Dr Rita Pemberton

The escalation of hostilities between the Axis powers and the Allies led to the declaration of war, more commonly called World War II, which lasted from September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945. Although this was a European conflict, it attained global proportions with the main theatres of war occurring in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Pacific and the Soviet Union, however, it seriously impacted colonial possessions in the Caribbean, which had nothing to do with the initial causes of the war.

As was customary whenever conflicts occurred between European powers, their Caribbean possessions were targeted by their opponents as a strategy to weaken their efforts at the main battle zones by the need to deploy some of their defensive mechanisms to the periphery areas. It was well known that the Caribbean islands were heavily dependent on shipping for trade and communication with their imperial possessors; hence, obstructions on shipping could paralyse trade in the region and seriously impair communication between the imperial countries and their colonial possessions and cause great hardship to the population. Such a development could provide opportunities for the spread of communist ideas espoused by the Axis powers to take hold in the region, which the imperial powers sought to avoid at all costs. On the other hand, the imperial powers wanted to reduce importation to be able to reduce the number of trading ships and the costs of defending their colonies to make maximum use of their ships and other resources in the main war effort.

Trinidad was specially targeted because of its newly operating oil industry, which provided energy for British ships, so it was an important strategy of the enemies to impose a blockade on trading ships coming to the island. As a result, the supply of many items of food, some of which were considered essential.

The war caused a major shift in the focus of colonial policy in TT. Normally, with respect to agriculture, the policy focus was on items which were marketable on the international market and could earn healthy profits for the imperial treasury or else were of strategic significance. Trinidad’s oil gave it prominence in the British war effort. The focus of agricultural policy in the colony was on sugar plantations, which remained the dominant export crop because cocoa was on the decline since 1922. Food production was not considered a major undertaking and did not attract government policy attention.

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War aside, Tobago was in crisis, the island’s treasury was empty, and infrastructural development was not given primacy of attention. The island’s major problems also included the lack of employment, the low wages offered for all forms of employment, bad roads and the absence of roads in many rural areas, which created difficulties to transport of food items from gardens where they are produced to market in the main population centres and the lack o