Small-Scale Agriculture in the United States Virgin Islands, 1930-1983

Jerome L. McElroy and Klaus de Albuquerque

No 261548, 20th Annual Meeting, October 21-26, 1984, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands from Caribbean Food Crops Society

Abstract: Over the past half century, United States Virgin Islands agriculture has deteriorated because of the phase-out of commercial sugar and escalating resource competition from tourism, construction, government and export manufacturing. Increasing dualism has resulted with a few large farms dominating in cattle, dairying, and sorghum, while a very large number of small (less than 50 acres) farms have increasingly specialized in vegetables, Geld crops, fruits and nuts, poultry, and small livestock. Since 1960 these small-scale holdings have dominated the production of sheep, goats, hogs, poultry, eggs, avocados, bananas, coconuts, grapefruits, limes and lemons, mangoes, oranges, and papayas. In terms of gross output shares, farms of 3-9 acres have consistently been the most productive while 10-19 acre farms have been the least productive. Output per acre comparisons reveal that farm sizes of under 3 acres and 3-9 acres warrant special policy focus because of their relatively superior productivity and their extreme resource constraints.

Keywords: Farm Management; Industrial Organization; Productivity Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 7
Date: 1984-10-21
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/261548/files/20_1.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/261548/files/20_1.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:cfcs84:261548

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.261548

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 20th Annual Meeting, October 21-26, 1984, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands from Caribbean Food Crops Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().