Natural Resources of the Caribbean

The character, extent, and availability of the Caribbean's natural resources are heavily influenced by the region's social and political characteristics, which result from historical relationships of the Caribbean with other, more powerful areas of the world. Those who study resources often emphasize that a region's natural resource characteristics are usually more human-influenced or socially produced than they are God-given, and it is difficult to think of another world region where this point is more applicable than it is for the Caribbean.

Geography and Geology

The Caribbean's most fundamental resources—its geographical and geophysical locations—explain much about the region. Its subtropical latitudes place it within the tradewinds that arrive continuously from the east, after traversing the Atlantic Ocean. Christopher Columbus and subsequent European seafarers rode these easterly winds to the Caribbean on sailing vessels before the advent of steam power. After the earliest European colonization, the region's aboriginal peoples, the Caribs and Arawaks, were eliminated by overwork, coercion, and disease. European sailing vessels brought African slaves, again via the trade winds, to replace the declining native labor force. In subsequent decades, slave-produced agricultural staples were transported to Europe via the westerly wind belt located farther north. Thus, the Caribbean region represented one corner of the infamous "triangle trade" of colonial days: European manufactures sent to West and West Central Africa, slaves shipped west to the Caribbean, and agricultural goods sent northeast back to Europe.

The Caribbean's location within the western hemisphere also helps in understanding much about the region. Some suggest that the Caribbean is the "Mediterranean" of the Americas because it separates two continental land-masses. In the early twenty-first century, the region's strategic position between the producing area (northwestern South America) and the principal consuming area (the United States) for much of the hemisphere's narcotics makes the Caribbean an important part of illegal drug smuggling. The Caribbean's middling geographical position in the western hemisphere—off the southeastern coast of the United States—has led others to refer to the region as an "American lake," in part because the islands have been routinely subject to gunboat diplomacy, especially since the United States became a global power at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the late twentieth century, the proximity of the United States allowed the Caribbean's island states and territories to develop two of the region's natural attributes, its warm year-round temperatures and its scenic beauty, into the region's most important economic resource. Early in the twenty-first century, especially in the northern hemisphere's winter months, Caribbean tourism overshadows all other sectors of local economies. The combination of warm temperatures and abundant sunshine, together with the Caribbean's geographic hallmark of insularity, or "islandness," helps to explain the presence of the beach resorts, cruise destinations, and vacation possibilities for which the region has become well known.

The Caribbean's white sand beaches, relentlessly portrayed in North American television commercials in the winter months, are not the only scenic attractions. Especially in the small islands of the eastern Caribbean, volcanic peaks covered with tropical foliage soar above the sea-level landscapes (to over 5,000 feet on the island of Dominica), providing breathtaking vistas. Yet the entire region's seismic instability results in frequent earthquake tremors and, worse, occasionally catastrophic volcanic eruptions, which have punctuated the region's human history. The most famous eruption in Caribbean history, the explosion of Mount Pelée on French Martinique in 1902, dominated newspaper headlines throughout the world and influenced the United States to build a canal in Panama rather than in Nicaragua, which is supposedly more volcano-prone. Nearly a century later, in 1997, tiny Montserrat in the northeastern Caribbean suffered an eruption that buried its capital town in lava and igneous sand and sent two-thirds of its human population elsewhere. Given these geophysical characteristics, the ultimate resource in the small islands of the eastern Caribbean—the land that underpins human habitats—can by no means be taken for granted.

Climate, Soils, and Erosion

Caribbean peoples are understandably wary of the region's climatic characteristics (though the same climate provides the basis for "sun and fun" tourist brochures). This is because every late summer and autumn seasonal hurricanes enter the region from the Atlantic, following paths that are generally southeast to northwest but whose specific trajectories vary from one season to the next, adding to the uncertainty and precariousness of living in the region.

Yet hurricanes have only slightly diminished the region's agricultural importance, especially in the past. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean dominated the world in producing cane sugar, creating massive wealth for European colonial powers. Tropical agronomists have since determined that the Caribbean's subtropical climate, especially its rainfall characteristics, is ideal for a high sucrose content in sugarcane. Accordingly, cane sugar, although it is fading from the region early in the twenty-first century, has traditionally been cultivated in a wide variety of Caribbean soils.

The Caribbean's many soil types are related in part to differing kinds of bedrock. The dark-red clays of central and western Cuba, the most fertile soils of the region, are limestone-based, as are the soils of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (the large island with the Dominican Republic on

the east and Haiti on the west). Both ashen soils and clays in the eastern Caribbean are related to the volcanic material underpinning these islands. The low, coralline islands far to the east—Antigua, the eastern half of French Guadeloupe, and Barbados—are uplifted oceanic deposits.

Yet bedrock, vegetation, climate, and slopes explain only part of Caribbean soil conditions. Just as important is the history of colonial exploitation. Beginning in the 1600s, Europeans directed massive deforestation of the accessible portions of most of the islands. This clearing left the insular soils unprotected from periodic drought and pounding rainfall. The crop usually taking the place of natural forests, sugarcane (a giant type of grass) tended to anchor the soil. But as sugarcane historically gave way to clean-row crop tillage and livestock herding, especially in the late twentieth century, massive soil erosion began to occur throughout the region.

The transformation of the natural forest cover to cultivated landscapes and barren hillsides has unfolded in different ways and at different rates throughout the Caribbean. Nowhere have the results been as tragic as in Haiti. As the French colony of Saint Domingue, Haiti was perhaps the world's most valuable colonial prize because of its sugar. After its slaves threw off French rule in 1803, Haiti was denied regular contact with other countries, and its population took up mainly subsistence agriculture. Since then, the need for Haitians to feed themselves has led to massive soil exhaustion and deforestation. Early in the twenty-first century, the country's nearly seven million human inhabitants eke out malnourished existences on a mountainous, degraded habitat, the most dismal human ecological plight in the western hemisphere.

The unhappy legacy of the Caribbean's agricultural history is paralleled at the start of the twenty-first century by a tourist industry that often despoils local environments. Walls and jetties designed to preserve Puerto Rican beaches have instead caused beach erosion. Stone embankments (pedraplenes) in northern Cuba that lead tourists to offshore cays have ruined habitats for fish, fowl, and flamingos. The demand for more electricity in Barbados has raised ocean temperatures near the island's power plant with negative biological effects. Tourism's effects have been worst on the very small islands; between 1970 and 2000, tiny Saint Martin changed from a quiet, semiarid island getaway to a jumble of franchise signs, chain-link

fences, and rusting automobile hulls. The giant tourist ships bringing visitors and hard currency to the region in the early twenty-first century also deposit litter and trash receptacles directly into Caribbean ocean waters. Calls for a more environmentally friendly ecotourism are heard throughout the region, yet this activity is practiced seriously only in Belize, in the far western Caribbean.

Fishing, Forests, and Fauna

The tropical waters and varying depths of the Caribbean support a variety of fish. A 1996 Puerto Rican fishing census enumerated two thousand full-time and part-time fishermen, most of whom fished at different locations at different times of the year, and who therefore used different types of equipment depending on the season. In villages near deep-water zones, fishermen commonly seek tunas, mackerel, and dolphins. Rough waters all around Puerto Rico in the late summer and fall usually limit fishing to destinations closer to shore.

Despite constraints to developing large-scale fishing industries in the Caribbean, offshore fishing on every island provides limited, although locally important, sources of food. Yet these activities are highly seasonal and cannot sustain local human populations throughout the year. Barbados's flying-fish season, which lasts from December to July, sees its highest catches in March and April and provides an important food source for locals and tourists alike. In Grenada and Saint Vincent, local fishermen often focus their activities on the blackfish or pilot whale, with their greatest successes coming in September. Yet other kinds of fishing there in the late summer months are often reduced because of the low-salinity water that comes north from the mouth of Venezuela's Orinoco River.

Similar to the region's terrestrial resources, the Caribbean's marine resources are adversely influenced by industrial pollution and a historical legacy of overdevelopment. Trinidadian fishermen, in an early twenty-first-century survey, all blamed the industrialization of western Trinidad and its associated pollution for reduced fish populations in the Gulf of Paria. A similar study of the estimated 30,000 subsistence fishermen of Haiti suggested that fishing there was hampered because of depleted and degraded marine habitats. These human-created problems are made all the worse for Caribbean fishing activities by storm destruction. Between 1979 and 1999, nine hurricanes or tropical depressions hit Dominica, damaging fishing vessels, equipment, landing sites, and shore facilities.

Hurricanes also influence the region's forests. Long-term studies of Puerto Rican woodlands have identified mountain "storm forests," floral assemblages that lack the usual species diversity, giant trees, and multiple leaf canopies found elsewhere in the tropics. In September 1989, Hurricane Hugo devastated Puerto Rico's El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical forest in the U.S. National Park system. Occasional near-total hurricane destruction of insular forests in the small islands of the eastern Caribbean occurs all the way south to Grenada.

Yet centuries of vegetation clearance and associated human devastation, not the forces of nature, have reduced the region's forests to tiny upland patches, and complete removal has occurred on some of the smallest islands. Wood products and lumber used for Caribbean building are nearly all imported, and local sawmills are practically unknown today. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Cuba and the Dominican Republic are the only countries claiming any significant forest covers. The most dismal deforestation example is Haiti. The country's original forest cover is gone, yet 50,000 rural Haitians produce charcoal from what wood they can glean, an activity that intensified after the local pig eradication (decreed by U.S. health authorities, who feared the spread of swine disease to North America) in the early 1980s.

In attempting to establish wood sources and to protect local water supplies, the reforestation of Caribbean landscapes was recommended as early as the nineteenth century. In the middle of the twentieth century, several places, including Guadeloupe and Trinidad, attempted the planting of mahogany; insect infestation and lack of knowledge led to disappointing results in both places, however. For decades, the potential success of reforestation attempts everywhere in the region has been thwarted by the large livestock populations. Goats, sheep, and cattle browse over denuded landscapes everywhere in the region, especially in the small, drought-prone islands. In addition, local herdsmen often (stealthily) cut down the small trees in reforestation plots to feed their animals.

Except for a few birds and reptiles, the animals native to the region prior to the coming of Europeans have been extinguished. Accordingly, the Caribbean's "wild animals" actually have been imported in relatively recent times. The mongoose, introduced to Trinidad from India in 1870, menaces chickens and house pets everywhere in the eastern Caribbean. The West African vervet monkeys on Saint Kitts and Barbados are said to have come on eighteenth-century slave vessels. A few untamed horses in the mountains of the Dominican Republic may descend from early Spanish stock. Limited numbers of manatees still live in the shallow waters surrounding the Greater Antilles, although they have not been sighted in the eastern Caribbean since the 1700s.

Minerals

Dutch interest in southern Caribbean salt production began about 1600, and in the early twenty-first century the Dutch-affiliated island of Bonaire, just north of Venezuela, continues to produce table and industrial salts from saline ponds. Yet the important mineral activity for which the Netherlands Antilles were well known in the twentieth century was the processing of Venezuelan oil at the refineries of Aruba and Curaçao. Although the crude petroleum refined there is not, strictly speaking, a Caribbean resource, the refineries at these tiny islands attracted thousands of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, beginning in the 1920s, who then took home the industrial and labor organizing skills they learned in the Dutch islands.

The main oil-producing country in the Caribbean is Trinidad and Tobago, which accounted for 125,000 barrels of crude oil per day in 2001. Pitch and tar from southern Trinidad were used on local roads by the end of the nineteenth century, and local oil production began in the early twentieth century. High oil prices in the 1970s inspired Trinidad and Tobago to embark on a massive industrialization scheme in southern Trinidad, an enterprise curtailed a decade later because of falling oil prices. Cuba produced 50,000 barrels of oil per day in 2001; Barbados, 1,000 per day. Most Caribbean islands import petroleum products, usually from the several oil refineries located in the region.

Jamaica became an important producer of bauxite (aluminum ore) and its dehydrated variant, alumina, in the mid-twentieth century, after the discovery of bauxite deposits there in 1942. Prices boomed into the 1960s, and the ore was exported to North America and Europe, where it was refined into metallic aluminum. In the 1970s, however, Jamaica attempted to raise bauxite prices, and hostile reactions elsewhere led to a downturn in production. By the early 1990s, Jamaican bauxite production had dropped severely, but resuscitation efforts thereafter led to some success. In 2001, despite several work stoppages and labor problems, Jamaica was still recognized as a world leader in bauxite and alumina (3.5 million tons in 2001).

In 2002, Cuba was the world's sixth leading producer of nickel. In that year it possessed an estimated 30 percent of the world's nickel reserves and exported US$600 million worth of nickel and cobalt, more than the value of the island's sugar crop. But the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba prohibited American imports of Cuban nickel, so nearly all the ore was marketed in Europe. Further development of Cuba's nickel mining industry has involved joint financial and planning ventures involving companies from nations such as Canada and Australia and Cuba's state-owned nickel mining company, Cubaniquel. Most other countries are wary of Cuban politics, however. Typical of Caribbean resource development for centuries, the full development of Cuba's nickel potential depends far more upon global politics than it does upon natural conditions.

See also Agricultural Policy in the Caribbean; Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM); International Relations of the Anglophone Caribbean; Tourism in the Caribbean

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