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Azucar (CEA), and the Institute for Agrarian Development (IAD) demonstrated
little interest in domestic food crops other than rice, and to some extent beans.
By the late 1980s, export production began to replace domestic food pro-
duction even within the conucos. In Zambrana-Chacuey, small holders grew pine-
apples for export; and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, shifting cultivators in
Los Haitises grew the root crop yautía for U.S. and Puerto Rican markets. Cul-
tivators on agrarian reform settlements raised export crops under contract:
agribusiness enterprises typically advanced credit on the condition that farmers
use it to invest in a technological package of improved seed, fertilizer, and pes-
ticides and that they sell their crop to the enterprise. Contract production re-
moves decision making from farm field to the agribusiness firm and increases
dependence on imported inputs, technologies, and seed stock. In the late 1980s,
the contract production strategy backfired with a vengeance when multiple crop-
ping and heavy water applications provided an atmosphere favorable to the
proliferation of insect pests (Murray 1994). Widespread application of broad-
spectrum pesticides in nontraditional vegetable production methods had led to
infestations of Thrips palmi in La Vega s oriental vegetable areas and white fly
in the Azua tomato fields. The response to these epidemics was increased ap-
plication of pesticides, to the point where the U.S. Department of Agriculture
halted imports of melons and oriental vegetables (Raynolds 1994). As prices and
production levels fell, farmers were left with loans they could not repay.
With declining sugar prices and the white fly crisis, the contribution of
export agriculture to GDP declined. Also in the 1990s, Dominican coffee growers
faced increasing competition from Vietnam, and, with elimination of trade bar-
riers, high-quality Caribbean bananas had to compete with cheaply produced
bananas from Central America and Ecuador (Fireside 2002; Raynolds 2000).
Coffee and banana producers found that they could survive more easily in the
global economy by producing for organic and fair trade markets, and by 2003
the Dominican Republic had become the region s foremost exporter of organic
bananas.
96 Barbara Deutsch Lynch
Cultural Obstacles to Agricultural Alternatives
In the Dominican Republic, cultural obstacles to the shift to alternative
agriculture were substantial. Even more severe were the barriers to polyculture
and shifting cultivation. Official statements on appropriate uses of the public
domain, shaped by the culture of export agriculture and the rhetoric of
Dominicanization, generally denigrated small cultivators. Their contribution to
GDP was systematically undervalued, and they were routinely blamed for de-
forestation, dam siltation, and other environmental problems. Anti-conuco rheto-
ric which appears as late as 1997 in the environmental literature had two
components. The first was the anti-Haitianism used since the Trujillo era to create
a fixed but highly permeable border and to control the movements of Haitians
within the Dominican Republic. Conuco cultivation was linked to African (Hai-
tian) backwardness, maroon subversion, and in the 1980s with environmental
destruction. A second strand of anti-conuco discourse was environmental, and
was associated with watershed protection and dam building. Blame for defor-
estation, erosion, and high dam siltation rates was assigned to shifting cultiva-
tors again largely those farming in the Central Sierra. For example, a 1989
issue of the official magazine Parques Nacionales states:
This historic process of deforestation, caused by the practice of shift-
ing cultivation, indiscriminate use of forests for firewood and charcoal,
the act of slash and burn& has produced grave consequences.& [T]o
combat the increasing problems of deforestation and erosion, which are
placing in danger the environmental and productive stability of the coun-
try, the present system of protected areas must be protected in the im-
mediate future.
The Forestry Action Plan for the Dominican Republic (FAO 1991, 51)
employs similar rhetoric:
The extreme poverty of the inhabitants, associated to [sic] a low edu-
cational level and the lack of an adequate cultural heritage to make them
aware of the proper management of natural resources, are the main causes
of the ecological unbalance of Inoa, Amina and Bao Rivers watersheds.
A 1993 review of the state of the Dominican environment states:
The principal obstacle that the Dominican Republic faces in its forest
protection efforts is the large campesino population that inhabits moun-
tainous zones and which most live by slashing and burning the forest
cover as a principal survival strategy. (Martínez 1993, 89)
As late as 1997, Bolay writes:
Doubtless this system (shifting cultivation) is a very dangerous one in
the Dominican Republic of today, because it endangers the last remain-
ing forests. Increasing population density reduces the fallow seasons,
Cuban and Dominican Strategies in Agriculture 97
so fertility is lost and erosion occurs. The rising urban population can-
not be supplied by those production methods. (Bolay 1997, 138)
As del Rosario (1987) argues, this rhetoric overstated the role of small
producers in environmental degradation and overlooked the very real contribu-
tion that traditional agriculture has made to food crop biodiversity and to Car-
ibbean food security.
It is now less fashionable to blame environmental degradation on conuco
agriculture. The failures of modernized agricultural systems throughout the is-
land and a renewed emphasis on organic and fair trade production among con-
sumers in the global north and in Dominican cities has had a perceptible effect
on Dominican environmental rhetoric and on the culture of agriculture. National
agricultural research centers are devoting more attention to the role and needs
of the small cultivator. At the same time, responding to increasing consumer in-
terest in organic and fair trade products on the part of Dominican consumers,
the food industry is placing new emphasis on conuco crops (comida tipica) and
organic production.
Before the revolution, small-scale food producers in Cuba suffered from
the same stigma as their Dominican counterparts. The revolution saw a partial
change in that food production was embraced as a national goal. However, revo-
lutionary emphasis on adoption of technological methods resulted in a food pro-
duction system and a devaluation of labor-intensive small farm food production
strategies.10 The Special Period saw a marked increase in government attention
to food security and a tentative, but broad-based transition toward low-input ag-
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