Progress so far...
Thanks to everyone who has expressed interest in this project since its inception. I've run into some issues unrelated to the project that have stalled efforts, so I haven't seen as much progress as I'd hoped by this point. Still, here's where I'm at so far:
Contacts in the Lesser Antilles: No luck so far. Still working on this and on expanding my scope of contacts. The biggest problem I'm seeing is that a lot of the poorest farmers aren't connected very well to the internet (including the farmers discussed below, who did not have access to internet).
Backup Plan Interviews: I've developed some contacts in Honduras who allowed me to do some interviews with local farmers of varying degrees of prosperity. I'm going to try and keep some of the details vague so as to not accidentally give one of our gracious small farmers accidental fame. These interviews helped me get a better perspective about some of the local conditions and infrastructure surrounding farming. Apologies that these narratives aren't able to cover the full scope of our discussions.
Alice's story - The first lady I interviewed owns some land and rents some more land in order to make ends meet. Let's call her Alice. Alice is lucky, in that she found an older man (Bernard) whom she can do long-term land rentals from, so she has a lot of control over land-related farming questions. Bernard is getting older and can't work the land, so she pays him a reasonable rate and knows she can keep renting the same land over and over again. Apparently in Honduras this is often not the case, dramatically limiting the kind of improvements you can make on the rented land. Alice knows she has an opportunity to plant cash crops, and she has a plan. She put $4k-$5k into irrigation, rent, and planting in a gamble that the price of plantains will stay high and the yields will ("by the grace of God") return around $12,500 in sales after about a year. (Most of the overhead cost is from renting the land.) If the crop isn't successful (due to flooding, rot, or market shifts), she could be ruined - though she'd still get by from her side-gig growing sweet potatoes on the land she owns outright. By the standards of many of her neighbors Alice is doing well for herself, especially with the prospect of earning north of $8k net profit from the plantain harvest.
If Bernard dies or refuses to continue renting from her next year (he's a friend, so this is less likely) Alice will have to pull the irrigation pipes after the first plantain harvest. She'd lose all the drip infrastructure, which is a cost she'd just have to eat. So long as the situation with her friend continues, where she rents the land and he makes a profit from renting out the land he can no longer work, she will continue to be able to capitalize off of this situation.
A few observations from this case study:
This doesn't look a lot like the kind of farming situation I'm trying to focus on. Indeed, Alice's access to land appears to have made her relatively well off financially, compared to her peers.
One concern about land redistribution that has been raised is that a farmer will just sell their land back to the landowner and be back in the same situation as before - or that they might sublet their farm in turn, perpetuating the cycle. My hypothesis was that with smaller farms this strategy is untenable. Here, we see that farmers who own a smaller farms, like Bernard, will sublet their land. However, in this case, Bernard isn't trying to establish a vassal relationship - probably because he can't. He doesn't have enough land even for Alice to work on her own. He doesn't have enough market power to monopolize the land market. And he's a close personal friend of Alice, such that he trusts her to make her part of his 'retirement' plan.
Alice was knowledgeable and animated during our discussion. She is very entrepreneurial and passionate about farming. This was a feature of many of the farmers I talked to. They often have to project market prices vs. long-run weather conditions to determine whether they'll be able to make it this year. At least for those I interviewed, these weren't lazy subsistence farmers. Desperate circumstances, were more likely to promote creative, hard-working farming strategies.
Given the low cost of farm inputs from low-income countries compared to US agriculture, and how much success for these farmers depends on minor shifts in market prices, I'm less motivated by the 'buy local' campaigns than I was before I'd spoke to these farmers. I'm not trying to be controversial here, and am willing to be persuaded otherwise, but after talking to Alice and others I can see the other side of this transaction. Perhaps it's better to buy my plantains and sweet potatoes from wherever is cheapest, as opposed to a local farmer in my area (which isn't very hospitable to farming in the first place).
Carl's story - Carl is a corn/bean farmer who is involved in his local politics. He works closely with the mayor and helps identify which farmers are most in need of some of the aid they get from various charitable/development organizations. Often this comes in the form of additional fertilizer. He says the people who most often need help are the ones who don't own their own land, but who have to rent. Most people rent, and most of them rent from a large farm that used to be owned by the Chiquita company back when they were allowed to own land in Honduras. Apparently it's now mostly used to grow sugarcane, rented out to a large number of small, semi-independent farmers.
Carl is doing okay for himself. He rents about 4-5 hectares (they use a unit called "manzanas", which are 0.7 hectares or about 2.5 acres). Sometimes Carl grows watermelon, which pays a lot better per manzana than corn, but there's a huge problem with local petty theft and rot/plagues. The theft is mostly local kids (like what Merry and Pippin were doing when we first meet them in the LoTR movies), not a large percentage of the crop. The plagues can be controlled with chemicals, but if you're not consistent you can lose a whole crop.
Observations:
Neither Carl nor Alice reported any restrictions on land use as renters. I think this is likely who I was talking to, or possibly a feature of Honduras' land market. A lot of the 'restrictions' seem to be self-enforcing. You're not going to plant something in an area where it couldn't grow, so if you're renting a swamp, you'll plant different crops than if you're renting a hill. Still, this is different from some of my interviews from other countries (like in Kenya or the Philippines) where farmers were heavily restricted in what they could plant by the local landowner.
Both of these farmers emphasized that they live in close-knit communities. Everyone knows who is doing worst off, and people come together to help them out. There's a lot of international aid involved, and that's often already part of each farmer's calculation for how they plan to make money each season. We discussed specifics (dollar amounts, acreage, etc.) in each of our conversations. Both farmers had a plan for making money this season, had experiences they'd implemented from prior years, and understood the risks involved.
Irrigation is a big deal, and a big deadweight cost for farmers in Honduras - both in terms of labor and materials. Unlike in areas where farmers use the same land for years on end, in Honduras farmers can't rely on renting the same land from one season to the next. This means they spend a lot of money on irrigation equipment, and both farmers noted that part of those systems (namely the drip system) has to be abandoned every year. This drove up costs, though for renting farmers the largest single cost was still the land rental cost (by a wide margin).
A word about the charitable organization I was working with: They were very interested in and receptive to the idea that land is an issue. They said they'd plowed through dozens of possible metrics as ways to help the farmers they're working with, but that they'd never considered land until now. When they started asking their farmers about land use and land rights, they got a LOT of positive feedback. I think this message resonates with the many good people trying to do sustainable economic development work. Even so, it's not immediately clear what they can do with the problem of land distribution other than, "land is a big deal", so there's a possibility nothing comes of simple awareness.
Next steps:
I'm working on identifying a good community for a land reform project. Although the people I talked to in Honduras were very receptive to this idea, and I think it would work well for them, I'm not convinced the improvements would be legible. Indeed, many of the features I identified in interviews across other nations were not present in Honduras.
Why did I shift to Honduras, when I was clearly focused on smaller island nations in my earlier post? Mostly this is a case of 'looking under the lamppost because that's where the light is'. I'm still working on developing contacts in the target regions.