The Overdevelopment of Carriacou

Abstract

HT HE tiny island of Carriacou in the southern Caribbean has white sand beaches, swaying palms, and clear blue waters-the requisite elements of a vacation paradise. It also has less aesthetic though no less typical West Indian characteristics: a high human population density, an island environment permanently scarred by a plantation history, and a transient labor force. Among other factors, occasional drought and accelerated soil erosion contribute to Carriacou's continuously declining carrying capacity. The descendants of plantation slaves continue to occupy the island, and most men who do not emigrate permanently become part-time labor migrants in order to help support Carriacou's human population. Variables bearing on Carriacouans' livelihoods are therefore largely external, outside the control of local islanders, and relatively unpredictable. Evidence from field research and from the sparse archival material pertaining to Carriacou helps explain the islanders' pattern of oscillating labor migration. Eighteenth-century plantation clearing disrupted Carriacou's existing ecosystem and caused severe ecological damage. Subsequent subsistence cropping and overgrazing have been responsible for continued environmental degradation. Carriacou has thus become increasingly less able to support a human population. As a response to ecological change, small island size, and economic dislocation, Carriacouans have extended their livelihood patterns in order to tap a wide variety of wage sources, a necessary though potentially hazardous adaptation. In a broad sense, we can say that Carriacou has been overdeveloped. This term is chosen not for its conceptual value but to question invalid stereotypes of ex-colonial areas, stereotypes that are particularly useless in the case of the Commonwealth Caribbean.' For too long we have employed a naive versus dichotomy of world regions that is laden with important assumptions. The North Atlantic world has been portrayed as hardworking, progressive, and blessed with a happy combination of superior technology and resources. In direct contrast, areas have been stereotyped as inhabited by economically inert peasantries that have lagged behind on an absolute scale of development. Economic improvement of the latter areas has thus been considered a matter of catching up. Within the last decade, a growing number of social scientists have challenged the theoretical separation of developed and underdeveloped areas, asserting that economic imperialism created and has increased the economic

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