved a conscious dismantling of an international consensus dating from the 1944 Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) conference, at which the workings of the postwar economic order were negotiated among representatives of forty-five allied nations. The conference's priorities were guided by the Keynesian doctrines of economic planning then dominant in the United States and Great Britain. In large part so that national governments could achieve their social and political objectives, including the creation of social welfare systems and postwar rebuilding, Bretton Woods established exchange controls that limited the capacity of corporations and individuals to move capital across borders (Helleiner 1994: 164). As the conferees recognized, were corporations and the wealthy able to easily shift their resources from one country to another, governments would be hamstrung in their ability to impose taxation or redistributive policies critical to economic planning.

Following the initial wave of decolonization after World War II, governments in the developing world took advantage of such policies to incubate fledgling national industries or agricultural sectors behind tariff barriers or subsidies. These policies shielded local producers from direct competition with industries and agriculture in the developed countries. The rationale for tariff barriers was phrased in terms of both the economic and political survival of the governments that erected them. Lacking investment capital and technology comparable to that found in the industrialized countries, fledgling industries in the developing world would be destroyed by an unregulated influx of cheaper manufactured or agricultural goods. The goal of “protectionist” policies was to create local industries and agricultural sectors that would generate products for local consumption, reducing the reliance of newly independent countries on expensive imported goods.

Of equal importance to policy makers was the political imperative to shield the rural poor from the onset of competition with industrial agriculture in the developed nations, a process held to fuel landlessness and even insurrection (de Janvry 1981; Ochoa 2000). Trade disputes under this system did occasionally arise between countries, and for that reason Bretton Woods had established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. For five decades GATT provided a framework for regulating international trade among signatory nations by negotiating tariff rates and import duties so that member states retained “reasonable” levels of access to each other's domestic markets.

By the early 1970s, the advent of jet transport and containerized shipping had made it possible for manufacturers to relocate virtually anywhere in the world, greatly reducing the temporal and geographic fixity of production in the then-industrialized countries (Harvey 1989). These developments created a politically powerful constituency, mostly of major corporations in the US and Western Europe, that favored dismantling national exchange controls as a way to expand their investments abroad (Helleiner 1994: 167). These forces secured a critical victory in 1973, when the US government abandoned longstanding fixed exchange rates and allowed its currency to freely “float” against others. Once the world's largest economy had opted out of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system, all other capitalist industrialized nations eventually followed suit.

Yet a significant impediment remained to the unfettered movement of manufacturing and goods across national borders; namely, the reluctance of many national governments in the developing world to lower tariffs and regulations that had protected state-run and -supported industries. Some countries, such as Brazil and Chile during their periods of military dictatorship in the 1970s, courted foreign investors with guarantees of lavish tax concessions, duty-free importation of equipment, and unlimited profit repatriation. But many democratic governments were hesitant to fully open their borders and expose nascent national industries to direct competition with heavily capitalized foreign firms. Their ability to maintain such policies was eroded during the 1980s, which saw an unprecedented debt crisis in much of the developing world.⁴ As interest payments ballooned and debt levels became crippling economic burdens, one national government after another turned to the International Monetary Fund for assistance. A multilateral lending agency established at Bretton Woods, initially for the task of postwar rebuilding, the IMF now became a lender of last resort for many indebted countries as they sought to repay private creditors.

As a condition of IMF assistance, national governments are required to conform to Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) drafted by IMF staff, in which they virtually turn over all aspects of national economic policy to the IMF. A common condition of structural adjustment is that governments devote as much national income as possible to the repayment of foreign debts. The IMF instructs them to do so by slashing public expenditures, eliminating subsidies for food, medicine, and other assistance to the poor, and removing restrictions on foreign investment—the same policies that could only be imposed previously on local populations by military dictatorships (Rowbotham 1998, Farmer 2003). Structural adjustment further mandates that government-owned national industries and utilities be sold to private investors in order to “free up” revenues for debt repayment, leading to layoffs and reductions in wages among those who retain their jobs, as well as a rising cost of living for consumers of newly-privatized electricity, water and other services.

By the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and most other centrally planned economies had left standing only one model of economic development worldwide, one that viewed national economic sovereignty as an impediment to the free and unregulated movement of capital and commodities. Embodying the principles of “free trade” and privatization, neo-liberalism is now embraced—at least rhetorically’by all of the world's develo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Map of St. Lucia
• Chapter One: Linking the Personal, the Local, and the Global
• Chapter Two: An Island in History
• Chapter Three: Banananomics: Work and Identity among Island Growers
• Chapter Four: St. Lucia in the Global Banana Trade
• Chapter Five: Banana Politics
• Chapter Six: Privatization and Fragmentation
• Chapter Seven: Survivors
• Chapter Eight: Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
• Chapter Nine: Fair Trade in Discourse and Practice
• Chapter Ten: Fair Trade and Conventional Farming in the Mabouya Valley
• Chapter Eleven: Conclusion: A New World or a New Kind of Dependence?
• References
• Index