Saint Lucia Forestry Stories: Sir Calixte George Sr. “Perspectives on the connection between forestry and agriculture in Saint Lucia”
Sir Calixte George Sr. Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2001-2003; Acting Chief Agricultural Officer, 1975-1979; Chief Research Officer, 1967-1975, Saint Lucia Ministry of Agriculture
Outside the Saint Lucia Ministry of Agriculture, he held the positions of Minister, Ministry of Home Affairs and Internal Security, 2004-2006; Minister, Ministry of Communications, Works, Transport and Public Utilities, 1997-2001; Managing Director, St. Lucia Banana Growers’ Association, 1994-1995; Executive Director, Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) 1990-1993 and various senior management positions in CARDI from 1979; Principal and lecturer, Union Agricultural College, 1968-1979.
From interview with Christopher Cox and Cletus Springer, December 2020
The early days
I happened to be one of the first students from Saint Lucia who studied agriculture at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago; before that it was the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, and it was during my studies I was introduced to scientific information on the environment of Saint Lucia. This included studies on the soils of the Caribbean that included Saint Lucia, that was conducted by Professor Frederick Hardy of the University of the West Indies. There was also the works of Dr. John Stanley Beard, the then Assistant Conservator of Forests of Trinidad and Tobago who did comprehensive studies on the vegetation of Saint Lucia that showed that there was great correlation with the nature of the soils and identification of eco-zones. It was from my formal education at UWI where I understood the connections between agriculture, forestry and the environment, but on a personal level I already knew a lot about forestry in St. Lucia through my father, Ivan George. He had friends who worked in forestry in St Lucia that included F.M.P. Branch and George Durrant Glasgow. Glasgow was a school friend from St. Mary’s College days, and they worked together in the Ministry of Agriculture where he was the senior forest officer in the Ministry of Agriculture. The Glasgow family lived close by to us in the Marchand community; this was in the 1950s. I can remember well Mr. Glasgow in his khakis.
When I joined the Ministry of Agriculture as Chief Research Officer in 1967 Mr Glasgow was still with the Ministry. He was one of the first Saint Lucians who went overseas to study forestry. This was to Puerto Rico where courses were hosted by the US Forest Service for foreign forestry professionals from the Caribbean. In those days the forestry work was not organized under a separate administrative unit as it fell under the oversight of the Chief Agricultural Officer. It was upon the entry of William Lang in 1946 that the Division of Forestry was created under the Ministry of Agriculture that remained under the Chief Agricultural Officer. Mr. Lang held the post of Forestry Supervisor. Mr. Glasgow continued to work under Mr. Lang as the next senior-most officer until the mid-1960s. By that time Gabriel ‘Coco’ Charles joined the division as a junior officer and was assigned to Savanne-Edmund forest area in Soufriere, where he spent several years before being reassigned to Castries and lived at the Union Agricultural Station. When Mr Lang retired in 1971 Mr. Charles succeeded him as Forestry Supervisor in 1972. He was sent off to the UK to the Gloucester School of Forestry to study forestry following which he was the first from Saint Lucia to do the forestry course at the Eastern Caribbean Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (ECIAF) in Trinidad. Coco Charles went on to do a wonderful job in forestry in St Lucia.
One of the people of great importance to forestry in St. Lucia was Stanley John. He was a forest ranger who was responsible for areas in the north that included the La Sorciere, Trois Piton and Forestiere areas. He lived in Forestiere. He had made a significant contribution to knowledge of wildlife in the country where he made extensive observations on the birds of Saint Lucia, and he was thoroughly knowledgeable about the islands’ wildlife. He authored a series in the Voice of Saint Lucia newspaper in the early 1950s in which he described all the birds. The publication used to come out every week and I remember reading it as a boy. I also recall that my father, who was a friend of Stanley John used to archive all these publications as he was something of a collector…I had the collection but unfortunately lost it. I also had a book on birds of the Caribbean where Stanley John was acknowledged.
I remember Cyril Matthew who was our Chief Agricultural Officer who used to convene meetings with the different divisions, where I was in charge of the Division of Research, and Coco Charles was in charge of the Division of Forestry. In these meetings we would talk about the work of the ministry where we would be planning around crop rotations (to harvest maturity) over a timeframe of a few months, and there was Coco talking about forestry or tree rotations of 20 years! This used to tickle us into laughter in these planning discussions. Of course, we understood that forestry was a longer-term management, and important investment for protection of our lands and soils we use for farming. We used to support the work of the forestry division and understood the vision and work of Coco Charles. We would provide the lab facilities where soil analytical testing was required or if there was need to look at fungal diseases that were attacking forestry seedlings. We had that close working relationship between agricultural services and forestry.
In the early days, well before my time, some areas in the forest reserves were earmarked for agricultural crop nurseries; forest lands were in fact utilised for the propagation of agricultural crops that were to be arranged in agroforestry systems. I remember well traveling to Quilesse (in the eastern central forest reserve area to the interior of Micoud) with an old agricultural officer, Mr. Beaubrun, where they had established nurseries for bananas, cocoa and citrus, along with nurseries for mahogany plants. In areas such as Patience and Fond Estate they established agroforestry systems based on cocoa cultivation where you needed shade plants to shelter the cocoa. Trees such as immortelle was commonly used. Up till today you can observe these agroforestry systems still in operation in these areas. This demonstrated the strong links between the agriculture and forestry in St. Lucia.
On land degradation and agriculture
Degradation of our forest lands, particularly in the interior has been a serious issue from time immemorial. The beginnings of this date back to the time at the end of slavery when the newly emancipated slaves moved off the plantations into the margins of the plantations and into the mountains to make gardens. Some people who remained landless over the years moved into the forest reserves, illegally squatting, in the process clearing the forest by slash-and-burn and planting crops on steep slopes that would result in tremendous soil loss and landslides. A big part of the work of the Forestry Division in those days was therefore to control illegal squatting in the forest reserves. The Forestry Division introduced a method called the taungya system where in agreement with the squatters, forest plants were grown among the temporary crops on a squatted plot of land, and when the forest trees became tall enough to shade out the temporary crops the squatters were moved to another location outside the forest reserve, usually other government lands, that was more suitable for agriculture so that they could continue their livelihood. There were big conflicts that Coco Charles and forestry officers faced in trying to remove squatters from the forest reserve notably in the areas around Des Cartier up in the heights of Desruisseaux. Most of these squatters were growing bananas. The forestry officers had powers under the legislation to charge squatters for illegal entry and destruction of the forests and bring them to court depending on the offence. However, at the time John Compton, who was the parliamentary representative of the area and Premier, would give permission for persons to squat in the forest reserve in return for gaining political favour. This would aggravate the situation, constituting political interference in forestry management leading to many conflicts between Coco Charles and John Compton.
Tackling land degradation was always closely connected to agriculture. On steep slopes soil conservation measures in farms included planting of cus-cus grass, and we established agricultural demonstration plots on the hillsides to show people how to properly implement soil conservation measures. Model Farms were established whereby farmers were assigned smaller acreages in the flat areas while in the foothills or sloped areas persons were allocated larger acreages say of 15 acres and were encouraged to install soil conservation measures and invest in agroforestry-type enterprises rather than pure bananas but in many areas this was often never practiced. There was research on soil conservation that were carried out by the likes of Chandra Madramootoo and Peter Norville that would have informed sustainable development of hillside lands. All the work as being translated to land use planning for agricultural lands. There was another forestry-agriculture nexus. Although the crown lands department was separate from the division of forestry there was a very close relationship between crown lands and forestry because they also had crown lands officers in addition to forestry officers. One of the things that was to assist in forestry was that the Ministry of Agriculture add a dedicated land surveyor assigned to the Crown Lands Department by the name of Didus Mathurin. He was sent to Trinidad to do surveying where on his return, his job was to rationalise the forest boundaries and the crown lands boundaries to make sure that they were in alignment with provisions of the prevailing legislation (Crown Lands Act and the Forest, Soil and Water Conservation Ordinance) and also to assist in management of land access and control of the problems with illegal squatting. Gregor Hall for example who became head of the Crown Land Department was a forestry officer in charge of the Dennery area, but he also had oversight over Crown Lands and had similar enforcement powers under the legislation.
Lessons relevant sustainable land management, planning and development
Looking back at the 1938 Ravine Poisson disaster, it was accelerated by the distribution of forest lands and allocation for banana cultivation. The farmers cleared too large of an area without installing proper soil conservation for example drainage. Further, the soils in the area were not suitable for this type of cultivation where these ‘latosolic‘ (as classed in the 1966 soil survey) or tropical soils are prone to slippage. Locally these soils are known as ‘terre gwa’ and are characterized by a the presence of a slip plane where the upper soil layers rest above something of a lubricated plane at some depth, where should the soils over steep slopes be disturbed and destabilized due to loss of tree cover and roots, the entire slope becomes liquified and moves down in a catastrophic landslip, the type of what occurred at Ravine Poisson back then. It seems unlikely that such a catastrophic event will occur in that area again since subsequently, Peter Lang followed by Gabriel Charles of the Forestry Division ordered the planting of trees like Blue Mahoe and Caribbean Pine that are holding the soils and the terrain very well.
In St Lucia we still do not take into account the past experiences to consider good soil and land management to avert disasters. It would not be surprising of there were a major landslide event from the Morne that impacts the Castries area at some point. Past events at Black Mallet in October 1999 shows how that could happen. Some of the areas that are vulnerable to land slippage should really be under forest cover. For example, along the Quatre Chemin road that runs along the ridge toward the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College there is the possibility to have slippage on either side, that facing Castries and that facing Cul de Sac. All of this is being driven by pressures of urbanization and expansion of Castries uphill. The Physical Planning Department should have never given permission to build houses in these areas. However, some of this control is outside that of formalized planning and approval processes as squatting and unplanned development complicates the issue. It is typical for multiple families to move in overtime on single plots of land, building dwellings at high density and where for example the wastewater and runoff that is generated is disposed of in an unrestrained manner overland and into the underlying soils, setting over the long term the stage for potential disaster. The only remedy for this is a strict planning and demarcation of lands that should be utilized for housing. The solution lies in education of the political directorate to help with their understanding; very often they do not appreciate what the technical persons are trying to convey. In my tenure at senior policy level and as minister I have tried to do my part to educate colleagues. There has to be appreciation of the integrative nature of the planning process, and one cannot separate one part from another; agriculture, forestry and urban…they are all integrated.
On generating value from forests
One of my associations with forestry based on my work in the agriculture sector was the potential for the forestry sector to also generate revenue and sustain livelihoods in the same way as in agriculture. There was use of timbers extracted from forest lands for the production of value-added timber products such as furniture, for example tables and the big armoires our mothers used to use as wardrobes. These products were manufactured at the timber processing plant under a government-run company called Timber Shed that was located at Conway in those days. Besides furniture, other items that were manufactured included curios and other functional craft such as mugs, ashtrays among others using attractive timber derived from Blue Mahoe and other timbers that were produced for sale as souvenirs in the tourism industry. One would hope that in the future there will be renewed attention paid to generation of these types of timber products as the value of such enterprises was well illustrated by the forestry department. This remains relevant particularly as the tourism industry continues to grow; there is need to continue to explore opportunities in this regard in forest management, not only in the context of agroforestry but in livelihood opportunity in manufacture of forest products. There is a matter of economy of scale that needs to be considered however. There was a sawmill (Fine Timbers) that was located at Patience. The reason why that mill was situated there was because of proximity to the larger tracts of forests that were on lands owned by private landowners such as Lord Palmer of Huntley and Palmer from England who owned Patience Estate, and Lord Bruce who owned Fond Estate. The idea was that these large landowners could have become engaged to provide the economies of scale needed in the sustainable harvest and management of timber production. There however seemed to have been a tendency to dismiss the potential of such investment based on other adverse experiences, for example paralleling that of the St. Lucia Marketing Board. It should be considered however that one simply cannot translate business models that may hold for bigger, more industrialized economies, to economies like in St Lucia or other small island states. Our economies grew out of agrarian development models that had a different orientation altogether. To meet these challenges there has to be a nurturing of the needed skills and training of people to support these types of manufacturing enterprises. These limitations suggest that the private sector may not embrace these types of opportunities at least in the near-term without investments in capacity. To illustrate in parallel, one may consider the fact that notwithstanding we have a 200-mile exclusive economic zone of marine space within which we can fish and manufacture salted fish that is always in demand, however it seems easier for the private sector to import salted cod product.
One of the other important commercial enterprises that the Forestry Department was engaged in was the production of Christmas trees. Through our agricultural research department, we used to guide Gabriel Charles in this endeavour, applying some of the lessons from the agricultural side in enhancing growth and yield of the Christmas tree seedlings particularly in the early stages of establishment. There was an aversion of course to use of chemical inputs in plantations in the forest so as to safeguard the environment, but we encouraged the application of nitrogen considering that forest soils are quite nutrient-poor.
Final thoughts – striking the balance between environment and development
Simply put, there is the need for more people to go and study development planning to continue to enhance and maintain good planning processes. It is key for future development for the country. There must not be fragmentation between core planning responsibilities in government; economic planning, physical development planning must be under the same administrative leadership. Of course, there will have to be individual planning capability within the various sectors; agriculture, health, etc, but a central planning node will take into account ensuring that the interconnections across sectors can be effectively made. This has to be backed up by political will, that can move recommendations from planning to implementation. There cannot be any type of sustainable development of the country if there is not proper management of the natural resources…and this includes your soil and land resources!
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