This piece offers a critical commentary on the historical-systemic marginalization and food system injustice being experienced by women farmers, agro-producers, and cottage industry owners in the Caribbean. In doing so, we provide an overview of the structural barriers and systemic negligence rural working-class and cash-poor women across the Anglo-Caribbean face as a result of the ongoing trajectories of colonialism, neoliberal logics, and patriarchal norms. In addition, the piece details the disproportionate amount of (devalued) socially reproductive labor women perform within the agrarian Majority World. We end by proposing that the radical potentials, emancipatory praxis, and clarion calls for transformative change offered by the region’s very own Jacqueline Creft and Frantz Fanon are revolutionary voices to pay heed to with respect to advancing a sustainable and (gender) just Caribbean future.
Agricultural Extension is an essential service, and this was even more so highlighted in this global pandemic which has significantly affected the agricultural sector. This rapid research sought to assess the capacity of Caribbean extension and advisory service providers. Seventy extension service providers from 11 Caribbean countries responded to an open-ended questionnaire administered via the Survey Monkey platform. The findings indicated that governments played an important role in providing opportunities such as distribution of seedlings to encourage producers, and promoted backyard gardening and other programmes to ensure continuity of country’s food security. Extension officers faced a number of barriers in the execution of their duties. Some of the barriers included technological barriers, limited resources, and limited mobility as a result of the necessary restrictions and in some cases psychological barriers such as the fear of contracting the disease in the execution of their duties. Officers however utilized strategies such as increased use of ICTs to train farmers and link them to market opportunities. In an attempt to increase the use of ICTs a number of challenges were highlighted. Challenges such as limited ICT resources for officers, poor connectivity in some remote areas, aged farmers literacy levels in the use of ICTs as well as access. This rapid research recommends policy development towards the increased use of e-extension with consultation among key stakeholders. This can be done on a regional basis, and eventually scaled up in an effort to further strengthen extension and advisory services globally.
This article provides evidence of the food system challenges and structural barriers faced by women farmers and food producers in the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States. The aim of the piece is to add to critical literatures on political economy, development and food systems in the Majority World via recognizing the political agency of rural grassroots women in the Caribbean. To do so, we focus on the role that social reproduction has in the lives of working Caribbean women who are engaged in agricultural production. The analysis we offer was generated via a mix‐method project that included 111 farmers and agro‐processors from Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We deliberately centre the perspectives of Afrodescendant rural women. Our study reveals the main barriers faced by women in agriculture are lack of access to land, concessions and capital; non‐gender responsive Agricultural Extension Services; an absence of national and sectorial gender policies; and ongoing dismissals of the time and effort that goes into unwaged socially reproductive labour. In illustrating these realities, we cast light on how the barriers faced by women food producers in the OECS are inextricably linked to persistent colonial‐plantation relations, patriarchal social norms and liberal‐capitalist logics.
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