In the Caribbean, women provide 60–70% of informal agricultural labour but hold less than 20% of land titles — a structural paradox that undermines regional food sovereignty.
In the market gardens of Martinique, on the subsistence plots of Haiti, or in the Creole gardens of Guadeloupe, it is predominantly women who sow, weed, harvest and sell. Yet when the time comes to sign a lease, submit a loan application, or appear in an official agricultural census, they vanish from the statistics. This paradox is not a local anomaly: it is a systemic structure that condemns Caribbean food sovereignty to build on invisible foundations.
Who Produces? The Figures That Agricultural Policies Ignore
According to data compiled by the FAO in its The State of Food and Agriculture report (2010–2023 editions) and cross-referenced with UNDP studies on gender in Caribbean rural economies, women account for between 60% and 70% of informal agricultural labour in the Lesser Antilles and Haiti. They are the ones who ensure the bulk of local food production: root vegetables, legumes, fruits, aromatic herbs — the crops that actually feed populations, far removed from export monocultures.
In the Dominican Republic, Haiti's immediate neighbour, surveys by the Ministry of Agriculture tend to confirm a similar distribution in the informal sector, even though official statistics structurally under-represent unpaid female labour.
This work is massive, daily, and often multigenerational. And yet it remains counted at the margins of national accounts, sectoral reports, and regional agricultural development plans.
Who Owns? The Land Divide at the Heart of the Problem
Fewer than 20% of official land title holders in the region are women — a figure that emerges from several FAO and UNDP studies on land ownership in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Haiti, where formal land law is extremely fragmented and where a large proportion of agricultural land has no official title, the situation is even more opaque.
Access to land in rural Caribbean communities is often governed by customary and family-based logic that de facto excludes women from direct patrimonial inheritance. They cultivate plots they will not inherit, work land they will never be able to mortgage, and build productive capital that does not legally belong to them.
This land divide has a direct and measurable consequence:
- Without a title, no collateral to access formal credit.
- Without credit, no investment (improved seeds, tools, irrigation).
- Without investment, no improvement in yields.
- Without documented yields, no visibility in agricultural policy.
The cycle is vicious, and it is self-perpetuated by the very institutions that claim to support family farming.
A West African Mirror: The Same Asymmetry, the Same Blind Spots
This imbalance is not unique to the Caribbean. In West Africa — in Benin, Burkina Faso, Senegal — women account, according to the FAO, for between 60% and 80% of food production depending on the country, while controlling less than 10% of titled land in certain rural areas.
The comparison is instructive, not to flatten very different contexts into one, but to highlight a constant: wherever food sovereignty rests on family and subsistence farming, it is women who ensure its day-to-day resilience. And everywhere, land policies, credit systems, and agricultural training programmes have historically been designed for male, property-owning interlocutors.
The Caribbean's distinguishing feature lies in its post-colonial specificity: in several French territories (Martinique, Guadeloupe), the legal framework is in theory that of French law, which makes no gender distinction. In practice, the land structures inherited from the plantation system, the fragmentation of small plots, and the informality of family transfers reproduce the same inequalities of access.
Initiatives That Are Beginning to Name the Problem
A few modest but serious approaches show that a different architecture is possible.
In Haiti, several rural women's organisations — notably in the Central Plateau department — are experimenting with community land cooperatives: groups of women farmers pool access to plots, collectively negotiate multi-year leases, and have these arrangements validated by local authorities. The goal is not necessarily an individual title, but durable security of use.
In Martinique, initiatives led by women's Creole gardening groups are working with local authorities to access communal micro-plots in exchange for commitments to food production. The model remains fragile and rarely replicated, but it opens a path towards institutional recognition.
In the Dominican Republic, certain NGOs supported by multilateral donors have developed agricultural micro-credit programmes with collective guarantees specifically targeting rural women — thus bypassing the obstacle of individual land titles by replacing real-asset collateral with group solidarity guarantees.
What these experiments share is a refusal to wait for structural land reform — which takes decades — before creating concrete use rights. They operate within the margins of the existing system, and that is both their strength and their limitation.
Food Sovereignty: An Empty Promise Without Gender Equity
Regional Caribbean food sovereignty plans — whether from CARICOM, the OECS, or national governments — put forward legitimate ambitions: reducing dependence on food imports, promoting local varieties, supporting small producers. But if these policies continue to address a male, property-owning farmer as their default interlocutor, they will miss the vast majority of their intended beneficiaries.
Any food sovereignty policy that fails to resolve the triple asymmetry of labour / ownership / credit working against women farmers is structurally ineffective. Not as a matter of ideological principle, but of operational logic: you cannot modernise, train, and finance production systems whose actual operators you refuse to see.
The next step is not necessarily a land revolution. It is first a simple thing — and yet one that is always deferred: counting correctly. Surveying informal female agricultural labour, integrating it into national accounts, making it visible in territorial diagnoses. What is not measured is not funded. And what is not funded is left to exhaust itself in silence.