Country profile: St. Vincent & the Grenadines

New Internationalist, June, 1998

HALF-WAY up the wild and scenic east coast of St Vincent lies Georgetown, once the bustling centre of the island's sugar industry. Today it is a deserted and melancholic place. Georgetown's prosperity disappeared overnight when the Government closed its sugar mill in 1972 and nothing has come to wake it from its torpor since.

Further up the coast are some of the island's poorest villages. These remote settlements are home to the so-called Black Caribs, a community descended from a mix of the island's indigenous people and African slaves. In the eighteenth century the Black Caribs were a fiercesome fighting force, harrying the British colonial forces and allying themselves with French revolutionaries from nearby Guadeloupe until they were defeated and deported en masse to the Honduran island of Roatan in 1797. The few isolated communities which remain are a poignant reminder of when European powers fought over the riches of the `sugar islands'.

The poverty of the east coast is a different world from the exclusive millionaire lifestyles to be found in the paradisical Grenadines, an $$ Illegible Word $$ of coral islands stretching to the south of St Vincent. In Bequia, Mayreau and Mustique the jet set relaxes on privately-owned islands or hires luxury yachts complete with local crews. Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger are two of the better-known regulars in Mustique, a six-square-mile tropical hideaway on which locals were until recently forbidden to give birth or be buried.

The contrast between rural hardship and enclave tourism has marked St Vincent's recent history and is liable to become more marked as the banana industry - the main island's economic lifeblood - enters a new crisis. The 1997 ruling by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that the European Union unfairly favours banana exports from ex-colonies like St Vincent means that the island will have to compete in a free market with large-scale, modernized producers such as Colombia or Costa Rica.

The National Farmers' Union talks of the need to diversify and hopes that `fairly traded' bananas from St Vincent can attract a niche market in Europe. Other options are few and far between. The island is the world's leading producer of arrowroot, but this can only be cultivated on flat land. Urban unemployment is depressingly high at 30 per cent.

Under the leadership of veteran Prime Minister, Sir James `Son' Mitchell, St Vincent & the Grenadines has adopted some unusual economic strategies to survive the harsh climate of the 1990s. The country is a major flag of convenience for international shipping and picked up many formerly Croatian-registered vessels during the Yugoslav conflict. Its new fish market, known as `Little Tokyo', was a gift from the Japanese Government in return, say cynics, for St Vincent's supporting vote on whale-fishing quotas in international fora. There are even dark rumours about alleged Mafia involvement in tourist developments in the Grenadines.

Yet little has been proved, and `Son' Mitchell has ruled for much of the last 30 years. Whether even he, however, can steer St Vincent through the impending banana crisis remains to be seen, and there are many who remember

that it was he who closed the ailing Georgetown sugar mill and started the town's irreversible decline.

James Ferguson