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.