Maroons, Rastas, and Ganja Cooperatives

Abstract

Abstract While the majority of literature on cooperatives tends to focus on cases operating in legal settings, this chapter examines the history and contribution of illegal cannabis cooperatives in the Eastern Caribbean islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent. This chapter argues that cooperatives were forged out of economic necessity, due to limited options for employment and income generation after trade liberalization devastated the Caribbean banana trade. Existing alongside more unequal structures of production rooted in a sharecropping model, the cannabis cooperatives provide an example of collective and community responses to economic hardship, rooted in longstanding traditions of resistance, from the Maroons to Rastafari. Unlike past illegal economic activities, the cannabis economy, in responding to widespread unemployment and catering to regional as well as local needs, represents a departure from the plantation model of the past.