Labour and manpower problems
 As has been explained, small farms exist side by side with large estates in the West
Indies and in most places the worker who earns wages on the large estates may also have
a plot of land to cultivate.

 The casual nature of employment in the West Indies makes it very difficult to measure
unemployment and underemployment. Most agricultural workers can find work for part of
the year, but rarely can they find sufficient work to constitute full time regular employment.

 The sugar industry is habitually one which has depended on a large labour force ready
and available for seasonal work, so that in the main sugar growing areas there are two
distinct periods: "in-crop" when there is work for all and "out-of-crop" when only a mi-
nority of regular workers are employed. This pattern still exists in spite of partly suc-
cessful efforts by many estates to spread work throughout the year.

 It was estimated by the British West Indies Sugar Association in 1958 that of a total of
3 million people in the region, 184,000 were directly employed in estates and factories;
with their families this would mean about three-quarters of a million people were directly
dependent on the industry. This did not include thousands of small farmers who sold cane
to the factories but were not directly employed by them.

 The labour force employed in sugar has not increased at the same rate as production
over the past decade. In some areas workers have been made idle by mechanisation, par-
ticularly of the loading and transporting operations. Follow-up studies in Jamaica indi-
cate that most of these workers have either migrated or have been absorbed in the general
expansion of this and other industries.

 In crops such as cocoa, banana and citrus we find a pattern of numerous small peasants
and a few estates. Considering the frequency pattern there is still a tendency for numbers
of growers to inflate the lower end of the distribution, and for acreage and production to
inflate the upper end. However, in banana, medium-sized farms contribute substantially
to the total product. Where land is available for peasants to grow bananas it is not so easy
for estates to find wage labour for this industry. In coconut, estates predominate and dif-
ficulties of finding labour have been experienced in this industry where banana production
has increased. The coconut industry is, however, saved by the fact that demands in la-
bour need not be specifically timed and coconuts can generally wait until labour is free
from more exacting crops.

 Rice production in British Guiana has traditionally been carried out by small producers
w.'ho also work seasonally on sugar estates; but with the development of new rice areas
some distance from the main sugar areas, this pattern is becoming less pronounced. Ne-
vertheless rice growing is still a predominantly part-time peasant crop. It has been es-
timated that about 25% of all labour is paid labour. Nevertheless much of this is supplied
by the farmers themselves, who work in turn on each others' farms.

 The expansion of the livestock industry has been inhibited to some extent more by shor-
tage of managerial categories of labour than by shortage of unskilled types. This is par-
ticularly evident in the Jamaica dairy industry where there is a large unfulfilled demand