by TREVOR YEARWOOD

ETHANOL is not going to save Barbados' ailing sugar industry.

And if agriculture is to be revived, it won't be through labour-intensive programmes or widespread backyard farming.

These are the views of Barbadian-born political economist Hilbourne Watson, professor of international relations at Bucknell University, United States.

In an interview following up comments he made in a lecture Wednesday, Watson said he did not think ethanol production was the way for Barbados to go.

"I do not think that Barbados has the wherewithal now to become an important player on ethanol," he told the WEEKEND NATION.

"It does not have the land mass for it. A lot of the land has been taken out of sugar and agriculture. It's into housing and commercial development and the boundaries keep going back and back and back."

Insignificant

He added: "You don't just produce ethanol – you have to produce it competitively. The land mass we have that could be devoted to ethanol is insignificant in terms of global requirements.

"I don't think that is the way to go. The sugar industry in Barbados has been dying and it continues. I remember when Barbados produced 200 000 tonnes of sugar a year. The expected crop this year is 34 000 tonnes.

"The future of sugar is bleak and therefore if Barbados continues to grow sugar cane, perhaps it cannot be for the conventional end-product uses that we have had . . . ."

Watson also referred to Government's hopes of a revival of agriculture, including an expansion in backyard gardening.

Problems

He spoke about the problems with the sugar industry during another presentation in the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) lecture series at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Wednesday.

His topic was Neo-Liberal Globalisation, Transnational Capitalism, Accumulation By Dispossession And The Contemporary Caribbean.

He told the gathering, including several UWI students, a shift by Caribbean countries from sugar production to sugar cane-based ethanol as an energy export commodity "would intensify landlessness, rural-urban migration, poverty, rising food and land prices and aggravate social decomposition".

In the interview, he said that with the prospects for sugar looking gloomy, agriculture would have to go through "a metamorphosis".

"It cannot be labour-intensive; it has to be very capital-intensive, which means that a smaller number of the population would have to be directly involved," he remarked.

However, Watson argued that "most Barbadians" do not want to have anything to do with working in the fields or on land.

"And if you look at the structure of middle class housing in Barbados, with what people refer to as heights and terraces and gardens and what have you, there are people who may have 10 000 or 12 000 square feet of land and most of them are building houses that take up most of the land," he added.

"There is no backyard left for kitchen garden or anything. I don't think that the Barbadian middle class wants to have anything much to do with this . . . and the blue collar people always try in many ways to emulate those standards and those habits.

"When they go into the supermarket and shop, they're buying American cereal to feed their children breakfast and think it's cool . . . .

"So there is a new value system that has also emerged in this society and all of these things have to be brought together to make sense [in any plan to revive agriculture]."