the end of green gold? comparative development options and strategies in the eastern caribbean...

The End of Green Gold? Comparative Development

Options and Strategies in the Eastern Caribbean Banana-

Producing Islands* Anthony Payne

Bananas were the basis of the political economy of Dominica, St. Lucia. and St. Vincent during the 40 or so years from their establishment as a crop in the 1950s to the beginning of their decline in the 1990s. Because of successive shifts in European Union policy and successful challenges within the World Trade Organization to the protectionist regime that banana production in these islands enjoyed throughout this period, these three small Eastern Caribbean countries are being pushed inexorably into the "'post-banana'" era. Their efforts to find a new niche within the global political economy are being led in each case by new, modernizing, labor party governments that won elections and came into office during a brief four-year period between 1997 and 2001. Each government faces the same broad development challenge, but employs different resources, leadership skills, and political style. At the same time, each can be said to be pursuing what is best described as a kind of "managerial populist" development. The range of development options faced by these islands is narrow in the extreme, but they have shown that they can still exercise some limited room to move forward into the post-banana era.

I t iS not much of an exaggeration to say that bananas were the basis of the politi- .cal economy of Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent L during the 40 or so years

from their establishment as a crop in the 1950s to the beginning of their decline in the 1990s. Often described as "green gold" (Thompson, 1987), they contributed substantially to the economic growth that. in turn, underpinned the move to political independence from Britain of each of these tiny Windward Island territories in the

Anthony Payne ~s professor of politics at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, He was the managing editor of the journal New Pohtwal Ectmomv from 1996 to 2005. He is the author of several books and articles on the Caribbean and on development and globahzation. The most recent include Charting Cartt~bean DevelopmeHt(University Press of Florida, 2001 ), co-authored with Paul Sutton. The Global Politics of Unt'q,.I Devetopnwnt ( Palgrave Macmillan. 2005 ~. and. as editor. Ker De/Jcttes in N~,~t' Political E'<'onoorv (Rout[edge, 20(16),

Stzldlea in Comparative Internat.mal lkevel~q~ment, Fall 2006, Vol 41, No. 3. pp. 25-46.

26 Studies in Comparative International Development / Fall 2006

late 1970s. The banana boom continued into the 1980s, exerting via its injection of spending power into growers' and workers' households an overpowering influence on the whole social, economic, and political life of the islands. By 1992, bananas were responsible for much of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and an extraordinarily high proportion of total exports of goods and nonfactor services: 20.1 percent and 48.0 percent respectively in Dominica, 8.2 percent and 30.5 percent in St. Lucia, and 9.9 percent and 42.4 percent in St. Vincent (Pantin et al., 1999: 26-27). Even on their own, these figures indicate the extent of the political vulnerability generated in the Eastern Caribbean as a result of dependence on bananas. This vulnerability was exacerbated still further because throughout the industry's history banana production was protected from the competitive pressure of a free market in two phases: first, by the preferential trade policies of the British government, which liked to manage its banana market as a form of development assistance to the Eastern Caribbean islands (Grossman, 1998; Clegg, 2002); and, second, by the whole, complex para- phernalia of European Union (EU) banana policy following Britain's accession in 1973 (Sutton, 1984).

Banana production in Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent has never been able to compete in a global free market with the cheaper production of the major South American producers in Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Colombia. All of this is well known, long understood, and will not be examined further here. Yet lately, a compelling case has emerged for reexamining the prospects of these banana-producing islands and for seeking to analyze their particular predicament within the context of contemporary studies of comparative international development. The new relevance of such a study derives from the confluence of two interlocking chains of events, which have served to change in broadly the same period of time both the structural context in which development has to be pursued in the Eastern Caribbean and the main agents: namely, the elected island governments responsible for charting the national development strategies of Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent.

The first chain of events served to intensify significantly the severity of the structural challenge facing the Windward Islands, arguably to the point of crisis. The problems were initially caused by the EU's establishment in July 1993 of a new collective import regime for bananas. These arrangements were always highly politicized, but they became more so, especially as the EU regime began to be called into question by a range of other countries, including the key South Ameri- can producers, but also the United States, where some of the leading multinational corporations involved in the banana business are based (Sutton, 1997). For a time, the trade preferences enjoyed by the Caribbean islands were largely maintained, although not without political tension and consequent steady declines in production (National Economic Research Associates, 2003). The reality was that this far-reaching challenge to protection was taking place in the context of a spreading global commitment to free trade and within the institutional confines of the new World Trade Organization (WTO). The so-called "banana trade war" was really the first major dispute that the WTO had to handle (Barfield, 2003). The Eastern Caribbean islands were unequivocally the losers of this war.

In April 2001, preoccupied by other trade conflicts closer to their core economic and political interests, the European Union and the United States struck a deal over the heads of Caribbean leaders, whereby some protection would run on until

Payne 27

l January 2006, after which time there would be no quotas, only a flat-rate tariff. As the Eastern Caribbean embassies and missions to the EU asserted in a collective statement on hearing its terms, this deal "imposes a daunting and possibly insurmountable challenge to complete the restructuring of our banana industries and economies in just over four years" (cited in Barfield, 2003: 273). In short, for these countries, all the prior years of realiTing that the future for bananas was bleak, and that diversification eventually was going to become a necessity, came, to all intents and purposes, to an end. Moreover, the EU has set the level of "tariffication" at a value per ton that the Caribbean regards as disastrous (Europa, 2005; Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery, 2005). Two other threats also greatly exacerbated the economic pressures on the three islands as a consequence of the banana crisis: first, the crusade against some excesses of offshore development mounted by various leading Western governmental institutions beginning in 2000; and, second, the various damaging economic ramifications (such as fewer tourists, intensified security costs, and higher oil prices) that flowed from the events of 11 September 2001. Overall, this conjuncture of events constitutes a major historical turning point for these islands.

The second chain of events derived from a renewed interest in rethinking national development strategies within the Windward Islands themselves. The election of new governments in all of them over a relatively short four-year period reflected a commitment to diversifying the banana-based political economies, which they had inherited, in more dynamic ways than seen in the recent past. The pattern was set in St. Lucia in May 1997 when the St. Lucre Labour Party (SLP), led by Kenny Anthony, swept into office in an unprecedented landslide election victory and, in so doing, ejected from office the political party that had held power for an almost unbroken period since 1964. Dominica followed suit, albeit in less strikingly in January 2000 when the Dominica Labour Parly (DLP), led by Rosie Douglas, won the largest number of seats in the general eleclion and was able to take the lead in a new coalition government, thus assuming office in the island for the first time since 1979. Although the DLP has since suffered severe disruptions of leadership, the party's return to government still denoted a new beginning in Dominica. Finally, in St. Vincent in March 2001, a similar ticket for change helped elect a Unity Labour Party (ULP) administration, led by Ralph Gonsalves, ending 17 years of rule by the preceding party administration. It is striking, to say the least, that new would- be modernizing regimes--all of them also labor party regimes--should come to power in each of the three Eastern Caribbean banana-producing islands in such a short period of time. In itself, this was perhaps a sign that the peoples of these islands realized that development could no longer be pursued as it had been during the immediate post-independence era.

The elements were put in place to enable a classic study of comparative development options and strategies--the emergence of a broadly similar development "crisis," which necessarily has to be confronted by three similar yet intriguingly different governing regimes, working within similar but not identical domestic political economies. The remainder of this article explores these issues in greater detail. The next section seeks to set the subsequent analysis in context by reviewing and engaging with the existing theoretical literature on Caribbean development. The succeeding sections then explore in turn the detailed policy responses of the


three islands, focusing upon the actions of their new governments (considered in the order they came into being). The final section seeks to sum up and offer reflections on the comparative insights into contemporary Caribbean development theory and strategy that these different (and ongoing) experiences can elicit.

Theories of Caribbean Development

Over the years, the development predicament of the small English-speaking islands of the Caribbean has generated its own body of explanatory and prescriptive theories (Payne and Sutton, 2001). These theories have inevitably mirrored trends in the wider Western debate about development, but also have always possessed a distinctively Caribbean character. [n retrospect, they appear to offer narrow, one- dimensional analyses and programs. It is not that they were wrong in what they argued, but that they generally addressed only one part of what was, and still is, a complex set of development problems.

The concept of development first became a preoccupying concern of Caribbean governments and intellectuals after 1945 as the various colonies began to achieve greater self-government. W. Arthur Lewis, the St. Lucian economist, initially advanced the case for a policy of industrialization designed to provide the jobs for a growing population that agriculture could no longer generate (Lewis, 1949; 1950). In his view, the industries that the islands had the best chance of establishing were those based on processing imported inputs. The key problem was the difficulty of breaking into established export markets, which could be resolved by persuading manufacturers who were already selling in overseas markets to locate their plants in the Caribbean. This venture required active government initiatives in relation to tax, tariffs, and infrastructure to lure foreign capitalists to the region. Eventually, in Lewis's view, the inflow of foreign investment would produce sufficient profits, generate sufficient local savings, and transmit sufficient skills to local people to set in motion self-sustaining growth. Although many of the English-speaking islands in the 1950s and early 1960s widely followed this strategy, the level of unemployment and underemployment in the region, which had been the main motive factor behind Lewis's thinking, continued to increase.

William Demas, then the head of economic planning in the Trinidad government, added a highly influential rider to Lewis's analysis. He argued that the critical con- straint upon the development prospects of the Caribbean economies was their small size, defined in terms of both land area and population (Demas, 1965). The smallness of the domestic market, he reasoned, imposed sharp limits on the process of import-substitution industrialization and thus removed the option of balanced growth, incorporating a roughly equal mixture of export promotion and import substitution. For the small Caribbean territories, the path to development could be secured most satisfactorily by regional economic integration, which would not only eliminate excess capacity in existing manufacturing industry, but also stimulate investment in new industries, which would become economically feasible for the first time in the English-speaking Caribbean on the basis of the expanded market.

This was a critique from within the Caribbean postwar modernization paradigm. At the same time, an alternative analysis of the Caribbean development predicament was being forged within the University of the West Indies (UWI). In a seminal

Payne 29

review of Demas's contribution, Lloyd Best, then a lecturer in economics at the Trinidad campus of UWl, argued that the basic fallacy of his theory was its almost exclusive emphasis on "'natural" variables, such as size, as opposed to "societal," and therefore, "manipulable," policy variables. In his view, Demas had failed to demonstrate that "smallness necessarily places economies at a disadvantage in the exploitation of their own "'endowment" of resources" (Best, 1971: 29). The bulk of the explanation had to come instead from "systematic examination of the instru- ments that control" economies ( Best, 1971 : 31 I. The apparent key in this vision was the concept of dependence.

Several other young UWI economists, loosely organized within the New World Group (NWG), joined the debate in support of Best. A fully fledged Caribbean dependency analysis emerged, built around the notion of a modern plantation economy and highlighting the continuing reliance of the islands on the rest of the world: for markets and supplies, transfers of income and capital, banking and financial services, business and technical skills, and "'even for ideas about themselves" (Mclntyre, 1971: 165). This new radical thinking undeimined the intellectual credibility of conventional industrialization strategies in the region and loosely underpinned the attempts of some English-speaking Caribbean governments to challenge economic and political dependence during the 1970s. The problem was that the NWG analysis of Caribbean development had its own limitations, most notable a failure to construct what one of the group called "'an operational model of development ... [and] ... by operational, I mean "likely to succeed in real world conditions'" (Blackman, 1980: 45). As the experiences of Jamaica under Michael Manley, Guyana under Forbes Burnham, and Grenada under Maurice Bishop all showed, a series of radical Ca- ribbean regimes were not able to create the necessary political protection for their reformist development strategies and were eventually brought down by a potent mixture of internal and external opposition.

By comparison with this structuralist slrand of thinking, the other major element within mainstream dependency theory in the 1970s, the neoMarxist approach, emerged relatively late in the English-speaking Caribbean. The most able Carib- bean political economist to move in this direction was Clive Thomas. A founding member of the NWG, Thomas acquired a w.der vision of the internationalization of capitalism and a greater awareness of class and politics in the construction of underdevelopment following a period working outside the region in Tanzania. He drew attention in his phase of this writing to the l:ailure of an indigenous capitalist class to create its own material base for self-reproduction in small societies, with limited markets like those of the Caribbean, and to the corresponding existence of dominant social classes that stood to benefit from the maintenance of existing patterns of development (Thomas, 1974). Yet other neoMarxists within the region did not build creatively on Thomas's analysis, but committed themselves instead to a rigid "path of socialist orientation," which emanated directly from the Soviet Union. They proposed that the capitalist phase of development could be bypassed completely and that socialism could be built through a broad class movement involving the proletariat, the semi-proletarian masses, the peasants, the revolutionary or democratic strata of the petty bourgeoisie, and even the progressive patriotic elements of an emergent national bourgeoisie (Thomas, 1978). These latter ideas were never credible as a political strategy and were completely destroyed by the


implosion of the Grenadian revolution and subsequent United States invasion of that island in 1983. For a long period afterward, any form of Marxist analysis of Caribbean development was consigned to the unthinkable.

The other way of describing the retreat of structuralist and neoMarxist analyses of the region's development predicament is by reference to the success of the neoliberal revolution in sweeping away all alternative theorizations. Of itself, this is not much of an overstatement. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the various regional governments mostly felt that they had no other realistic option but to sign up for "structural adjustment" as a new path to development. They have also subsequently sought to come to terms with the new reality of a globalizing world economy and accept the need to find a place within it for their economies and societies. It is disappointing but true that within the English-speaking Caribbean the theoretical response to this paradigm shift in theorizing development has been less than inspiring, certainly by comparison with that earlier period in the 1970s when, as Kari Levitt has recalled, "the University of the West Indies was a vibrant center of intellectual ferment" (Levitt, 1996: xii). This is not to suggest that telling critiques of the social consequences of neoliberal policies were not advanced or that a full grasp of what had occurred was not properly established. Thomas, for example, argued in the clearest possible terms that "the developmental state which emerged in the Caribbean after independence has collapsed under the twin pressures of U.S. self-defined geo-strategic national interest and the world-wide process of globalization." It had been replaced, in his view, with a state "recomposed" to meet the demands for "good governance" imposed by the international financial institutions and thereby fashioned "to serve 'efficiently' the logic of deregulated competitive markets and integrated global production, led and directed by private capital" (Thomas, 1998:81). Yet, for all the critical insight contained with such an observation, it did not constitute the charting of a new vision or course of action. Radical intellectuals seemed for a while to be unable to think their way out of the Caribbean's development impasse.

Over the last few years, there can be discerned again the rebirth of some radical strands in Caribbean development thinking. Two are worthy of brief mention. The first is grounded in an academic Marxism that posits the continuing necessity to place at the center of analysis the changing processes of global capital accumula- tion. Hilbourne Watson, for example, has argued that Caribbean development now requires the presence of a critical mass of trained professional and technical labor, an innovative industrial bourgeoisie and, in general, the ability to absorb and exploit large amounts of productive capital--all of which are lacking (Watson, 1994). Don Marshall has emphasized that the local business class in the region, especially in the Eastern Caribbean islands, is both tiny and confined to commercial and retail operations (Marshall, 1998). Perhaps it has made enough money too easily through basic import-export activities to be easily transmuted into the classic risk-taking bourgeoisie that can kick-start economic growth. Moreover, in this analysis, the roots of this problem are seen to be both deep-seated and longstanding, reaching back to the days of the original plantation economy.

The second strand is constituted by an incipient school of"antidevelopment," or postmodern, thinking, which focuses in the main on the capacity of the poor and other disaffected groups to transform their lifeworlds through their own agency via

Payne 31

new social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other mecha- nisms of community empowerment. In this view, social change is best achieved, not by seeking to transform the macrostructure of society by the capture of state power, but rather by "building on the experience of routine, everyday struggles by the poor for resources which they need to satisfy their basic needs" (Ramphall, 1997: 21). Such thinking is still at a very early stage in the English-speaking Caribbean and it may be that it will not mature as an intellectual movement. In any case, it is, by its nature, unlikely to have much impact on government strategies.

These radical intellectual initiatives unqueslionably represent minority positions. The mainstream is now represented by a series of attempts to find compromises between the traditional concerns of radical development theory in the Caribbean and the ideological power of neoliberalism. This is not heroic stuff, but it should not necessarily be conceptualized as a defeatist position either. As indicated at the outset of this section, a key deficiency of the Caribbean development debate has long been a tendency to emphasize excessively a single aspect of what are actually complex multidimensional problems. It was as if we were being repeatedly asked to believe that a series of dramatic, and very different, interventions (foreign investment, regional integration, state developmentalism, socialist revolution, structural adjustment) would each in turn cure the patient of lhe sickness of underdevelopment. In the real world, that was never plausible and it has led over the years to an excessive polarization of Caribbean development thinking and strategy. What actually needs to be admitted is that many of the apparently ~ompeting analyses advanced over the past 50 or so years may complement each other in the end more than has generally been realized. We will return to that thought in the conclusion, but we turn now to review the different strategies for charting a path of development out of the banana era embarked upon by the new regimes that came to power in St. Lucia, Dominica, and St. Vincent between 1997 and 2001.

St. Lucia

St. Lucia was economically the most successful of the Windward Islands during the 1980s. Thanks to bananas, the establishment of a dynamic new tourist industry, and the emergence of a nascent light manufacturing sector, it registered consistently good economic performance with strong growth, low inflation, a relatively secure balance of payments position, and moderate external debt ratios. From the early 1990s, the decline of bananas meant that overall economic growth slowed mark- edly, slumping to a mere 1.4 percent in 1996. In that year, Dr. Vaughan Lewis, an academic from the University of the West Indies who had not yet been closely involved in domestic politics, inherited the leadership of the United Workers Party (UWP) government from the party's longstanding founding leader, John Compton. Unavoidably confronting the unpopularity caused by rising unemployment and poverty, Lewis also found it hard to adjust to the highly colloquial style of St. Lu- cian street politics, and it was no surprise that the UWP was defeated in the May 1997 elections. More unexpected was the scale of the Labour Party's victory, for it won no less than 16 of the 17 seats in the St. Lucian House of Assembly. Kenny Anthony had himself only assumed the leadership of the SLP in 1996, having previously been counsel to the Caribbean Community Secretariat. However, he moved


quickly to revitalize the party, and ran a brilliant campaign in which the traditional party manifesto was transmuted into a "Contract of Faith" with the electorate and made a platform to present Anthony's ideas on the need to adopt a new, inclusive approach to governance in St. Lucia. In this approach, the "task of development" was not seen "as being that of the government alone," but rather of "all social part- ners" (Anthony, 2004: 29). As Didacus Jules and Tennyson Joseph astutely noted, Anthony was deliberately "seeking to create a context in which a fundamental break with the past could be envisioned" (Jules and Joseph, 2004: 3).

In practice, the Anthony government has found the task of creating a new political economy in St. Lucia more difficult. The government was reelected in December 2001, winning 14 (as opposed to 16) of the 17 available seats, and, with the UWP still in recovery, has every prospect of being reelected again some time in 2006, albeit perhaps with a further reduced majority. For all that, the government now confronts some disillusionment and undoubtedly has lost some of its early sheen. It is also notable that the two seats it lost to the opposition in 2001 were in banana- growing areas. Before assuming office in 1997, the SLP had exploited effectively the intense anxieties that built up in these parts of the island in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it became clear that the industry would have to face major ad- justments. It supported the Banana Salvation Committee, a militant organization of banana farmers, which engaged in October 1993 in "no cut strikes" and other protests, during which police killed two farmers.

In office, the Anthony government repudiated past political interference in the industry and sought to force the farmers to take responsibility for their own industry. It paid off the EC$45 million debt owed by the St. Lucia Banana Growers Association (SLBGA), which was in effect a publicly owned corporation and was unquestionably inefficient. In an unexpected move, it privatized the corporation and at the same time encouraged other companies to emerge in an attempt to make the business internally competitive and to allow the government to step back from the situation. In many respects, privatization was a surprising and bitter pill to choose to swallow for a government that saw itself as renewing its party's early post- 1945 commitment to British-style social democracy. It reasoned that it would force cul- tural change in the banana industry and thereby remove the prevailing sense that all the farmers had to do was grow the fruit and turn up with it at the port, leaving the "government" somehow to sort out everything else.

Few in St. Lucia believe that the policy has really worked. Only three other companies were ever formed, mostly by groups of farmers linked by past political affiliation rather than future business strategy; none of them, not even the privatized SLBGA, can be said to have turned into enterprises shaped by their sense of different market opportunities within the industry. Production has continued to fall and the country now has only some 1,500 active producers (Jean, 2004). The government has continued to do what it can to stabilize the industry, setting up a Banana Industry Recovery Unit in the Ministry of Agriculture. This action contributed to improved irrigation schemes and helped raise production standards, and the like, with much of this activity funded under either the European Development Fund or the European Union's Special Framework of Assistance for ACP banana-producing countries. Formally, the government adopts the position that it will not conceive of an exit strategy from the banana business (politically, this would be almost im-

Payne 33

possible). It may well be that the bottom has almost been reached. The remaining growers, many of whom are old and conservative, are able to sell somewhere for a few more years, perhaps by exploiting the "'fair trade" or organic market or both more assiduously. The truth is that the decline of bananas has already done most of its damage to the St. Lucian economy and society. Many farmers have gone out of business o1 have turned to growing marijuana: accordingly, their sons have not been able to inherit functioning businesses and many have drifted off to Castries, the capital; crime has grown and also has become more professional in association with the growing use of St. Lucia as a transhipment point for drugs produced in South America and sold in North America. For all of its bravery in embracing privatization, the Anthony government has done little more than prevent the industry falling off the edge completely.

In these circumstances, tourism has been forced, fimte de mieux, to become the mainstay of the economy. The industry experienced continuing growth throughout the 1990s, with its contribution to GDP rising from 9.6 percent in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2000. Both direct and indirect employment generated by the tourist sector also increased during the decade, while by 1999 government tax revenue from the sector amounted to 5 percent of the total. Moreover, with regard to the balance of payments, tourism was the only item in the goods and services category that made a positive contribution between 1994 and 1997 (Government of St. Lucia-European Community, 2001: 12-13). It is hardly surprising that the Anthony government moved swiftly to adopt a five-year strategic plan for tourism that aimed to position the island as the premier destination in the Caribbean and worked energetically to attract more cruise ships, hotel chains, and airlines to focus on St. Lucia. Yet, as is well known, tourism has many deficiencies as a development strategy: much of the gain slips away through foreign ownership of key plants; serious competitors exist both inside and outside of the Caribbean; and the whole concept is notoriously dependent on perceptions of stability and receipt of an "'appropriate" welcome.

Given the longevity of its involvement wilh the Caribbean tourism industry, St. Lucia also possesses a maturing tourist product, which always has been focused principally on the high end of the market, rendering it increasingly vulnerable to the low prices of the "'all-inclusive'" resorts favored these days in Mexico. the Do- minican Republic, and even Cuba. According to St. Lucia Hotel and Tourism As- sociation figures, the first sign of a fall in the numbers of U.S. "stay-over visitors" manifested itself in May 2001 (with a drop of 11.3 percent in that month compared to the previous year). The events of 11 September 2001 then precipitated a sharp further tall in arrivals (of approximately 33 percent by October), a genuine slump that ran on throughout 2002. The industry did not rebound until 2003 when, thanks to its revival, growth in the economy as a whole returned to a moderately healthy 3.7 percent annually. Yet, in the two preceding years, the combined effects of banana decline and tourist collapse produced a dramatic fall in real GDP of 4.3 percent in 2001 and, to all intents and purposes, negligible growth of 0.4 percent in 2002 (IMF, 2004b). Even in 2003, the overall economic situation in the island remained difficult, given that the recovery of the tourist sector did not fully spill over into the whole economy.

As for other sectors, manufacturing in St. Lucia remains embryonic and fluctuates in activity, usually in relation to particular, often relatively modest, inward invest-


ments. A significant group of local industrialists does not really exist in St. Lucia because most businesspeople in the island content themselves with commercial and retail enterprises. Consequently, several longstanding agroindustrial opportunities (e.g., the production of banana or mango pulp for baby foods) remain unfulfilled. Fisheries have grown steadily since the mid-1990s, aided by the completion of a new Japanese-funded fisheries complex, but still account for no more than 1 - 1.5 percent of GDP. Moreover, fisheries are hampered from contributing more to economic growth because few fish can be exported regionally or internationally without the authorities acquiring the necessary external certification, which they have not yet been able to do.

In these circumstances, the Anthony government's diversification strategy focused on efforts to open up three new areas, each of which was thought to have genuine employment creation potential, namely, financial services, free zone operations, and informatics (Anthony, 2004:51 ). It was deeply worried about unemployment in the island. Although precise figures are hard to come by and definitions always can be disputed in economies characterized by lots of "hustling" and informal economic activity, the number unemployed probably reached around 22 percent during 1998- 1999, but has since fallen to around 17-18 percent. There has been some progress in the targeted new areas of growth, and St. Lucia has the potential to take these further forward in the future. For the moment, though, human capital constraints in respect of the educational level of the available workforce serve to limit what can be built up in these economic spheres.

In sum, it is undeniable that the reforming energy of the incoming Anthony government has been substantially blunted by the difficult economic circumstances and severe structural constraints within which it has had to operate. Yet it may still have done as well as any government could have been expected to do in the circumstances. It came into office with a social orientation, and has maintained this in good part, taking up a sufficiently expansionary fiscal stance in its various budgets to cause the IMF in its Article IV consultation with the government in 2004 to warn, albeit gently, about the country's increasing public debt and call accordingly for "gradual fiscal consolidation" (IMF, 2004a). At the same time, An- thony has pragmatically recognized the need to bring new money into the economy, establishing, for example, a new Office for Private Sector Relations within his own prime ministerial office.

On the whole, the country is quiet politically, perhaps too much so, in that it is difficult to detect any strong sense of a national debate about the island's development predicament. Beyond ritual statements made by the Chamber of Commerce, the Hoteliers Association, theYouth Federation, and some trade unions, civil society in St. Lucia is weak. There exists, for example, no real development-oriented NGO. For its part, the press is mostly consumed with interparty machinations and is quick to raise questions about the "political ambitions" of anyone who seeks to raise issues of developmental significance in the media or elsewhere. This tendency to discuss issues in excessively personal terms is one of the problematic features of Eastern Caribbean political culture. In the meantime, the Anthony government presses on in a generally competent fashion. In 2004, GDP growth climbed back to 5.4 percent, spurred by increased value-added in tourism and a rise in total banana production (Caribbean Development Bank, 2004: 1). At the same time, the government oper-

Payne 35

ates without ever looking as if it will be able to live up to its early promise or fully regain its initial impetus.

Dominica

Dominica also enjoyed the good banana years of the 1980s, but experienced de- clining economic growth in the 1990s, largely because of the damage done by a series of hurricanes and tropical storms, the presence of fundamental structural rigidities in the economy, and a continuing failure to invest in the infrastructure necessary to encourage private sector activity. Manufacturing was more or less confined to the production of soap and dental cream by a single firm, while tourist development was constrained by the island's lack of white sandy beaches and an international airport. Real GDP growth in 1999 fell to only 1.6 percent. That said, the United Workers Party (UWP), a party of young businessmen, did not lose the election in January 2000, primarily because of the deteriorating economic situation,

More damaging were charges of corruption. After the election, a coalition government was formed between the Dominica Labour Party, which won I0 seats, and the traditionally right-wing Dominica Freedom Party (DFP), which won two seats, thereby giving the government 12 of the 21 seats in the Dominican parliament. Interestingly, it was led by Rosie Douglas, a prominent member of the Caribbean left in the 1970s and early 1980s, who had once been imprisoned in Canada for his part in a violent anti-racist protest but had returned to the island to become an MP in 1985 (Andrd and Christian, 2002). But Douglas died after only eight months in office and was replaced as prime minister by Pierre Charles, another former radical who came from the Grand Bay area, known locally for its strong collectivist political tradition. Yet Charles himself died in January 2004 and was replaced in turn by Roosevelt Skerrit, a young and inexperienced former schoolteacher.

The DLP govermnent has had to cope with some real traumas, and was in a sense rewarded for this when, in the May 2005 elections, it was returned to office with a higher number of seats and an increased sharc of the w~te. The coalition dimension to the government was also rendered less marked because the two DFP representatives ran under the DLP banner, albeit without a signed formal merger agreement between the parties.

Not surprising, given these sudden shifts of leadership (which, it should be noted, did not lead to any political turbulence in Dominica), the various DLP governments have not yet set out any coherent strategy of development for the country in the context of the structural decline of bananas. They have sought only to stave off the prospective collapse of the economy. In his brief period in office, Douglas set out to build, somewhat from scratch, an enterprise culture in Dominica and he traveled energetically and widely to attract more foreign investment to the island. Yet, as one obituary stated, although "his oratory was inspiring," some felt "'disheartened by his inability to plan and pay attention to domestic details" (Pattullo, 2000). Charles inherited nothing less than an economic crisis. GDP stagnated in 2000 and fell by 4.2 percent in 2001 as banana production fell again, and such tourism that did exist was hit by the fall-out from 9/11.

Public finances felt the most immediate pressure, which was caused by a combination of the country's narrow tax base, its limited production structure, and an


excessively ambitious public investment program launched by the new DLP regime. In July 2002, the government was forced to introduce a package of measures aimed at correcting the fiscal imbalance through both revenue-raising and expenditure-re- ducing measures. On the revenue side, these included a 4 percent stabilization levy on all incomes, a 5 percent sales tax on petroleum products and telephone services, and a 1 percent environmental levy; on the expenditure side capital spending was also capped at around 6 percent of GDE The government also approached the IMF and, shortly after these measures were announced, the fund approved a one-year stand-by credit for Dominica of some SDR3.28 million (about US$4.3 million). According to the IME the program involved "a narrowing of the fiscal deficit by nearly half to 53A percent of GDP," as well as "the introduction of key structural reforms" (IMF, 2002). Above all, it required that the government confront the necessity of public sector retrenchment, cutting back wages, eliminating jobs, and facing down the trade union protests that inevitably ensued. Charles admitted that his earlier package had not been enough to secure IMF support, acknowledging that "the country is hurting," and pleaded tbr national support (Fontaine, 2003).

Dominica still remains under IMF supervision. It was deemed to have tightened policy implementation and government spending sufficiently to be moved in De- cember 2003 from the stand-by arrangement to a fully-fledged three-year credit tbr SDR7.7 million (about US$11.4 million) under the fund's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). The PRGF is the IMF's concessional facility for low-income countries and involves the adoption of a "country-owned" poverty reduction strategy supposedly articulated in conjunction with civil society. This required continuing cuts in public expenditure and in the size of the country's public sector, as well as a "structural reform agenda," embracing debt restructuring, tax and civil service reform, financial sector strengthening, and other moves to improve the investment climate and enhance competitiveness (IMF, 2003b). It was a bleak time for the island: real economic growth fell again by 4.7 percent in 2002 and 1.0 percent in 2003, bringing about real hardships for many ordinary Dominicans. The IMF's aim was to push the economy to a point where it would "bottom out" and then return to steady growth, with the salient difference that the government would then be in control of its budget. In these narrow terms, the strategy has largely worked. A series of IMF missions and reviews confirmed that the government's implementation of the program had been "consistently strong" (IMR 2004a), with fiscal targets generally observed by wide margins, notwithstanding severe unanticipated damage to public infrastructure caused by an earthquake in late 2004. Data showed that the economy grew again by approximately 1 percent in 2004, with the trend gather- ing strength into 2005. It is now possible that the country could move out of IMF financial supervision when the PRGF facility terminates at the end of 2006.

Dominica's eventual return to growth resulted because the economy had slumped so low that the only way forward was back up. It was certainly not brought about by a recovery in banana production, which has continued to fall in the years after 2000, with fewer growers than ever involved in the business. The government does not have a clear strategy for bananas. As in the other Windward Islands, the Dominica Banana Marketing Corporation was for many years a government corporation. But it failed financially and has now been converted into a private company owned by the farmers. This conversion did not reflect a conscious act of privatization, but

Payne 37

rather the harsh reality that it had run out of money and the government was in no position to bale it out. The country has struggled to be on the itinerary of the cruise ship companies while benefiting little from this aspect of regional tourism. Ecotour- ism endeavors have begun in a modest way and there are opportunities that could be better exploited such as diving and whale watching.

Manufacturing has been hit by the sale of Dominica Coconut Products to Col- gate, which, having bought out a rival, proceeded to wind down production at the Dominican plant. Other agroindustries do exist--Bello produces pepper sauce and Blows produces herbal tea--but production levels are exiguous. A financial services sector was also briefly opened, but many were crooked operations and they have now been completely squeezed out by the government's belated enforcement of the tighter regime demanded of late by the leading Western states. In short, the Domini- can economy is not being driven now by any of its constituent elements. It draws in significant remittance income {estimated by some in the country at approximately EC$80 million a year) from the Dominican diaspora in the United Kingdom and United States, and also contains a strong subsistence element whereby many families keep chickens and grow much of their own lood. In a real sense, the economy just muddles along: it is not developing in any particular direction, and will not necessarily do so just because the IMF has put the public finances in order.

Skerrit, who is serious of purpose and open-minded, has not yet confronted this core problem. He knew as soon as he became prime minister that he faced an election within a year or so, and he was initially almost wholly preoccupied with positioning himself and the DLP lbr that contest. His main ploy involved suddenly terminating in March 2004 Dominica's longstanding diplomatic links to the Republic of China (Taiwan) and instead establishing relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC). The announcement came with the promise of substantial financial support from the PRC for numerous key infrastructural projects with obvious electoral reso- nance. These projects included the construction of a new sports stadium in which it was suggested that international cricket could be played, the upgrading of the main Roseau-Portsmouth highway linking the country's two main towns, major improve- ments to the Princess Margaret Hospital, anti the construction of a new secondary school in the environs of Roseau. As Skerrit noted in an "address to the nation" (no less), the provision of these important projects, valued by the government at some EC$300 million, "will not cost the taxpayers of Dominica one cent ... not now or in the future" (Skerrit, 2004: 5). In addition, the PRC also provided some EC$30 million in cash grants to the government over a five-year period. It was new money and of a magnitude that the Dominican people were not used to having lavished upon them, especially during the economic contraction and public sector retrenchment since 2000, but it was enough to secure electoral victory in May 2005. Skerrit took no chances politically by alleging that the opposition UWP would immediately reopen relations with Taiwan if it were to win.

The Skerrit government knows that it now needs to chart some proper steps toward the formulation of a post-banana development strategy for Dominica. It is revealing that when he addressed the nation at the time of his diplomatic switch between the two Chinas, he conceded that, "for a while," as he put it, the combination of the three external shocks experienced by Dominica and the other Windward Islands--namely, the final WTO ruling on bananas, the various external financial initiatives against


offshore development, and then 9/11--"seemed to petrify us" (Skerrit, 2004: 6). By implication, the moment had come when the country needed to move into a new development era. This is even more apparent since the government's reelection. The DLP regime has been given more time to think through and then act upon the needs of the moment. But it still confronts many deep-seated difficulties, not least its own inexperience (Charles Savarin, the former DFP leader and now minister of Foreign Affairs, Labour and Trade Relations, is the only member of the cabinet with a significant prior record of office), the general weakness of the civil service, and the institutions of the state in general and, again, as in St. Lucia, the effective absence of civil society. One small NGO, called SPAT, was formed in 1981 after major hurricane damage, but it barely survives, picking up grants where it can and working with local communities (Esprit, 2004). The problem is that many middle-class Dominicans, the sort of people with ambition and education who might be expected to offer leadership as "critical citizens" in a small-scale society, have long since left the island. A group of them have recently founded the Dominica Academy for the Arts and Sciences (DASS), with a view to promoting closer links between wealthy, entre- preneurial Dominicans living in the United States and on the island itself. Although this is a promising initiative, it does not retract from the core responsibility of the reelected Skerrit government over the next five years to address as strategically as it can the development impasse that presently characterizes Dominica.

St. Vincent

St. Vincent experienced much the same pattern of economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s as the other Windward Islands--namely, steady growth on the back of banana sales in the first of these decades, followed by fluctuating and, on average, lower growth (2.9 percent annually) during the latter decade. The fluctuations largely related to the fortunes of the banana industry, with tropical storms wiping out substantial portions of the crops in both 1994 and 1995, and a particularly good year being enjoyed in 1998. Nevertheless, real GDP growth in 2000 was just 2 percent, reflecting a general slowdown in the economy and a contraction in the public sector as major public sector projects were completed (IME 2003a). In general elections held in March 2001, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, leader of the Unity Labour Party, convincingly won power (taking 12 of 15 seats) from the center-right New Democratic Party (NDP), which had held office in St. Vincent for 17 uninterrupted years since 1984. Gonsalves was another Eastern Caribbean politician with a record of left-wing activism. A man of Marxist convictions, he had been leader of the tiny Youlou Liberation Movement in St. Vincent in the 1970s, and had contested the 1979 election as leader of the leftist United People's Movement. Retraining as a lawyer after a period as an academic at the University of the West Indies campus in Barbados, he worked his passage in the courts and in opposition politics in the island until his victory in 2001. Although he campaigned on a relatively orthodox modernizing platform, Gonsalves still liked to present himself in posters and at rallies as "de Comrade" and, on winning, he immediately announced that he would lead a "poor people's government."

Gonsalves undoubtedly has been an activist prime minister and interestingly has given high priority to reforming the nature of the process of governance in St.

Payne 39

Vincent, seeking, in his words, to build "'a "Together Now, ~ inclusive, participatory'" approach to leadership (Gonsalves, 2002: 3). Accordingly, he moved quickly to establish three new committees by which to manage the economy. The first was a national economic and social development council, a broad-based grouping of civil society representatives including trade unions, the business community, government officials, and two of the minor political parties (the NDP declined membership), which was charged with subjecting the economy and society of St. Vincent to "critical analyses." The second was a tripartite commiltee on the economy, again composed of representatives of the government, labor, and business, which was asked to make policy recommendations on a range of issues including productivity, wages, employment, prices, and investment. The third was a cabinet committee on the economy, chaired by Gonsalves who is also minister of finance, which meets once a month to monitor the ongoing economic and financial situation, In addition, Gonsalves has embarked on a regular annual tour of the island in the couple of months before the budget, holding a series of town-hall style consultative meetings, which have been broadcast live on national radio. This technique was actually reminiscent of how the former revolutionary government in neighboring Grenada used to operate in the early 1980s, but had not been tried anywhere else in the Caribbean before or since. Gonsalves was closely linked to the leaders of the Grenada revolution in those years, but has managed to carry off this innovative piece of decisionmaking with the approval of the IME some of whose officials were in St. Vincent at the time of the first round of budgetary meetings in late 2001 and attended themselves to witness the process in action.

The new government has also brought new energy to bear on the banana industry, although it can be argued that it has not been especially radical in its approach. For example, unlike St. Lucia, St. Vincent has not pursued privatization, preferring to keep the St. Vincent Banana Growers Association in effect as a state corporation while seeking a~ much as possible to "'commercialize" its operation (Daniel 2004). For example, the management was immediately changed; new incentives were introduced to encourage banana farmers to increase productivity and product quality; EU aid was deployed as extensively as possible to improve both irrigation and the main highway by which most of the fruit was transported to harbor; while an "action committee" was set up to monitor the supply-side requirements of the industry. In June 2004, Gonsalves also called and chaired a "'banana conference" in St. Vincent, ostensibly to plan the Windwards campaign against the implica- tions of "tariffication'" and the WTO ruling. Although it was attended by Skerrit and a St. Lucian minister (but not by Kenny Anthony), it was arguably an initiative that was both too little and too late, and it can best be understood perhaps as a domestic political maneuver designed to show activity and concern in the midst of an intractable situation. The number of banana farmers in St. Vincent has continued to fall even during the ULP years (Rose, 2004). It is true that those that still grow are probably more efficient than previously and, as with the other islands, there may be enough of a niche in the global market for production of modest quantities of small, sweet, ~'ethically produced" bananas. At the same time, the government has thought about an "exit strategy," of what to do, say with one big, final EU grant, although for political reasons, it cannot admit that it has ever considered such a prospect.


It hardly needs mentioning now that the achievement of significant diversification in these Eastern Caribbean economies is far from straightforward. Tourism is growing slowly, although St. Vincent also suffered, like the rest of the Caribbean, from the post-9/11 downturn. The government has presided over a major "clean-up" of Kingstown, the capital, which is actually a pretty and historic town with a fine botanical garden, but has still only been able to attract a small number of cruise ships. The country's tourist development is great inhibited by the absence of an international airport and the government has undertaken much preparatory work on various aspects of this problem, planning new airports on mainland St. Vincent and on Canouan, one of the beautiful Grenadine islands that make up the territory, and seeking to improve the existing E.T. Joshua airfield at Amos Vale (The Vincentian, 16 July 2004). It has been talking to foreign businesses and aid donors, but the costs are huge and no deals have been reached as yet that will lead to a breakthrough in airport development in St. Vincent. In the interim, the best prospects lie in building up yachting in the Grenadines. Offshore financial development had also been identified by the previous NDP administration as a potential area of diversification and the sector was beginning to take off, albeit involving some dubious operations, when all the various listings initiated by Western governments included St. Vincent. Gonsalves moved immediately to put the country's house in order, appointing a capable Trinidadian woman as the head of a new statutory organization and instructing her to work meticulously through the country's laws and administrative arrangements in this sphere (Mitchell, 2004; Trotman, 2004). As a result, St. Vincent was removed from the list of tax havens in 2002 and of noncooperative territories in relation to money laundering in 2003: the cost was a sharply diminished offshore sector, comprising some 11 offshore banks in September 2003, compared to 44 at the end of December 2001 (IME 2005).

As far as other sectors are concerned, manufacturing hardly contributes to GDR The fisheries industry is very small and suffers from inadequate infrastructure, and non-banana agricultural export production is distinctly limited, although the government has set itself the task of reviving the arrowroot business in which St. Vincent had been a major player in the 1940s, when this crop was a key ingredient in salad sauces. A final reference in this overview of national economic options should be made to the production and illegal export of marijuana. St. Vincent has long been acknowledged as the major grower in the Eastern Caribbean. U.S. military forces in the past have been involved in extensive "slash and burn" operations, but these have been less frequent in recent years. The government has always been careful not to do or say anything to endorse the growth of marijuana, and it has openly condemned its own ministers when they were involved. At the same time, it must know, and appreciate, the economically beneficial effect of the extra spending power the marijuana trade brings to the economy. St. Vincent will be well placed, should this drug ever be legalized in the future in any of the rich societies of the West.

As a result of these various measures, the St. Vincent economy has begun to stage something of a recovery. The year 2001 was marked by stagnation, with the incoming ULP government having to implement a wage freeze on all public sector employees as part of its financial response to a bad drought affecting agricultural production, the contraction of tourist business caused by 9/11, and the general sluggishness of the world economy. Since then, growth has resumed, registering

Payne 41

1.7 percent in 2002 and 3.6 percent in 2003. The government's estimate for 2004 was as high as 5 percent, with the same projected for 2005 (Gonsalves, 2004: 1). Government spending has increased in consequence, including the award of wage rises for public employees. It is noteworthy that the IMF explicitly commended the ULP government for its "'achievements in its first eighteen months in a difficult regional and global environment" (1ME 2003a). However, it has also expressed more recently "some concern" over the government's "pursuit of a counter-cyclical fiscal policy," whereby capital spending was used to stimulate economic activity at a time of below-average economic growth (IME 2005). It pointed out that St. Vincent's public debt-to-GDP ratio reached 80 percent in 2004 and observed that, with growth returning, there was less need for a high level of public investment and an emerging requirement tk)r renewed fiscal discipline. In effect, Gonsalves has got away with applying classic Keynesian policies for a couple of years, but will probably now have to recognize the need not to slep too far beyond IMF orthodoxy if his general approach to macroeconomic management is not to incur greater scrutiny and ultimately criticism. The renewed economic growth of the last three years has reduced somewhat the very high level of unemployment reached in 2001, estimated at around 22 percent, but the reality is that this problem, and the poverty inevitably generated in its wake, remains endemic to Vincentian society. Here will eventually be found the acid test of the ULP's proclaimed inclusive approach to governance.

The Gonsalves government has brought ideas and commitment to St. Vincent's post-banana development strategy, and there is no doubt that it has enjoyed some real successes. The opposition NDP is led by Arnhim Eustace, who was briefly prime minister between October 2000 and March 2001. He is by training an economist who has worked in the banana business and has been well placed to exploit anxieties about the continued decline of this industry. Politics in St. Vincent also remains deeply partisan in relation to loyalty to party, and the NDP has generally been thought to possess a larger core vote than the ULR For all that, Gonsalves is the most able and visionary figure in St. Vincent and is acknowledged even by his critics to be a formidable political operator at grassroots level (John, 2004). He suc- ceeded in winning easy reelection to office in December 2005, the ULP winning 55 percent of the popular vote and retaining its 12-3 majority, and now has an extended opportunity to try to embed the more diversified strategy of development on which he has embarked as the new national consensus.

Conclusion

Set against the notion advanced at the outset that an impasse has been reached in Caribbean development theory, this review of the recent development experience of the three Eastern Caribbean banana-producing islands generates four broad conclusions, The first concerns the general nature of the Caribbean development predicament. It is obvious that the development challenges faced by these islands are multidimensional. Put differently, they do not reduce to a single, overarching problem that, if somehow "fixed," would unleash a successful development strategy. Indeed, it can be argued that virtually all of the analyses of underdevelopment highlighted in the Caribbean over the past half-century still apply with some force to Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent. These countries manifestly need to attract


foreign investment; they are genuinely inhibited by their smallness; they undoubtedly experience many manifestations of structural dependence; they do not possess either a dynamic indigenous capitalist class or a capable developmental state; they do need to adjust their economies to find a place within globalization. All of these longstanding mantras of Caribbean development still stand. Lewis, Demas, the New World Group, Thomas, Watson, and Marshall, as well as the neoliberals--all of them continue to have something to say to the Eastern Caribbean development predicament. The key point is that none of their arguments are exclusively right, for, as we have already said, the problems of Caribbean development are genuinely multidimensional. The implication of this line of argument is obviously that Carib- bean development theory and strategy also has to be multidimensional. There simply is no deus ex machina. In reality, multiple responses to multiple problems have to be set in motion, and then assembled into a coherent strategy whereby each element complements the other and a political defense of the whole package can also be effectively made. Even then, one cannot expect the impact to be revolutionary: the best that can be hoped is that economic diversification and social progress will be pushed forward on an incremental and gradualist basis.

Second, it should be noted that, within such a strategy, the key facilitator of development has come to be the political leader and associated political elite formally charged within the national system of governance with charting development policy. Such leaders and elites necessarily have to fill the vacuum caused by the weaknesses of the state, of local capitalists, and of local civil society. This is what makes the recent development history of the Eastern Caribbean so interesting and potentially important to the wider understanding of Caribbean, and indeed comparative development generally. In each country, a key political figure has come to the fore in the person of a dominant and successful party leader and subsequent prime minister--Anthony in St. Lucia; Douglas, Charles, and now Skerrit in Dominica; and Gonsalves in St. Vincent. Scholars have long noted that politics throughout the English-speaking Caribbean region has been characterized by a dynamic relationship between what Archie Singham many years ago dubbed the "hero" and the "crowd" (Singham, 1968). Lloyd Best added a new twist by coining the term "doctor politics," and distinguishing between what he dubbed "Sunday School Doctors," "Public School Doctors," and "Grammar School Doctors" to encapsulate the different means by which different leadership styles held sway in different Caribbean territories (Best, 1969 and 1985). Paul Sutton observed that, by the 1990s, the region appeared to have acquired a taste for the political leadership of"Managerial Doctors" who could deliver economic growth and development by virtue of their professional, technocratic skills (Sutton, 1991). This last point is highly apposite, with both Anthony and Gonsalves actually possessing doctorates awarded by British universities, and Skerrit being a schoolteacher before entering politics. Anthony and Gonsalves dominate their governments in St. Lucia and St. Vincent, respectively, and Skerrit is beginning to show signs of doing so in Dominica. The reality is that the political leaders of these Eastern Caribbean banana-producing islands have been required to take center stage in the whole development drama. They are the key players, reliant on their political ingenuity, their contacts, and their luck. They are classic "Managerial Doctors."

Yet there is another important aspect of this model of development that must be drawn out and highlighted as a third concluding observation. Precisely because these

Payne 43

leaders cannot depend routinely for advice and guidance on a focused and development-oriented state machine, and precisely because they do not have a powerful national capitalist class to work alongside, the only other political resource that they can deploy is the support, involvement, and tmderstanding of the ordinary people that they represent. As we have seen, formal ~ivil society activities in these islands are generally weak and do not provide that much support, but it is important to note there exists in all three countries a strong sense of national "island" identity that can potentially be harnessed into a sense of popular togetherness capable of providing significant political support for strategies of incremental diversification. It is actually one of the few positive features of small size. The Anthony government in St. Lucia certainly set out on this road with a distinct emphasis on inclusivity, although that commitment has been dulled somewhat over time by the latent pressures of competitive multiparty politics. Equally, the Gonsalves government in St. Vincent has worked hard and with some real success to embed a meaningful "social contract" between the government and the people arotmd the problem of development. By comparison, the Skerrit government in Dominica has not yet put as much effort into building a popular development consensus and perhaps can be said to display consequently a lesser dynamism. Even so, there is enough evidence in the recent politics of St. Lucia and St. Vincent, as well as the potential in Dominica, to suggest that a kind of "managerial populism" is emerging in the Eastern Caribbean as the political base on which to chart a viable strategy of development into the world of globalization in the post-banana era.

Finally, and notwithstanding the guarded note of optimism just struck, it must be reiterated that the task remains extraordinarily difficult: the structural constraints that shapes the current development challenges facing Dominica, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia are truly formidable. One does not have to possess an irredeemably structuralist cast of mind to see that the range of development options faced by all of these islands is narrow in the extreme. Their bananas have been found to be un- competitive in the context of more or less free trade. Other countries have already entered and largely command the main export markets of the other agricultural crops they can produce. Moving into narcotics risks arousing the renewed interest and ire of the United States. The obstacles in the way of agroindustrial manufacturing have always been considerable, although there are possibilities. Tourism is viable, yet it is also fragile, inherently highly competitive, and hard to ground as an industry within the domestic economy. The offshore sector can no longer rely on shady practices and must compete on quality of service with other major English-language players. It is hardly necessary to go on. The point is that there are no easy choices to be made by political leaders, no options begging to be taken down off the shelf and examined. Clearly, the argument can be overdone, to the point where these countries are somehow condemned to further impoverishment and endemic marginalization within the global economy. That would be to go too far. The development challenge facing the Eastern Caribbean banana-producing islands is genuinely structural, constituting nothing less than a classic historical turning point for the islands, both individually and as a grouping. Yet, as we have seen, they have already responded in interesting and often courageous ways and are beginning perhaps to pioneer within the region a genuine model of "managerial populism." In so doing, they have shown that there is always some room to


maneuver, some minimalist space for agency, available even to the smallest states in the global order at the most threatening of moments.

Notes

1.

The author would like to thank the Nuffield Foundation for supporting fieldwork in Dominica, St. Lucia, and St.Vincent in July 2004. Basic data relating to these countries are as follows: Dominica: size 290 sq.mdes; population (estimated 2005) 69,000: date of independence 3 November 1978; St Lucia: size 238 sq. miles: population (estimated 2005) 166.000; date of independence 22 February 1979: and St Vincent size 150 sq. miles; population (estimated 2005) I I 7,000: date of independence 27 October 1979.

References

Andr6, Irving W. and Gabriel J. Christian�9 2002�9 In Search of Eden: Essays on Dominican History. Brampton, Ontario: Pond Casse Press�9

Anthony, Kenny. 2004. At the Rainbow's Edge: Selected Speeches by Kennv D. Anthony 1996-2002. Kingston and Miami: lan Randle.

Barfield, Scott. 2003. "Development, the World Trade Organisation and the 'Banana Trade War,'" unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, UK.

Best, Lloyd�9 1969. Interviewed in The Express, Port of Spare, 31 May. �9 1971. "Size and Survival." Pp. 29-34 m Readings in the Political Economy of the Caribbean,

eds. N. Girvan and O. Jefferson. Kingston: New World Group�9 . 1985�9 "West Indian Society 150 Years after Abolition: A Re-examinanon of Some Classic

Theories." Pp. 148-152 m Out ot'Slavel3': Abolition and Alter, ed. J. Hayward. London: Frank Cass.

Blackman, Courtney. 1980. "'Speech to the Students of Chancellor Hall, University of the West Indies, 14 March 1980." Caribbean Monthh' Bulletin 14(6-7).

Caribbean Development Bank. 2004. Ammal Report 2004. Bridgetown: Caribbean Development Bank�9

Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery News Release No. 1512005. "'Scaled Back Commission Banana Proposal to Have Crippling Effect on Caribbean," 13 September 2005.

Clegg. Peter. 2002. The Caribbean Bamma Trade: From Colonialism to Globali,atton. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Daniel, Montgomery. 2004. Interview by the author. Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Kingstown, 21 July.

Demas, William G. 1965. The Economics of Development in Small Countries with Special Reference to the Caribbean. Montreal: McGill University Press.

Esprit, Francisco. 2004. Interview by the author. Coordinator of SPAT, Roseau, 28 July. Europa press release IP/05/377, 31 March 2005. Fontaine, Thomson. 2003. "Dominica's Economy on Bnnk of Collapse." The Dominican.net 1(39)

(16 March), available from <http://www,thedominican.net/articles/economyone.htm> Gonsalves, Ralph. 2002.2003 Budget Address Presented to the House of Assembly by Dr. the Hon.

Ralph Gonsah'es, Prime Minister and Minister of Finance on Monday December 2, 2002, mimeo, Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Kingstown.

�9 2004. 2005 Budget Address Presented to the House of Assembly by Dl: the Hon. Ralph Gonsah'es, Prime Minister and Minister oJ Finance on Monday December 6. 2004, mimeo, Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Kingstown

Government of St. Lucia-European Community. 200 I. CountO' Strategy Paper and National htdiea- tire Programme for the Period 2001-2007, available from: <http://www.eu.mt/comm/development>

Grossman, L.S. 1998. The Political Ecology oj Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants and Agrartan Change in the Eastern Caribbean. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

International Monetary Fund. 2002. "IMF Approves US$4.3m. Stand-by Credit for Dominlca." Press Release No. 02/37, IMF, Washington, DC. 28 August.

Payne 45

�9 2003a. "'IMF Concludes 2002 Consultation with St Vincent." Pubhc lnforlnation Notice No. 03/14, IMF, Washington, DC, 14 February.

�9 2003b. "'IMF Approves in Principle US$11.4m. PRGF Arrangemenl for Dominica.'" Press Release No. 03/228, IME Washington, DC, 22 December�9

�9 2004a. "'IMF Completes 2 "~ Review of Dominica's PRGF Arrangement." Press Release No. 04/174, IMF, Washington, DC, 6 August.

�9 2004b. "'IMF Concludes 2003 Article IV Consultation with St. Lucia." Public Int\wmation Notice No. 04/128, IMF, Washington, DC, 15 Nm ember.

�9 2005. "'IMF Executive Board Concludes 2003 Article IV Consultation with St Vincent." Public Information Notice No. (15/65, IMF, Washington, DC, 19 May.

Jean, Ignatius�9 2004. Interview by the author. Minister ol Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Govern- ment of St. Lucia, Castries, 14 July.

John, Kenneth�9 2004. "Dr. Gonsalves" Tortuous Course." The Vincentlan, 1 l June 2004. Jules, Dldacus and Tennyson S. D. Joseph. 2004 "Introduction." Pp. xiii-xv, 3, 93-94, 181-182, and

299 in At the Rainbow's Edge: Selected Speeche,~ ('1 Kemly D. Anthony 1996-2002, K. Anthony. Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle.

Levitt, Karl�9 1996. "'Preface," Pp. xi-xiii in Tile Crmcal Tra&tion of Caribbean Political Ecmlomv: The Lega(y of George Becklord, eds. K. Levitt and M. Witter. Kingston: lan Randle.

Lewis, W. Arthur. 1949. "Industrial Development m Puerto Rico." Caribbean Econondc Review ]: 153-176.

�9 1950. "'The Industriahsation of the British West Indies." Carthbean Economic Revtew 2: 1-61.

Marshall, Don. D 1998. Cartbbean Pohtwal Economy ,a the Cro,s,sroads. London: Macmillan. Mclntyre, Alister, 1971. "'Some Issues of Trade Pohcy m the West Indies." Pp. 165-183 in Rea&ngs

in the Political Econonlv of the CotJbh('(ltl, eds. N Girvan and O, Jefferson. Kingston: New World Group.

Mitchell, Louise. 2004. "'A New Chapter for International Finance in St. Vincent and the Grenadines." Pp. 50-52 m The his and Outs o/St Vincent & the Grenadines. Kmgstown: The St Vincent and Grenadines Hotel and Tourism Association.

National Economm Research Associates. 2003. "Banana Exports from the Caribbean since 1992: Prehminary Report," mimeo, prepared for the Caribbean Banana Exporters Association, 18 June, London�9

Pantln, D, W. San&ford, and M. Henry. 1999. "Cake, Mama Coca Or? Alternatives Facing the Carib- bean Banana Industry in the Light of the Aprd 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ruhng on the European Union's (EU) Banana Regime." numeo, commissioned by WINFA, CPDC and Oxfam Caribbe:m, 20 September, Port of Spain.

Pattullo, Polly. 2000. "'Obituary: Rosie Douglas," The (;ltar(han, 5 October. Payne, Anthony and Paul Sutton 2001 Charting, Carit,hean Deveflqmwnt. London: Macmillan and

Gainesville Umversity Press of Florida. Ramphall, Davin. 1997. "'Postmodemism and the Rewriting of Canbbean Radical De,,elopment Think-

ing." Sociol am/Economic Studie,s 46( I ): 1-23, Rose, Renwick. 2004, Interview by the author. Coordinator of WINFA, Kingstown, 20 July. Singham, A. W. 1968 The Hero and lhe Crowd tll a ('ohmml Politx New Haven: Yale University

Press. Skerrlt, Roosevell. 2004. "'Address to the Nation by Hon. Roosevelt Skerrit, Prime Minister and Min-

ister of Finance, on the Estabhshlnent of Diplomatic Relations between the Commonwealth of Dommlca and the People's Repubhc of China,'" mlmeo, Government of Dominica, Roseau, 29 March�9

Sutton, Paul. 1984. "'From Neo-colonlahsm to Neo-cohmiallsm: Britain and the EEC in lhe Com- monwealth Caribbean "" Pp. 204-237 in Dependem3" under Challenge 77w Political Ecmlomv o/the Commonwealth Cartbheait, eds. A. Payne and E Sntton. Manchester: Manchester Uni- versity Press_

�9 1991 . "'Constancy, Change and Accomlnodatlon The Distinct Tradition of the Comlnonwea[th Caribbean." Pp 106-28 in The Fallacie.s o/H(q~e: 77w Post-colonial Record ol'ttle ('omntonwealth Third World, eds. J. Mayall and A Payne. Manchester: Manchester University Press


. 1997. "The Banana Regime of the European Union, the Caribbean and Latin America." Journal of lnteramerican Studies and World Affairs 39(2): 5-36.

Thomas, Clive Y. 1974. Dependence and Tran,sfornmtion: The Economics of the Transition to Social- ism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

. 1978. '"The Non-Capitalist Path' as Theory and Practice of Decolonization and Socialist Transformation." Latin American Perspectives 5: 10-36.

.1998. "Globalization, Structural Adjustment and Security: The Collapse of the Post-Colonial Developmental State in the Caribbean." Global Development Studies 1 (1-2): 67-84.

Thompson, Robert. 1987. Green Gold: Bananas and Dependency in the Eastern Caribbean. London: Latin America Bureau.

Trotman, Jeff. 2004. "FATF Black List More Harmful than OECD." The Vmcentian, 16 July 2004. Watson, Hilbourne A. ed. 1994. The Caribbean in the Global Political Economy. Boulder: Lynne

Rienner.

the end of green gold? comparative development options and strategies in the eastern caribbean...

Documents