Sustainable Agriculture and Domestic Food Production: Adaptation and Experimentation on Small-Scale Food Farms in the Caribbean

Abstract

Research speaks to the tendency to see small-scale farmers in the tropics as bounded by tradition, conservative, resistant to change, lacking in innovativeness, and even lazy both in official pronouncements and in academic discourse (Richards, 1985; Chambers, 1989; Rhoades, 1989). One reason for this is the chasm in communication between farmers, on one hand, and researchers unfamiliar with the rationale for traditional agricultural practices, on the other, a situation compounded by the lack of historical records. Rhoades (1989) explains this situation saying that farmers as a rule do not document their activities and accomplishments and do not write about their discoveries and innovations. Moreover, the relative successes of the Green Revolution technology, encouraging the view that Western science and technology can solve all problems, has not only served to marginalize the ongoing efforts and diverse productions of small-scale farmers, but has also led to numerous instances of counterproductive interventions in a variety of agricultural and food-related problems in developing economies (Jones and Carswell, 2004). Carswell (2004) argues that agricultural narratives developed in colonial discourses continue to implicitly blame small farmers for poor cultivation techniques and environmental degradation, and need to be challenged in the face of mounting contradictory evidence. In the Caribbean, for example, the entire production of domestic food crops is attributed to small-scale farmers, which underscores their significance in regional food security.