Jamaican Agriculture HistoryA slow and intermittent recovery of the British West Indian sugar industry began at the turn of the present century when the governments of those countries most concerned in the sugar trade agreed to abolish the subsidy on beet sugar exports. This eventually led to a rise in agriculture cooperatives in Jamaica. Sales of British West Indian sugar in Britain increased a little, and a new and expanding market for sugar and molasses was found in Canada. However, at about the same time the United States imposed high duties on British West Indian sugar in order to encourage production in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Slowly agriculture education in Jamaica began to take center stage.
During the First World War between 1914 and 1918 Britain was cut off from her sources of beet sugar, and the market for British West Indian cane sugar improved considerably. In fact, the output from the Caribbean, particularly from Cuba, soared at this time. This went on after the war ended. Soon more sugar was being produced than the world could consume and prices fell to very low levels and agriculture Jamaica took a major hit.
Tariff preferences in Britain and Canada enabled the British West Indian sugar industry to survive but at a cost of low wages and deplorable conditions for the workers. The first real sign of relief came in 1937 when the International Sugar Agreement was established to regulate exports and maintain a basic price for sugar and once again Jamaica agriculture was on the rise.
Two years later the Second World War broke out and the Agreement was unable to operate properly until 1945. In 1951, when world production was known to be stabilized, the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement was signed and agriculture grow in Jamaica was becoming stable once again. This provided the British West Indies with a basic export quota of 900,000 tons of sugar a year. Of this, 640,000 tons are purchased at a special price called the ‘negotiated price’ because it is worked out during negotiations by representatives of the British and Commonwealth governments. Apart from a few brief periods this price has been considerably higher than world market price, which rises when demand is greater than supply and falls when supply is greater than demand, forming the basis of the sugar trade in the agriculture industry in Jamaica.
Throughout the century the tendency in most Caribbean countries has been to reduce the cost of producing sugar by concentrating the output in large central factories capable of processing at least a quarter of a million tons of cane in a season. As these factories cost several million dollars to build, they are owned not by individuals but by companies, often controlled from overseas. They are set in the midst of wide expanses of cane fields, most of which usually belong to the company that owns the factory. The remainder of the land may belong to other estates or to cane farmers or sometimes to the government.
Several square miles of flat land are required to grow enough cane to support a central factory. In almost all the smaller and most mountainous islands good soil is not available and sugar production has ceased. Only St Kitts, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Belize are able to support large factories. Barbados is a special case. The properties there have remained in family hands, and relatively small factories continue to process the crop. Normally a man’s world, the role of women in agriculture in Jamaica began to take center stage.
Large-scale agriculture in the West Indies presents many problems. One is that farm work is not well paid and has no prestige. This explains why workers prefer to reap crops in America, or even in another West Indian Territory, rather than in the place where they live. Many people prefer to remain unemployed if the only alternative is agricultural employment. A second problem is that there are large tracts of land lying unused or ineffectively used. A third is that more mechanization is needed if sugar estates are to improve their efficiency, but people are reluctant to accept it for fear of unemployment.
The bulk of the export crops other than sugar and the foodstuffs consumed locally are grown on small holdings which, in all, amount to two-thirds of the cultivated land in the Commonwealth Caribbean territories. Some small farmers are fairly well off, but the great majority live in poor conditions on tiny plots of land which they cultivate in a primitive and inefficient way. Improving their living conditions, their methods of cultivation and their crop yields are among the biggest problems facing West Indian governments today.
Some of the most useful forms of help are the provision of proper titles to the land, the establishment of land settlements, the granting of loans for development, the formation of co-operative and other organizations to assist in producing and marketing crops, bulk purchases at guaranteed prices, and the provision of plants, seeds and fertilizers at little cost. Due to anticipated low returns the student factors affecting agriculture education in Jamaica did seem as if it was going away anytime soon.
A problem of a different kind is that the British and American markets for traditional West Indian exports are saturated. Britain and America are developed countries and any rise in the standard of living there does not result in the consumption of much more food; the people have enough to eat already. Thus the present consumption of sugar in Britain (112 lbs. per person per year) and in the United States (96 lbs.) is unlikely to increase much. And at the other extreme, countries like Nigeria— where the sugar consumption is only 4 lbs. per person per year—are not potential markets because they are not rich enough to increase their imports of food. | 
