This study of banana contract farming in the Eastern Caribbean explores
the forces that shape contract-farming enterprises everywhere--capital,
the state, and the environment. Employing the increasingly popular
framework of political ecology, which highlights the dynamic linkages
between political-economic forces and human-environment relationships,
Lawrence Grossman provides a new perspective on the history and
contemporary trajectory of the Windward Islands banana industry. He
reveals in rich detail the myriad impacts of banana production on the
peasant laborers of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Grossman challenges the conventional wisdom on three interrelated issues
central to contract farming and political ecology. First, he analyzes
the process of deskilling and the associated significance of control by
capital and the state over peasant labor. Second, he investigates the
impacts of contract farming for export on domestic food production and
food import dependency. And third, he examines the often misunderstood
problem of pesticide misuse. Grossman's findings lead to a
reconsideration of broader debates concerning the relevance of research
on industrial restructuring and globalization for the analysis of
agrarian change. Most important, his work emphasizes that we must pay
greater attention to the fundamental significance of the "environmental
rootedness" of agriculture in studies of political ecology and contract
farming.
