Barriers to Organic Agriculture in Puerto Rico Under U.S. Colonialism
by Amy Guptill Ph.D
Abstract
Puerto Rico is particularly well placed to become a major producer of tropical organic products with extensive available land, excellent infrastructure, unfettered access to U.S. markets, and decades of sustained activism. Yet, while other Caribbean countries are investing in the sector, organic production in Puerto Rico is negligible at best. Drawing on recent thought in political ecology, this paper analyzes the role of U.S. colonialism in creating a contemporary Puerto Rico dominated by a "landscape of consumption" that poses direct and indirect barriers to the regeneration of a productive agricultural landscape. A powerful business class, whose interests lie in promoting the consumption of imported goods, have used political manipulation and outright violence to limit promising projects. Farmers, understandably reluctant to pursue entrepreneurial approaches, have become somewhat distrustful of entrepreneurialism itself. Puerto Rico's dilemma stands as a warning to countries increasingly pressured to give up their productive sectors in favor of "free trade."
Introduction
Puerto Rico (see footnote 1) is particularly well-placed to become a major producer of tropical organic products. First, the rapid decline of agricultural production in the post-World War II years have left the island with extensive agricultural acreage that has never been incorporated into chemical-intensive farming, making for an easy transition to organic standards. Second, Puerto Rico is privileged with good infrastructure, an excellent land-grant university, and unfettered access to the U.S. market, where the consumption of organic and other "natural" products nearly tripled between 1993 and 1998 from $6 billion to $17 billion (Wellman 2000a, Wellman 200b). Third, Puerto Rico has a long tradition of environmental activism (Concepción 1995) and a sustained organic agriculture movement at least two decades long.
Currently, five organizations on the island with a total of about 150 regular participants, promote ecological agricultural practices. They have established farmers' markets and other direct marketing opportunities, organized workshops on organic techniques, and created a channel to lobby for government support for organic development. Yet, there are only about 10 career growers that avoid agro-chemicals and depend on agricultural sales for at least 25 percent of income. Another 20 or so retirees and hobbyists with interest in organics own farms but do not depend on farming for their livelihood. Young organic enthusiasts are pursuing careers based on providing training or landscaping services rather than producing food. Despite numerous advantages, organic production in Puerto Rico is negligible at best.
The lack of organic production in Puerto Rico is especially curious considering that other Caribbean countries are investing in organic production to take advantage of premium prices and growing international markets. The Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Guatemala are leading regional organic producers of both traditional tropical commodities like coffee, bananas, cacao, and sugar and nontraditional commodities like counter-seasonal vegetables. Organic production is also growing in Belize, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname (Raynolds 2000; Yussefi and Willer 2002). Worldwide, a recently released report found that "organic agriculture is practiced in almost all countries of the world, and its shares of agricultural land and farms is growing everywhere" (Yussefi and Willer 2002: 9).
Given the global and regional growth of organics and Puerto Rico's particular advantages, why is the island lacking in organic production? One characteristic that sets Puerto Rico apart from comparable Caribbean countries is its status as a "commonwealth" of the United States. The people of Puerto Rico are citizens of the U.S. but do not vote in presidential elections, send voting representatives to U.S. congress, or pay federal income taxes. As citizens, Puerto Ricans are eligible for nutritional assistance and other social programs and can move freely to and within the mainland U.S., where they have the same rights and responsibilities as other Americans.
While no single study can provide a total explanation for the stunted development of organic agriculture in Puerto Rico, the unique relationship with the U.S. suggests a fruitful starting point. This paper explains the link U.S. colonialism and the lack of organic agriculture in Puerto Rico. I chose a historical case-study approach to draw on diverse sources of information including data collected from 40 personal interviews, 15 months of participant observation, and primary and secondary sources on Puerto Rican history, economy, and politics. These data enabled me to construct a rich historical sociological account of efforts to rebuild Puerto Rican agriculture on an ecological basis and the barriers they face.
My findings indicate that U.S. colonialism played a major role in creating a contemporary Puerto Rico dominated by a "landscape of consumption," which poses multiple barriers to regenerating a productive agricultural landscape. Development, importing, and retailing dominate the Puerto Rican economy, reflecting and reinforcing the political power of a local business class whose interest lie in suppressing production. Meanwhile, insular agricultural policy maintains a small and minimally productive agricultural sector that contributes only marginally to Puerto Rico's food supply. Despite the tangible gains made by organic activists, the lack of production and the hostility of the powerful business class still frustrate promising efforts. This analysis draws on recent insights in political ecology.
Landscapes of Consumption in a Political Ecology Framework
Blakie and Brookfield (1987), who first penned the phrase "political ecology," use the idea of "degradation" to link environmental damage and the economic and political marginalization of people. Many of the first contributions to this emerging field encountered that link through critical analyses of the effects of large-scale development projects which often impoverish and marginalize vulnerable people by disrupting their control over productive ecosystems (Goldman and Schurman 2000; Peet and Watts 1996a). The environmental degradation caused by these projects, they argue, both reflects inequality and causes or deepens it. In a broader and more everyday sense, political ecology holds that the relationship society takes to nature reveals and constitutes shifting social structures of power.
The term "landscape" has been borrowed from aesthetic genres to capture this dynamic society-nature relationship. It highlights how human societies both ascribe social meaning to terrains (Greider and Garkovich 1994) and interact with ecosystems to meet human needs (Duncan 1996). For some current thinkers, the society-nature relationship reveals the active role of nature in shaping social life (Goodman 1999; Whatmore and Thorne 1998). For me and others, however, the focus is still on society and how the contours of social processes are expressed and shaped by ecological relationships and outcomes.
For this analysis, landscapes are understood as shifting arrays of spaces defined according to a particular analytic interest (see footnote 2). I define the landscape of consumption as simply the constantly changing set of spaces that serve consumption processes such as shopping malls, suburban tract homes, import facilities, supermarkets, and car dealerships (see footnote 3). To highlight Puerto Rico's landscape of consumption is not to claim that the entire country is given over to such spaces, but simply to foreground this important dimension of contemporary Puerto Rican life. Consumption's disproportionate expanse constitutes a particularly distant relationship between society and nature and thus engenders unequal social relations that provide a partial explanation of Puerto Rico's curious lack of organic production.
Puerto Rico is obviously not unique in having a landscape of consumption, because it is a necessary part of any economy. However, Puerto Rico is at least highly unusual in the extent to which the landscape of consumption dominates contemporary social life. Since the second World War, the productive agricultural terrains on the coastal plain have become increasingly covered with highways, shopping malls, tract homes and other suburban sprawl (Minet 2001). These trends reflect and bolster the power of the local business class, that promotes and enables the consumption of imported goods. The political dominance of imports and retailing reflects the unusual way in which Puerto Rico has become incorporated into the U.S. colonial sphere.
The Puerto Rican Landscape under U.S. Rule
Early U.S. rule: 1898-1930The U.S. entered the Spanish-American war to expand economic and military reach in the Americas. Cabán (1999: 22) quotes Senator Albert J. Bevridge on the need to expand U.S. influence:
American factories are making more than the American people can use: American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours, and we will get it as our mother [England] has told us how.
While traditional colonialism sought primarily to extract value through exploitative production and mining schemes, Bevridge's comment indicates a qualitatively different emphasis.
While the search for new markets drove this expansionism, land and people in Puerto Rico were also incorporated into American controlled production, primarily in sugar. Early U.S. colonial policy purposefully weakened the independent farming sector, shifting people from independent agriculture (often coffee production) into sugar. Charles Allen, the island's first American governor, set burdensome property tax rates specifically to drive small-scale farmers off their land and into the agricultural wage-labor force (Cabán 1999). That tax burden, combined with new tariff barriers in traditional European markets for coffee and the extensive damage to coffee farms from a major hurricane in 1899, led to a steep decline in independent mountain farming between 1898 and 1930 (Dietz 1986). Whereas in 1897 coffee accounted for 60 percent of all Puerto Rican exports, by 1928 it comprised less than 3 percent (Dietz 1986: 101). Another major hurricane in 1928 and the advent of the Great Depression precluded the recovery of the coffee sector.
Meanwhile, U.S. investment in modern sugar growing and processing operations, supported by U.S. protectionist policies, led to a resurgence of that traditional Caribbean industry. Sugar's proportion of Puerto Rico's total value of exports grew from 22 percent to 53 percent between 1897 and 1930. The industrial characteristics of sugar production and the centralization of processing encouraged larger farms. In 1899 the largest farms, of 100 cuerdas (see footnote 4) or more, cultivated 36 percent of farmland. By 1920, those large farms accounted for 66 percent of farmland, nearly double the 1899 figure. With the decline of coffee and the growth of sugar, the great majority of Puerto Ricans became completely dependent on low, seasonal wages (Dietz 1986)
Crisis of colonialism and the emergence of a new model: 1930-1950
Between the Great Depression and World War II, U.S. Puerto Rico entered a crisis. Per capita income dropped by a third between 1930 and 1933, worsening the already deplorable living conditions of most Puerto Ricans (Dietz 1986: 139). The sugar sector recovered somewhat during World War II (because of booming rum markets), but collapsed after the war's end leaving Puerto Rico in the midst of a crisis (Dietz 1986). A series of work strikes and independentista uprisings in the 1930s and early 1940s forced the U.S. government to cede more control over insular affairs to the Puerto Rican people (see footnote 5), and in 1944, populist hero Luis Muñoz-Marín became Puerto Rico's first elected governor.
Muñoz-Marín sought to maintain a close relationship with the U.S. government and (with federal assistance) pursue an industrial development program that would eventually enable Puerto Rico to become a modern, independent country with a high standard of living (Picó 1998). Muñoz-Marín's administration first adopted an import-substitution strategy and built a few state-owned factories to produce goods like building supplies, glass bottles, and packaging materials, to serve existing locally owned construction businesses and rum factories. However, the anticipated customers of these state-owned firms were companies owned by families that had gained wealth and prestige from collaborating with American colonialists. Resentful of the populist victory that displaced them from the political center and carried the "threat" of future independence from the U.S., these business owners refused to purchase the products of the state-owned plants despite their high quality and low prices (Dietz 1986). The plants were privatized within a few years.
Next, the populist government adopted a model of "industrialization by invitation" in which U.S. firms were invited to open manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico and operate free of Puerto Rican or U.S. federal taxes for ten years. Called "Operation Bootstrap" in English and Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Hands to Work) in Spanish, the program was designed to attract U.S. firms that would create well paid employment while providing inputs and markets for Puerto Rican-owned firms (Pantojas-García 1990). In 1947, the first year of the program, nine companies established plants in Puerto Rico. The number of new factories increased every year until 1953, when 83 new plants were built (Dietz 1986: 211). The Puerto Rican and U.S. governments repeatedly extended the tax holidays; they are only now being phased out.
Operation Bootstrap neither ameliorated the persistent unemployment crisis nor spurred the growth of a real Puerto Rican industrial sector. As shown in Table 1, the official jobless rate in Puerto Rico never went below 15 percent while the percent of adults participating in the labor force dropped between 1940 and 1980 from 52 percent to only 44 percent. The percent of workers employed in manufacturing grew only slightly, from 23 to 25 percent. In 1980, the non-working population (combining the official unemployed with non-jobseekers) accounted for 64 percent of Puerto Rican adults. Among those who were working, 30 percent worked for the Puerto Rican government.
The problems with Operation Bootstrap only worsened in the 1960s when the government began recruiting capital-intensive industries rather than labor-intensive ones to avoid competition from lower-wage islands in the Caribbean (Dietz 1986; Weisskoff 1985) (see footnote 6). Meanwhile, American companies with plants in Puerto Rico soon learned accounting methods to transfer profits earned in other lower-wage off-shore locations to their Puerto Rican plants to avoid taxes (Weisskoff 1985). The terms of the program, then, carried little incentive to expand employment in their Puerto Rico.
The Puerto Rican manufacturing sector not only failed to grow but actually atrophied, in part because Puerto Rican manufacturing plants were not eligible for tax holidays under Operation Bootstrap (Weisskoff 1985). Puerto Rican capitalists instead specialized in consumption-oriented economic sectors like importation, distribution, and retailing that have come to dominate the local economy (see Table 2). Data on the 300 largest locally owned firms in Puerto Rico (Caribbean Business 2000) show that in 1999 over 60 percent of Puerto Rican-owned firms made their fortunes from one of four activities:
(1) development (including design, construction, or the sale of construction equipment and materials);
(2) the import and sale of food;
(3) the import, sale, and service of cars and trucks; and
(4) the import, sale and service of other consumer goods.
The remaining firms in this group are distributed among various services (31 percent) and manufacturing (8 percent). In terms of annual revenue, food import and retailing comprise the largest category followed by finance and development. This new local business class is one unanticipated result of Operation Bootstrap.
Masking the crisis: 1950-present
While most critical analyses of the Puerto Rican development experience consider Operation Bootstrap a spectacular failure, to many Caribbean people it looks quite successful. Indeed, Puerto Rico has the highest GNP in Latin America (Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1996), and the high-tech factories, modern grocery stores, tract houses, cars, and other trappings of modern life suggest an industrialized society. What explains this apparent success when the majority of Puerto Rican adults are not working? Four policies and trends have played major roles in masking the crisis.
First, the unemployment problem was contained somewhat by migration of Puerto Ricans to New York and other U.S. cities. With assistance from the Puerto Rican government, 461 thousand people emigrated to the U.S. between 1950 and 1959. These emigrants represent one-fifth of the total 1950 population and over one-third of the 1950 adult population (Dietz 1986). Currently, about as many Puerto Ricans live in the U.S. as in Puerto Rico, and emigration is still an important strategy for the frustrated jobless.
Second, available capital and credit increased significantly after 1976 when the Puerto Rican legislature imposed a "tollgate" tax on dividends paid U.S. manufacturing plants to their parent firms. Corporations could reduce this tollgate tax by investing in Puerto Rican government bonds and specific kinds of bank deposits for five years. By 1979, these deposits accounted for over one-third of all bank deposits (Dietz 1986: 303). Puerto Rican banks were permitted to use these funds to finance residential construction, much to the delight of Puerto Rican developers. Consumer debt also grew through the 1980s to help close the gap between earnings and consumption (Benson-Arias 1997). Dietz (1986: 303) comments that the tollgate tax legislation "amounts to a further short-run subsidy of the cost of consumption for Puerto Ricans, a policy that has been a cornerstone of the development model from the beginning but which has not contributed to the expansion of the productive base of the economy." Rather, the outcome is an illusion of wealth.
Third, the drop in labor force participation also indicates a growth in the informal economy (Dietz 1986; Weisskoff 1985). In particular, Puerto Rico became a major player in Caribbean drug trafficking and money laundering by the early 1980s, which in large part explains Puerto Rico's high rates of murder and other crimes in the last two decades (Montalvo-Barbot 1997).
Fourth, and most significantly, the U.S. government extended numerous transfer payments to Puerto Rico. In 1950, U.S. and Puerto Rican government assistance represented 12 percent of personal income; by 1980 it comprised 30 percent (Dietz 1986: 297). One major program was the Food Stamp program in which almost 60 percent of Puerto Ricans participated (Dietz 1986: 299). By 1989, federal nutritional assistance as a whole accounted for over one-fifth of Puerto Rico's GNP (Weisskoff 1985). Despite this assistance, Puerto Rico still has a per capital income only one-third that of the U.S. and only one-half that of Mississippi, the poorest state.
Weisskoff (1985: 59) describes how these public transfers closed a circle of economic flows that incorporate Puerto Rico into the U.S. economic sphere:
In short, the U.S. public underwrites the Puerto Rican people, while U.S. corporations shift profits through their Puerto Rican plants and back to the United States, tax free. The Puerto Rican family then buys its consumption needs, which consists for the most part of imported goods, shifting its public grant money back to the U.S. private sector. As its own economy decomposes, Puerto Rico becomes the revolving door for funds flowing from the American public back to the American corporation (...) . Meanwhile, these corporations employ only a token Puerto Rican work force.
In short, the industrialization program indeed brought wealth and some measure of consumption power to Puerto Rico while profoundly altering the structure of the Puerto Rican economy. However, instead of moving toward independence as Muñoz-Marín envisioned, Puerto Rico has instead become almost completely subsumed in the U.S economy on marginal terms.
Why has the U.S. government been so forthcoming with assistance? Grosfoguel (1994) points out that in the emerging Cold War, Puerto Rico took on a new role as a "showcase" for capitalist development. The U.S. government invited leaders of newly independent and other low-income nations to tour the modern factories and housing developments of Puerto Rico with the hopes of attracting them to the American and capitalist side of an increasingly polarized world. In the end, just as at the beginning, U.S. interest in Puerto Rico was driven by an effort to expand U.S. economic and political influence.
The tax incentives undergirding Puerto Rico's industrialization program are currently being phased out, and plants established under that program are beginning to close and leave Puerto Rico (Fletcher, 1999). The end of the Cold War and the increasingly reluctance of the U.S. federal government to fund social programs also threatens Puerto Rico's special position within the U.S. sphere. Puerto Rico's nebulous political status, always a matter of pointed insular debate, has recently become an even more pressing question. The agriculture sector must obviously play a role in creating a productive and food secure foundation for a new independent Puerto Rican economy, but the rise of the landscape of consumption also remade and marginalized agriculture.
Agriculture in the Food-Stamp Era
One could reasonably predict that agriculture would become the new entrepreneurial center of the Puerto Rican economy, especially because food distribution and retail is, for the most part, locally owned. Indeed, the development theories on which the industrialization program was based propose that agriculture will become more productive to serve the food needs of the growing, urbanizing population (Dietz 1986). However, Puerto Rico has been somewhat dependent on imported foods since colonization by the Spanish (Mintz 1985), and the changes of the post-war era only exacerbated this tendency.
Since sugar's ultimate post-war decline, no other agricultural sector rose to become the new engine of the agricultural economy, and agriculture continued to shrink (see Table 3). Between 1950 and 1980, the total number of farms dropped from about 54,000 to only 32,000, and the percent of all land in farms dropped from 82 to 48. In the same period, local agriculture as a source for all food consumption fell from 51 percent to 13 percent, while the share of imports rose from 37 percent to 46 percent. Almost all of these food imports come from the U.S.
While food stamps played a role in weakening local agricultural production and trade, they also, paradoxically, helped maintain the smallest farms. According to Carro-Figueroa and Alamo-Gonzalez (1997) the number of very small farms in the central region of Puerto Rico stabilized around the time of the 1978 Census of Agriculture. They attribute this outcome to what Weisskoff (1985) calls the rise of the "mini-farm," units of no more than three acres that persist at a sub-subsistence level, because food stamps enable farming families to continue the farming lifestyle without sufficient farm earnings. Recent research by Droz-Lube (forthcoming) suggests that among small-scale farmers (with 20 acres or less) the value of food stamp benefits usually exceeds the earnings from agricultural products.
In 1974, farmers also began receiving incentives and subsidies from the Puerto Rican Department of Agriculture. Unpublished research by Pluke (2001) confirms that the incentive zones used by the Department of Agriculture to promote regional specializations in key commodities overwhelmingly explains the crops that farmers in the central mountains choose to plant. Ostensibly, these incentives were meant to increase food production and hence food self-sufficiency, but given the lack of policy attention to marketing, rural credit, or agricultural education, they function more like a veiled form of welfare that helps support rural communities. Also, to receive these incentives, farmers must comply with government recommendations including using agrochemicals. Thus, some of the incentive money pays for imported agrochemicals, much like food stamps buy imported food. Agriculture is by definition a productive activity, but contemporary Puerto Rican agriculture is incorporated in a way that strongly suppresses its productive potential.
Barriers to Organic Agriculture
Because the government incentive program requires farmers to use prescribed agro-chemicals and other industrial production techniques, farmers pursuing sustainable alternatives must give up these incentives and replace that income with increased sales of agricultural products. Generally, only supermarkets, which dominate food retailing, can purchase the kinds of volumes needed to sustain an entrepreneurial farming operation, but supermarkets have not only been somewhat inaccessible to farmers but also pay very low prices.
These barriers partially account for the minimal production of organic goods. However, the dominance of the landscape of consumption and the politics that it constitutes also plays out in more social, more political, and sometimes more subtle ways. As the following three cases show, projects that surmount basic economic barriers nevertheless face a hostile development and retailing class that wields its power on both local and insular levels. Meanwhile, the disincentive to pursuing an entrepreneurial farming operation is compounded by a persistent distrust of those proposing or pursuing such a strategy.
Violent response to sustainable agriculture
In the early 1980s two experienced activists moved to a farm in the small community of Rabanal to begin a sustained community organizing effort. In 1984, the Association of Small Farmers of Rabanal (APARI for its initials in Spanish) was incorporated with Miguel A. Delgado-Ramos as executive director. APARI organized remedial and agricultural educational programs, infrastructure improvements for the community, and a demonstration and income-earning project to grow and market poinsettias and other ornamental plants.
Continuing urban expansion and relaxed land use laws had accelerated the conversion of agricultural lands in the area to housing and other development uses, in some cases in violation of environmental protection laws. APARI led the struggle to preserve agricultural lands and enable farmers' access to them, inciting the wrath of local developers who wanted terrain for development. They also began pursuing funds for an ecological housing project which would ostensibly compete with local developers. Local developers were prominent members of the conservative New Progressive Party which at the time controlled both the insular and local governments. Because of their visibility and initial success, APARI was met with a concerted campaign to close the organization and drive the organizers out of the community.
Delgado-Ramos describes the violence directed at APARI and the attempts to disrupt their projects:
"Things changed, because of the problems we had here with neighbors and developers that wanted to take away our earnings and get us off the farm. [They] began a project; a process of communication with other sectors, with government agencies, taking advantage of the fact that the central government and municipal government were of the same party. [...] They [began] a systemic persecution against us, against the organization, against the board of directors, against our institution. And it happened that in December of 1994, in which we were going to have a tremendous harvest of poinsettias - 10 thousand poinsettias - they put herbicides in the water tank and all of our agricultural production was lost. [...] In another year ... they cut off all of the funding from the Department of Education for which we had already been approved, $465 thousand, and from the Department of Housing, which had approved for us some $500 thousand for our housing project. [...] [They visited] all of the members of our board of directors, threatening them that they would be harmed if they didn't leave the board. It hasn't been easy, this situation. The closed all of our sources of funding. We had a huge financial crisis. They wouldn't let us establish any agricultural production. In any moment that we left the farm ... they would destroy all that we had with herbicides. So, it's been a difficult time. [...] We're tired."[My translation]
In addition to poisoning crops and scuttling grant-funded projects, opponents of APARI also killed horses and dogs on the farm.
Despite this campaign of violence, APARI persisted. Currently, APARI is organizing a farmers market and accompanying restaurant, beginning construction on the affordable ecological housing project, organizing a watershed protection network, continuing to offer workshops and trainings, and building agricultural production facilities for use by landless local growers. One can only guess what APARI could have achieved without such harassment.
Limits of a commercial approach to organic agricultural development
Another series of projects did not experience violent sabotage that plagued APARI, but instead encountered more subtle barriers to agricultural development. In 1980, Jorge Gaskins, a North American who moved to Puerto Rico about a decade prior, initiated the establishment of the Federation of Agricultural Associations. "The Fed" sought to unite regional farmers' groups to pursue grassroots agricultural development projects, linking production and processing in markets that farmers would control. In another interview (see Benedetti 1996), Gaskins explained the need for a grassroots organization around production in Puerto Rico:
"To produce in Puerto Rico is a revolutionary act, a liberatory act, because the whole system is against it. The system is designed to make you a vegetable. If you don't produce, you don't confront our economic system and you actually support it, you become involved in maintaining it."
By linking processing and marketing more closely to production, the Fed hoped to recreate a production chain driven by commerce rather than government incentives.
The Fed incorporated as a worker-owned cooperative, built a small-scale processing plant, and developed of marketable products (juice and pulp) from the strongly flavored passion fruit. Initially the processing operation paid good prices for passion fruit, reflecting success in marketing the new products, but soon the influx of cheap surplus passion fruit from Colombia and other countries undermined the market. Other companies began processing the cheap imported fruit and selling juice at much lower prices. The Puerto Rican government is legally unable to control imports and so could not prevent foreign producers from dumping their surplus in the local market. The Fed was forced to lower its price for fruit to maintain the viability of the plant, and as a result, many farmers began to distrust the processing operation. The project declared bankruptcy in 1985.
While the Fed did not last, the social networks and small-scale processing plant created through the Fed facilitated the most successful effort to develop organic agriculture to date. In 1991, Gaskins was approached by some North American investors interested in purchasing organic and other high-quality agricultural products from Puerto Rico to sell in U.S. and European markets. According to Gaskins, the international demand for such products was obvious:
"We went to three trade shows. [...] And we easily saw that there was a market for tens of millions of dollars worth of organic tropical products. Immediately, I mean, right away. The problem was doing it. The problem really wasn't selling it. And it never was a problem of selling it."
The investors founded a company called Tropical Sources in 1992, with Gaskins as a partner, and bought and retrofitted the plant built by the Fed. Some former Fed participants were hired to manage the purchase and processing of organic banana, mango, soursop, tamarind, and other minor crops. Tropical Sources sold organic and other premium fruit pulps to companies like Earth's Best, Haagen Daas, Dannon, Welch's, Stonybrook Farms, and several European companies, especially baby food manufacturers. Within twelve months, Tropical Sources had become the second largest agricultural exporter in Puerto Rico.
The greatest challenge that Tropical Sources faced was the reliable supply of organic products. Gaskins explains:
"Our problem was that Tropical Sources depended upon convincing farmers that this was going to be the best market since sliced bread. Because, when they can not do anything and pick up a better price for their product, that was wonderful, but when you wanted them to actually make a commitment to doing something proactively, that was a hard sell."
The company organized and paid for the organic certification of small parts of over 50 farms in Puerto Rico. The great majority of them were conventional farms with small, marginal areas of fruit trees that were certifiable as organic, because they had been ignored in the farming operation and spared from agricultural chemicals. Sympathetic middle-class professionals with hobby farms that were similarly certifiable for being unworked constituted another smaller group of suppliers. Less than five suppliers to Tropical Sources were active career growers invested in organic techniques.
The investors expected that once the viability of organic marketing was demonstrated, more farmers would grow organically and current organic growers would use their earnings to expand production. They also, as Gaskins explains, anticipated an institutional response:
"We thought we would finally get some breakthroughs, ... and we thought we would attract enough attention from the government or from the university, whatever, to try to pass off some of our own promotion and development work onto an agency who had a budget for that kind of stuff. We were taking money directly from our bottom line and investing it into organic agriculture in Puerto Rico, and we thought that that [...] wouldn't be a constant cost for the company. We couldn't afford it."
From the beginning, the investors sought to grow the company to a certain size and then sell it to a larger food company to realize their profits. Despite the company's initial success, they were impatient with the lack of interest in organics on the part of farmers and the Puerto Rican government. Soon, the company's customers began demanding quantities of products that were impossible to supply without a significant increase in output by farmers. In trying to maximize the capacity of the plant, quality control suffered, costing the company some important accounts. When damage from Hurricane Hortense in 1995 caused the price of bananas to triple, the company closed.
What can explain the reluctance of growers and agricultural institutions to participate in developing a viable organic sector? One aspect is distrust some farmers had of the North American company and Gaskins in particular. Some suppliers found it suspicious that the company kept the documentation of each farm's organic certification. Meanwhile, all North Americans involved in progressive activities in Puerto Rico are invariably under suspicion of being from the CIA, as the agency infiltrated activist organizations in earlier decades. While Gaskins' long residency and consistent activism make the CIA charge highly implausible, his success in marshaling government and private funds for these projects made some suspect financial misdeeds. One distrustful grower explained his misgivings about Gaskins by saying, "He's clever, he's well connected, he speaks English." Few farmers are familiar with the public and private financing with which Gaskins worked and often became resentful and leery.
Thus, not only are farmers reluctant to depart from the government incentive system for a more entrepreneurial path, many are so unfamiliar with agricultural development and marketing that they tend to distrust people and organizations working in those realms, especially if they are outsiders. As the next case shows, locally organized efforts are similarly hampered by both a disincentive to and distrust of entrepreneurialism.
Divisions in contemporary efforts to develop organics
The Boricua Organization for Eco-Organic Agriculture was founded shortly after Tropical Sources closed by about former 15 suppliers seeking to develop new marketing channels for their organically grown products. They had neither the resources nor the desire to buy the Tropical Sources processing plant and form their own exporting company. Instead, they simply sought individual marketing solutions. Eventually most of the full-time growers stopped participating, and Boricua recruited more non-farmer members and pursued more educational and policy-oriented goals. Recently, Boricua has sponsored workshops on composting and other topics and sent letters to Puerto Rico's Secretary of Agriculture requesting meetings to discuss organic agriculture and the need for a Puerto Rican organic certifier.
Many Boricua members are also involved in the recently established Mother Earth Organic Cooperative. The cooperative was initiated by a non-farmer with an environmental and spiritual commitment to organic agriculture. To date, the cooperative has recruited over 100 members, sponsored a two-weekend workshop on agroecology, begun purchasing imported organic foods in bulk, and organized a monthly organic market in San Juan that continues to draw increasing numbers of shoppers. Consumer interest in the cooperative is growing steadily, but production is still the limiting factor. About 10 vendors regularly sell at the farmers' market, but only two or three sell fresh fruits and vegetables. An environmental organization sells ecologically grown coffee, the cooperative itself sells imported grains and other bulk products, and other vendors sell prepared food, flowers, extracts, and body products. The market has been in operation for over a year, but so far no farmer has begun or expanded organic production in response to these new marketing channels.
A third organization was established after the Popular Democratic Party regained control of the insular government in January 2001. The new Secretary of Agriculture Fernando Toledo vowed to increase agricultural production by 20 percent in four year and announced initiatives to establish farmer-owned processing and distribution operations and restructure incentives to reward entrepreneurship and organization.
Ismael Rios is an entrepreneurial organic farmer retired from a professional career who, on his own farm, has sought to "develop a solid Puerto Rican agriculture for the nation ... based on our own resources." Until Toledo's appointment he felt that the Puerto Rican government's agricultural policy heavily reflected the influence of "importers who don't want Puerto Rico to grow anything" and agrochemical purveyors. Rios is a local official in the Popular Democratic Party and was thus was well placed to help shape Secretary Toledo's new policies. In March 2001 he hosted a meeting to establish the Organic Agriculture Association of Puerto Rico to prepare the sector to take advantage of these recent changes.
More than seventy people attended this meeting, including Secretary Toledo, who briefed the attendees on the new policies and answered questions. Comments in the morning were followed by lunch and then the opening of the official founding meeting of the association. Only 22 people stayed for the official meeting, of whom only four to six were career growers. The remainder were activists from Boricua, Mother Earth, and other organizations. A provisional board elected at the meeting included two farmers and five non-farmers.
The second meeting of the association (June 2001), which the secretary of agriculture also attended, was disrupted by a heated debate between those insisting that the association include only "pure organic" farmers and those proposing a broader coalition of growers committed to producing and marketing sustainably produced goods. Six people, all active members of Boricua, spoke in favor of the narrower focus, arguing that the broader definition "opens the door" to agrochemical use and thus violates the purity and morality of organic agriculture. Only two of these six adamant purists were farmers. The leading proponent of inclusiveness was Rebecca Pérez-Rosselló, who left a professorship in computer science 10 years earlier to pursue a full-time farming career. She emphasized the ecological challenges and economic constraints of Puerto Rican agriculture. Two non-growers verbally supported her position. The purists, however, continued to portray even minimal chemical use as a moral failure and insisted that the association exclude people who pursue such practices. Rios helped end the debate by inaccurately redefining farmers like Pérez-Rosselló as "in transition" to organic agriculture. He feared that the signs of division would hurt the Associations efforts to hold the Secretary's attention.
The contemporary organic movement is largely consumer-led, which creates promising opportunities for interested farmers. However, until such farmers increase their number and productivity, the movement will be hampered. Directly, the lack of production limits promising efforts to create new marketing relationships around organically grown produce. Indirectly, the preponderance of non-farmers in the movement creates a tactical impasse among activists, many of who have little or no direct experience with farming.
Postscript: limits to government initiative
The agricultural development initiatives begun in 2001 were derailed early in 2002 when the Puerto Rican governor dismissed Secretary Toledo citing financial irregularities. Organic and environmental activists are fully convinced that his dismissal was prompted instead by complaints from the Puerto Rican business lobby, whose interests in food imports as well as construction and development were threatened by the specter of a growing, entrepreneurial agriculture (Ruiz-Marrero 2002).
Conclusion
This account of obstructed efforts to recreate a productive agricultural landscape on an ecological model bear out the central tenet of political ecology. Puerto Rico's particular and in many ways peculiar colonial relation with the United States has created a very distant relationship between Puerto Rican society and its natural environment, which has empowered certain groups (developers and retailers) and marginalized others (farmers and other producers). In colonial context, the industrialization program, meant to create the economic basis for a vibrant and independent Puerto Rico instead created a foreign owned enclave sector, functioning primarily as a tax shelter, alongside a local economy dominated by development, imports, and retailing. Agriculture was incorporated into this dependent economy as marginal and minimally productive.
As political ecology thinkers have noted, the relationship between society and nature plays a foundational role in shaping socio-political relations. In Puerto Rico, the dominance of the landscape of consumption is manifest in the political power of a consumption-oriented business class whose interests are threatened by efforts to regenerate a productive agricultural landscape. Through outright violence and political manipulation, they have managed to limit promising agricultural development efforts. Meanwhile, contemporary farmers, understandably reluctant to depart from the meager but guaranteed incomes provided by government incentives, are also distrustful of entrepreneurial approaches. They are not increasing production in response to promising marketing opportunities created by outsiders or local consumer-led initiatives. Because the movement is dominated by people inexperienced in growing food, moralistic wranglings have created a persistent impasse that hampers efforts to organize for meaningful change.
An economistic analysis would predict that Puerto Rico's productive sectors can simply be switched back on as imported goods and transfer payments diminish. From that perspective, the lack of production is seen as an odd and temporary vacuum that under "normal" conditions will simply correct itself. However, this analysis shows that the dominating landscape of consumption creates social and political conditions that actually suppress production. Reinvigorating Puerto Rico's economy will require broad scale social and political change that will invariably be resisted by powerful actors who benefit from the current situation. If activists are correct, Toledo's dismissal shows that development and retail interests are resisting change even as the basis for Puerto Rico's entire economy begins to crumble. Puerto Rico is profoundly vulnerable to a major and protracted crisis.
Compelled by the same expansionist ambitions as early 20th century America, multinational food corporations and other "free-trade" boosters are using rules established under the World Trade Organization to continuously challenge the right of countries to manage production and trade within their own domestic food systems. The case of Puerto Rico shows that increasing dependence on imports to meet the most domestic needs is not simply a national accounting datum. Rather, it means profound, lasting, and somewhat unpredictable changes in social relations, reflected and constituted in the society-nature relationship. Because other countries will not likely receive U.S. transfer payments, they are not likely to see the same dominance of the landscape of consumption. Nevertheless, because of the kinds of social relations that import dependency engenders, these findings suggest that it constitutes a potent and enduring threat to food security and economic viability.
Footnotes
1. In this paper "Puerto Rico" refers to the inhabited islands of Puerto Rico, Vieques, and Culebra. For convenience, I use "island" and "insular" to refer to the whole archipelago.
2. Landscape can be likened to GIS data layers. Just as data layers overlap, different landscapes can claim the same geophysical spaces. Suburban tract homes, for example, help constitute a landscape of consumption by creating a proximate but unproductive relationship with nature. They are, however, more than just spaces of consumption.
3. I draw on, but depart from, Ritzer's idea of a landscape of consumption. In earlier analyses Ritzer identified places like Disney World as "cathedrals of consumption" in which people spend money in a kind of consumerist religion (Ritzer 1999). His "landscapes of consumption" are contiguous spaces, larger than the premises of individual retail establishments, that serve much the same purpose (2001). I use the term to refer to an array of noncontiguous spaces that include shopping for every day needs, not just those that promote consumption as entertainment.
4. A cuerda is a Caribbean unit of land equal to .97 of an acre.
5. While Puerto Ricans were empowered to elect executives and legislators for the insular government, U.S. congress still retains the power to reverse or alter any legislation passed in Puerto Rico. Thus, Puerto Rico actually enjoys less autonomy that American states. For this reason, I continue to refer to Puerto Rico as a colony of the U.S.
6.The U.S. government's Caribbean Basin Initiative, based on the Puerto Rican development model, was largely responsible for creating low-wage Caribbean labor markets for U.S. firms.
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