The Decline of Agriculture and Projection of the Number of Farm Units in the United States Virgin Islands Frank L. Mills College of the Virgin Islands The collapse of the sugar industry in the Virgin Islands in 1966 ushered in a period of decline in agriculture which has persisted till the present. Despite the government's efforts to increase production, the agrarian domain has been under relentless siege by competing industrial, commercial and social interests. The paper is presented in three sections. The first gives, and discusses, basic quantitative parameters of the decline in agriculture over the last 20 years. The second makes use of a stochastic model-absorbing Markov chains-to pro- ject the decline in the distribution and the total number of There is hardly any doubt that in the minds of the majority of the residents of the Virgin Islands, agricultural activity should constitute one of the major components of the economy of the territory. Until the recent past, i.e., about twenty years ago, most native Virgin Islanders had known little more than the monoculture of sugar cane that had dominated the economy from colonial days. And for many other residents of the Carib- bean, agriculture had always featured prominently in their island economies. The period that begins about 1960 can be described as a watershed in agricultural production in the Virgin Islands, for despite recent efforts to restore agrarian-based activities to a higher level than it has been in the last decade, there appear to be signs of an irreversible trend to a decreasing role for agriculture. This tendency to a reduced performance of agriculture can be broadly ascribed to three initial and interrelated factors: the col- lapse of the sugar industry in 1966, the impact of tourism and heavy industry, the population pressure on limited space. The Virgin Islands Company (VICO) that was created by the Federal Government in 1934 was done with the express purpose of stimulating the economy by the operation of a sugar, rum and hotel business. Its successor in 1949 was the Virgin Islands Cor- poration (VICORP), which the Congress prohibited from any fur- ther production of rum. The production of sugar proved to be unprofitable, and VICORP sold off or conveyed its assets to the local government. This ensured the demise of the sugar industry in 1966. The early 1960s was marked by a rapid increase in tourism, and many hotels and tourist recreation facilities were built on land that was previously in the agricultural domain, in- cluding an 18-hold golf course and a condominium complex in St. Thomas, and two golf courses in St. Croix. The net result was that many agricultural workers drifted into the tourist industry as unskilled workers, and the demand for more cheap labor per- sisted for more than a decade. The supply of labor for the increasing number of tourist facilities and for the burgeoning construction industry was met largely through migrant labor from the Eastern Caribbean and from the U.S. mainland. The demand for housing grew concomi- tantly, and inroads into abandoned rural farm land or VOL. XX-PROCEEDINGS of the CARIBBEAN FOOD CROPS SOCIETY farm units over the next 20 years. The third section details those causative factors that may explain the decreasing perfor- mance in agriculture. These latter include the impact of the abandonment of sugar production, the development of tourism, the increase in industrial and commercial activities, competition from imported foodstuffs, the policies of govern- ment, the unavailability of land, the lack of trained personnel, the shortage of labor, inadequate supplies of water, and insuf- ficient marketing facilities. The paper concludes with a call for a conscious policy commitment by the government. agricultural lands adjacent to urban areas were readily given over to public housing complexes and other expressions of residential housing needs. Hence it is quite clear that agrarian land has been under persis- tent siege by competing commercial and social interests, and this continues to be the case in the mid-1980s. The objective of this work is, therefore, to explore two issues. The first is an examina- tion of the major characteristics of farming in the territory through an analysis of agricultural census data. The second is a projection of the number of farming units in five-year periods till the year 2000. The approach that is taken below is to discuss, first, some of the attributes of Virgin Islands agriculture which will lay the groundwork for the succeeding section. The second step is to present the salient features of the stochastic model- ab- sorbing Markov chains-that is used in the projection of the distribution of farm units. After a presentation of the future pat- tern of decline, an attempt will be made to provide reasonable answers to why farming is on a continual decline in the Virgin Islands. Attributes of Virgin Islands Agriculture The most appropriate point of departure for a discussion of recent performance in agriculture appears to be the hiatus in ac- tivity of the early 1960s. Prior to that time, sugar and cotton pro- duction, raising livestock, and truck farming were the primary enterprises in farming, with the latter confined principally to St. Thomas. The artificially sound VICORP collapsed when it could no longer produce rum, and thus the sugar industry was the ma- jor casualty in 1966. This, therefore, led to the abandonment of large tracts of agricultural land and the retirement from this in- dustry of hundreds of acres of prime land. The evidence for this may be seen in the Census of Agriculture data for 1960 and 1970, which show not only a decrease in the number of farms, but also in the number of acres that remained productive. The 1982 Cen- sus of Agriculture in the Virgin Islands defines a 'farm' "as a 'place' of three acres or more on which any field or forage crops were harvested or vegetables were harvested for sale during the 12-month period between July 1, 1982 and June 30, 1983, or on 23