Paper short abstract:

This paper will set out the factors that made Jamaican small farmers vulnerable to drought in the 1990s, including agricultural reforms and an unequal water infrastructure, and explore a range of adaptation and coping strategies that they used to mitigate the impact of drought.

Paper long abstract:

Of all natural disasters, drought has the most far-reaching impact on society and the environment. Informed by the growing interdisciplinary body of work on water (in)justice, this paper explores how Jamaican small farmers in the 1990s were affected by a series of droughts. It will argue that they were vulnerable to the impacts of these droughts because of where they lived, the type of land cultivated and crops grown, an underdeveloped rural water infrastructure, lack of government support during the droughts, and agricultural reform and other neoliberal policies. But Jamaican small farmers were not just passive victims of the droughts. The paper will also set out a range of (mostly reactive) adaptation and coping strategies that they used to mitigate the multiple and varied impacts of the droughts. And it will show that when pushed to the brink, small farmers did not hesitate to resort to open protest to improve water access, albeit with varied effect.