Episode #283
Nicola Shirley-Phillips: Growing Organic in Jamaica

Nicola Shirley-Phillips makes the case for organic farming in Jamaica as both an agricultural necessity and a cultural recovery. Drawing on Jamaica’s Ital traditions, the rise of chemical-dependent extension advice, and her own work training growers, she explains how the island’s food system was pushed toward extraction, imports, and pesticides, and why rebuilding organic knowledge, local production, and policy support could help Jamaica grow cleaner food and a healthier farm economy.

Our interview with Nicola Shirley-Phillips has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Nicola Shirley-Phillips in winter 2025

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking to Nicola Shirley Phillips today. Nicola, it’s a pleasure. We just met, and it’s wonderful to have an activist and a witness coming from Jamaica. What I want to do is help people from all over the world listen to this, but undoubtedly, the majority are in the United States.

Dave Chapman 0:25
They’ve never been to Jamaica. They know about the bobsled team. They don’t know much about it. You have been working pretty hard down there to try and grow organic. Could you talk about that? First, is there much organic in Jamaica, or is it something that completely got missed?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 0:47
It’s interesting, because I think that Jamaica, for the most part, is kind of the counterpart evolution, where we talked about Rastafarianism. Remember, they have Ital as a concept, and they were also part of that movement in the, I would say, 60s and 70s, about clean food. We have been doing this, but not necessarily under the organic label, but under Ital, trying to eat clean – trying to stay away from all that chemicalized food that was coming in. That was a kind of counterculture to what was going on.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 1:24
Even though it’s not necessarily the organic label, early on, we’ve been doing that work in Jamaica. It stems a lot from that point of view, and I think, though, for us, the label came in a different way than maybe in the US. We were looking at mothers with babies wanting to have clean food.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 1:44
For us, organic came to us more through an academic way, through the University of the West Indies, where there are some professors wanting to look at that, and some people that wanted to have organic coffee getting certified. There’s a grassroots movement with the Rastas, but then the word organic really came through the University of the West Indies – academic pursuit.

Dave Chapman 2:12
That’s interesting. In this country, organic came from the farmers and then the eaters. What’s coming from the academics now is agroecology. I know in great parts of the world that comes from the peasants. We see these different words that are talking about very much similar things. I think when organic began, it was very politically active, and agroecology was very politically active.

Dave Chapman 2:45
For me, organic doesn’t mean certified. It doesn’t mean you’re not certified; you’re not organic. I think certification is important, and it has value, but it also can be used for bad purposes. Just to be clear, for me, organic is about how we think, how we farm, how we eat, and it does not have to have a government certification to be real organic.

Dave Chapman 3:17
That’s interesting about the Rastas. Are they still into clean food? Is that movement still strong?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 3:25
It is still there. But what I’m finding, I’m finding the younger generation is actually there. It’s kind of weird and a very interesting point. I think we’re all at a great inflection point in our history right now. When I came back to Jamaica, I thought, definitely all clean, mostly clean. Then what I saw was a lot of the agrochemical folks have kind of taken over Jamaica.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 3:57
The Rastas were there, but then I started seeing them creeping into using a lot of these chemicals, and that’s a lot because of our Ministry of Agriculture and the education. We have an agricultural college, College of Agriculture, Science, and Education. But they were taught through this kind of Green Revolution growing.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 4:23
If you ask extension to help you with a problem, they only know one way. They were trained wrong, and that’s what they would often share with somebody. You might have a farmer, maybe a Rasta farmer, that is growing something, that knows you shouldn’t be putting these things on whatever. If they’re doing a crop and they’re about to lose it, they’re going to ask for help, and then what’s going to be shown to them is these chemicals, and so it’s kind of shifted.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 4:48
Even with ganja, which they know people are going to be smoking, and it’s supposed to be clean, and it’s obviously not. They’re going to lose a crop. We always say that when humans run after the natural world for profits, what follows is always some kind of devastation and destruction. That’s what we’re seeing.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 5:13
If the person is growing it for a profit and they see their crop is going to fail, they’re going to lean on what they know. They don’t necessarily know all the natural things that maybe a lot of the newer organic farmers know how to use, integrated pest management, and all that stuff. They’re not doing that.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 5:32
They’re going to listen to extension, and extension is going to only know how to do it one way, and it is going to be with some chemical that is harmful.

Dave Chapman 5:37
Of course, it’s changed in the US a bit, for sure, and there are now a fair number of extension people who understand there are other ways. When I was young, there weren’t any. Extension was quite simply not our friend, and USDA was not our friend, and they’re still not all that close, but they’ve gotten friendlier.

Dave Chapman 6:04
I’m curious, you talk about the Jamaican version of extension and the government agency, and they’re kind of preaching Green Revolution. Was that explicitly taught to them by the US government? I know that there was a lot of Green Revolution. It wasn’t just government, it was the Rockefeller Foundation that was funded in Mexico and India. Did that extend to Jamaica?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 6:33
Absolutely. For Jamaica, we are English-speaking, often the head, or senior head, of the English-speaking Caribbean. So we definitely got that. We had USAID here for many, many years, and many different agencies coming to help us with our agricultural system. If it wasn’t banana, pineapple, or some yams, or something that would export, Scotch bonnet peppers, whatever those things are that we’re going to export,.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 7:07
I’d like to remind you that we’re considered the near South. A lot of the things that we grow, obviously, were designed to grow for North America, because you have a large Jamaican and Caribbean population there, and so exports. We actually have a whole USDA station that helps us with our phytosanitary requirements for anything going to the US, so very much influence.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 7:34
We have probably 2 million people who live in the US. That interconnectedness that happens. A lot of the information and training that came to the various universities and schools, through USAID, through even the Farmer-to-Farmer program, came in that way.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 7:53
They’re bringing the knowledge that they had at the time. It really wasn’t anything about organic or permaculture, or any of these kinds of things. It was only what was being taught to everybody. We got the brunt of that. If you had a problem, you would depend on the US to try to solve it, because you’re the next neighbor that would have that information.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 8:15
Even now, research, when we look at something, we might be going on one of the websites that is really based in the US to get information on some solution, because we are…

Dave Chapman 8:31
I know. It’s like we’re passing along these secrets about, “Hey, you know, if you try this…” We’re doing it here with Farmer-to-Farmer too. The leadership on this mostly doesn’t come from government. I’m curious, because in the US, for sure, there is a conflict between many farmers and the input industry: chemical fertilizers, and chemical pesticides.

Dave Chapman 9:03
They write many editorials and put out a lot of information about how what we do is impossible. “We will all starve to death if you try to do that,” but we’re doing it, and it works. I’m curious, in Jamaica, do you confront these big companies, Syngenta and Bayer? Are they in the marketplace? Are they flexing muscle? Are they spending money?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 9:31
Yeah, man. That’s how it works. You got to pay to play. What happens here, if you call right now and you ask extension or the government about anything organic or naturally grown, they say it can’t work. That’s just a standard line, “it can’t work.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 9:47
For instance, we have a couple of companies that are here, and they bring in all these different synthetic and other chemicals that come in. It’s all about, they obviously are going to be supporting whichever political party is in power. They’re going to be part of that. They’re going to grease the wheels. They’re going to lobby. They’re going to ensure that their products and stuff come in, and are very much there.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 10:18
It’s because it’s a small island, you get to see a lot of that play itself out. That’s who is educating extension and the schools. They come and they have a junket, and they’re going to push whatever the chemical is. They’re going to pay, we say in Jamaica, “bling”.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 10:38
They’re going to give the hats and all that paraphernalia, they’re going to take them out to lunch, they’re going to give them a hotel room, whatever it is going to take, trips, whatever, to make sure those products get into Jamaica. Then they’re also shared throughout the island. That’s really how it works.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 10:58
It’s a very big emphasis on that. When we come now with our organic self, or trying to do something natural, every extension officer in Jamaica will say it can’t work. That’s the work that we’ve been trying to do, to show them that it wasn’t always like this. I always remind them, like 40 years ago, we didn’t have these things. How come all of a sudden, it’s the only way that we grow?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 11:23
You look back in history, World War II would be the point where Jamaica was actually sending food to Europe, to the UK, and different places, and the US. They didn’t have any of those chemicals, but we did feed a number of countries when we had the war. We were able to do that, knowing that it’s always been very export-driven. That’s why the whole enslavement thing happens, because of that exploitative system.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 11:51
We didn’t have those things, yet we always had yields, obviously slavery, but also just even some of the management practices. If you go back and you speak to some of these extension folks, I’m like, “What did your grandfather do?” They go, “Oh, yeah.” Then we’re trying to get them to remember that we didn’t always do it this way, and they still had great yields.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 12:10
Now, they put all this stuff in, their yields obviously decline because of the amount of chemicals being used. We talk about the webinar that we did, which was “Pretty Dutty Food,” and the numbers that you see, that for the small island, that we import so many chemicals, and a lot of it is absolutely banned globally. What is that?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 12:36
The whole Ministry of Agriculture is totally in support of it. It’s just now that, since I’ve been trying to get them to do this island-wide soil fertility project, that there’s a little bit of something, but there’s a lot of pushback. Extension doesn’t come out to the trainings that we do. They’re supposed to take the farmers out, even though it’s a government project. Extension is supposed to come out. You see one or two people show up.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 13:05
They don’t know these strategies. They don’t know them, so they can’t even introduce them to the farmers if they don’t even know this, because they’ve been trained a certain way. That’s why, for me, it’s important to do that kind of curriculum change. Since I’ve been back 20 years, I’ve been trying to get CASE, the College of Agriculture, Science, and Education, that’s where a lot of the extension comes from.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 13:27
I’ve been trying to get them to put a program in. When I talk to the students, they all want it, but if the faculty isn’t trained, then they don’t know, and they’re going to lean on what they do know, which is really outdated information for themselves, and also for the whole ecosystem.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 13:46
Everybody’s moving away from that, or at least there’s some conversation. But if we’re stuck 20 years behind, and we don’t know this information, we can’t teach what we don’t know. That’s where the problem is.

Dave Chapman 13:59
Information is a huge part of all this, isn’t it? Of course, that’s what we’re trying to do, because we think so many people are working in isolation. I was just talking with Hugh Kent. I don’t know if you ever have seen any of the interviews I did with Hugh, but he’s a blueberry grower in Florida. He’s in a very hot place with lots of insects, and he uses no insecticides, no herbicides, and no fungicides.

Dave Chapman 14:23
So interesting. He talked about when he started, he and Lisa were figuring this out for themselves. They didn’t know any other organic farmers. They were first-generation farmers, so they didn’t even know very many other farmers of any kind. They’d go to extension, and they’d say, “Yeah, if you don’t spray this, you’re going out of business.” That was just it. It was a fact.

Dave Chapman 14:48
They were, I think, with great courage, figuring this out. But he said, when he stumbled into the Real Organic Project, suddenly he discovered there were many other people doing this and succeeding at it. It was a world movement, and there were people he could talk to, and books he could read. It was a big breakthrough from being so isolated and alone.

Dave Chapman 15:13
That’s why I wanted to talk to you, because, yeah, of course, Jamaica is a part of it. I’m curious, in Jamaica, do they import most of what they eat? Do they export most of what they grow? How does that work? How self-sufficient is the island?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 15:33
We used to be very self-sufficient, but over the years, we’ve really gotten less and less. I think the numbers are about 65-70%. I should qualify that with more of it being processed food that we’re importing versus some of the vegetables. Even now, especially because we just had this Category 5 hurricane, a lot more products are coming in. We see more and more of those processed items.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 16:03
We get a lot of American programming, all that television that we get, Netflix, this or that. So we pick up the lifestyle. Also, we have a lot of our family members who live in America, so they send home barrels of different products. Also, there are products out there that will say “for export only.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 16:23
If you walk into a Jamaican supermarket, you will actually see most of the aisles…. It’s like you’re in Florida or somewhere else in the world. You’ll see a lot of the brands, General Mills products, and some of these other things. You’d have no problem if you wanted to come and shop. You’d see a lot of the things that you normally see.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 16:49
We do have some light manufacturing that happens in Jamaica. We do have some products that are our own. I didn’t realize it was actually that much. We just had some folks that came from the Virgin Islands, St. Croix, and they were surprised. They’re like, “Oh, wow, you guys have a lot of products that you manufacture.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 17:09
I didn’t think that we had enough, but we actually do have some things that we make that are Jamaican brands and that kind of stuff that is here. Obviously, not a lot of organically labeled products at all, really, and that’s the work that we are trying to do now. It is to get more of that work being done, where we can actually have some light manufacturers, and you can actually see some of those products in our stores and on our shelves.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 17:40
The supermarkets do ask for it, but production is not up yet. It’s hard to do that when the Ministry of Agriculture is saying it can’t work, or extension is saying it can’t work. Farmers that might want to go and lean in that direction, they’re being told there’s no money, it can’t work.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 17:57
Even a lot of returning residents that come back, who’ve had that North American experience or the UK experience, and know the difference, they’re asking for clean food, or they want to go back to farming and start farming, and then they go to extension, and they say, “No money. It can’t work. It can’t work.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 18:14
Also, the other major issue is that we don’t have enough people trained to work organically. When people come to me, and our team, and say, “Oh, we’re returning residents. We have family land. We want to grow. We know about organic because we’re eating that way, more so in the US. They know the difference.” I say to them, “You have to work, because there’s nobody trained, not many people trained.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 18:40
I have to bring in people from EARTH University in Costa Rica, or we do work with different people that are in the US that can only come for three months at a time, to come and help put a system in place, and to take them through a cycle, because the people have only been trained a certain way.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 18:56
We don’t really have a number of people that can come out, or extension, to come on and say, “This is what you would do, and this is how you should set it up,” or anything. That’s one of the reasons that we started our program, which we can talk about a little bit.

Dave Chapman 19:10
Yeah, that’s great. It’s interesting. When I was talking with Hugh, we were talking about how complex the organic system is. We barely know what’s going on. We know to get out of the way. We know to do things, to be stewards. That’s what they talk about in organic, “be a good steward of the soil and the insects and the whole system.” But it’s too complicated for us to really understand. It’s just that we can appreciate it.

Dave Chapman 19:44
But I was thinking about how hard it is to give advice or to show a model to someone who’s just starting, because in a system that is working, you almost don’t dare go in and mess with it.

Dave Chapman 20:04
You go and just spray that pesticide to kill that one insect, and it has a lot of unexpected consequences, so suddenly you have another insect problem, because you wiped out two beneficial species that were keeping the balance going. It’s complicated. We need a lot of research, don’t we?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 20:23
We do need a lot of research. It’s interesting you brought it up, because one of the things that’s been happening with me is I keep talking now about organic intelligence. Instead of this AI thing, I’m all about OI, Organic Intelligence.

Dave Chapman 20:42
I like that.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 20:45
One of the things that the Rastas would say, or just indigenous people, is obviously sitting in nature and let nature talk to you and show you. I’ve really been advocating that, because there’s a whole system that is going on under the surface, or just in that invisible, that next layer of invisible world, that is a whole interaction that’s going on that we need to be reconnected to.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 21:11
I think that’s one of the things that we’ve kind of got disconnected from. We’re moving in a direction that we need to do to get reconnected. I really believe the plants will show up and tell you. Even in sitting in my meditation, in my space, where we are farming on Source Farm Ecovillage, or on the research station, the plants are speaking, literally, like “work with us, and we’ll show you how to do this.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 21:35
That’s humbling, because it makes you really think about how you don’t know anything. You really don’t know what you’re doing. To kind of step out of that thinking of you knowing, and really sitting with the plants and have them show you that, just information.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 21:50
We even said that we did a meditation with a tree, and the tree was like, “Yeah, we are always here talking. You guys are just moving too fast. Just slow down.” It’s the base frequency of the planet. We could say, “Whoa, what is that?” It really is about that. We talk about organic as really about that organic intelligence that we should be connecting with. They will show you the way.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 22:11
I think that most of the people that are having success around this work, it’s really about making that connection, and listening, and trying to follow, and not trying to go too big, too fast, and then slow solutions, and all those kinds of things. I think that if we do that, that’s a direction I’d like to see us move more into, in that divine connection.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 22:37
That is going to help us navigate all the things that we’re trying to go through, is being able to listen to that invisible world, which the plants are very much part of.

Dave Chapman 22:45
Yeah, I love that, Nicola. That goes beyond “we need more research.” That’s like, we need more wise people to guide us, and to maybe teach us to be a little more humble, and, as you say, listen a little more carefully. That’s an interesting idea. I look at the complexity of these systems, and I see the tiny amount of research that is done for organic, and a huge amount of research and support that is done for chemical agriculture.

Dave Chapman 23:28
I realize how inappropriate it is, because organic is what we all want. You have to be crazy to say I would rather have food sprayed with pesticides. Nobody would rather have that except the person who sold the pesticides. Even they often, that’s not the food they want to eat.

Dave Chapman 23:48
They won’t talk about that, but it’s interesting that a lot of the wealthiest people in America are very careful about what they eat. Even if they’re making their money off selling Fritos, they’re pretty careful about what they put in their own body.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 24:06
Yeah. I can really testify to that, because my first degree was in hotel food and beverage management. I came up to food from that direction. I was a caterer and a chef for many years before returning to Jamaica. I’ve cooked for very wealthy people over the years. There’s a whole organic garden that’s there. Different diets. Some of it, I love it, microbiota diets. They’re not eating that food, they’re just not.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 24:43
I think coming from that perspective, and you know, you know. To see it, and then just to see the mass production and the influence that food really has on people, is really amazing. Trying to explain that to folks is kind of interesting. We have a bunch of work to do to kind of get out of that dysfunction, but it is there. Yeah, they don’t eat that. I can 100% tell you that, because I’ve worked for many companies.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 25:13
Even when I had the restaurant, I would get invited. I had my catering company first, and then I had a restaurant, which we still do catering, and because we have a lot of ethnic food, we were invited into these different companies, private homes, and stuff. I made sure that the stuff that was coming in was clean.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 25:35
That’s one of the reasons, too, that for me, even returning to Jamaica, I was like, “Okay, I need to – it really was a personal thing – figure out how I can eat clean, or just organically, and or naturally,” whatever title. I just needed to make sure a lot of things that I was getting.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 25:54
In the US my herbalist doctor friend told me, he’s like, “You got a chance of living a longer life if you get out of this food system.” I was like, “Huh?” I knew it. But then when I came back, I saw a lot of things that were still being done traditionally and organically. I saw the growth of a lot of the processed foods and a lot of the chemicals also being there, and that was a really a shock to me.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 26:26
For me, the movement, from my perspective, or where I was living, came out of that, of like, “How do I get more people to plant?” I couldn’t plant everything in a good rotation, just like all the things I wanted. It was very intense. I said, “Let me see if I can teach some other people in our rural community some of these practices.”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 26:49
Not that many people from my community, John’s Town came, but other people across the island came for the first workshop. We did permaculture first to kind of give them the grounding of, like, “Let’s set this place up in a holistic way.” At least have a better way of setting up these systems. Then we would do the organic farming piece of it, trying to show them how they can go about doing some of the stuff without spraying up the place.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 27:15
That’s what started for me, really about self-interest, about, “How am I going to get some good food in this place?” Then that’s what the self-growth that you kind of see. Of course, partnering with JAM, Jamaica Organic Agriculture Movement, and doing a lot of this work.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 27:30
Then you saw maybe the other video with Chuck. I don’t know if you know Chuck Marsh or Tony Kleese. I don’t know if you’ve run into those. No, I don’t know them. They are not clients anymore. They kind of transitioned. But they were major folks in North Carolina that did a lot of work. Chuck did a lot of work in permaculture, because when Mollison came around, he was part of the first class that Mollison taught.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 27:56
Then Tony, coming from an organic standpoint, he did a lot of Carolina Farm Stewardship work, and was very influential, even with the NOP. I know that you interviewed Jim Riddle.

Dave Chapman 28:12
Yeah, right.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 28:13
There’s a whole team of guys and girls that came down through those guys to kind of help us look at the whole value chain of doing an organic movement, in terms of what we need to do with our information. We’re very much connected in that way. About 70 volunteers that came down and are still coming, that are still connected to us and stuff.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 28:39
We have some good people out there distributing, not just for Jamaica, but the actual region. Because whatever we tend to do in Jamaica, it spreads throughout the Caribbean. We have that influence, where whenever we’re doing the trainings, or whatever, they’re coming. We’re writing the handbook on the organic standards or policies.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 29:00
People are looking to us in the Caribbean for that body of work and the trainings that happen. It’s a good system. We just need to do more of it.

Dave Chapman 29:11
All right, Nicola. I want to hear about what you’re doing, what you hope to do, and what you think we can do. But first, I just want to go a little bit deeper into my understanding of the agricultural history of Jamaica. It has a big history of plantation crops, big mass export crops. What were those crops?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 29:34
It first started with, actually, two main crops: indigo and sugar cane. Those are the two things. Indigo, because at least in the UK, the thing that they have there was called woad, which would allow you to have that blue. Only royal people wore that blue.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 29:57
When they got to North Africa and realized that they also had that indigo plant, they wanted to grow that because, of course, everybody would want that blue, because it was something that was kind of restricted. They grew a lot of indigo, lots of money in the indigo. That’s why you have the blue jeans. They were able to produce enough indigo that you could just dye that fabric, and everyone would have access to that blue.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 30:25
That was one of the main things. A lot of people don’t know that, or even remember that. Then it moved into sugar cane, the sugar for the rum, sugar as well. Everybody wants to sweeten their teas for the UK. That was another crop that was a major influence.

Dave Chapman 30:46
Both of those were big export crops. I believe there was a sugar boycott in England. It was their way of opposing slavery. They said, “We won’t buy it,” which is a big deal for people to give up sugar, because if you’re putting sugar in your tea and then you don’t, you go, “I miss my sugar.” But it was a big deal that it was a big boycott, and it was pretty successful. It went on for a while. It was pretty successful.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 31:22
Then after sugar, there’s not much sugarcane being produced, and we’re actually importing sugar, which is a little crazy. We get bananas. We had some of the larger people shifting to bananas. Then they had NAFTA, so that knocked that out in the early 2000s. What is being exported now is…

Dave Chapman 31:51
I’m sorry, can I just ask? How did NAFTA hit Jamaica?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 32:00
A number of the sugar factories closed. There were still some main estates. But then a lot of people picked up on bananas. They had a special trading status with the UK to sell bananas into that market. Then, unfortunately, Dole and Chiquita, even though they had 90% or 95% of the entire banana market, they wanted the whole hub. They went through Clinton and the UK and wanted to break that special arrangement that they had.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 32:35
Because through the colonies, they’re like, “What are we going to do?” So they broke that. Because of that, all those banana plantations, not just in Jamaica, but throughout the Caribbean that had been planted with bananas – you’ll hear about the banana boat and the “Banana Boat Song,” all that stuff – was tied to that direct trade with the UK, with Cavendish bananas being planted and sold.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 32:57
For years, we used to have the banana boats would come in, pick up, and then go back to the UK. Because of that, Dole and Chiquita won, and they got rid of a lot of banana plantations, which, of course, put a lot of people here out of business.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 33:13
They gave some money, but the money was, of course, I would say, appropriated by the government. Not a lot of the things that were supposed to happen with that, in terms of retraining farmers, really didn’t play out. That’s when I came back into the system in Jamaica – when they were trying to liberalize that agricultural sector around bananas.

Dave Chapman 33:39
Can you explain, just for people because lots of people have no idea, how NAFTA worked? A lot of people don’t know what NAFTA is. What happened in Jamaica because of NAFTA?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 33:57
Because of NAFTA, they said that it needs to have a balanced playing field. Because of Jamaica having a special trading agreement with the UK, with England, around this particular agricultural product, Chiquita and Dole could not sell into the UK market. They couldn’t sell into the UK market because they had a special trading agreement with the Caribbean islands around this banana arrangement. They were kind of locked out of it.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 34:41
Through NAFTA, it forced us to open up this trade route. It’s a similar thing in Mexico to the US, opening up these corridors for people to be able to sell into.

Dave Chapman 34:48
Especially corn.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 34:49
Right, Everything would be opened up and then… But of course, these small islands will never be able to compete with these larger companies. Hence, people had to make the shift because they couldn’t fight them. If Jamaica is trying to fight Dole, it’s not going to happen.

Dave Chapman 35:08
Something that somebody explained to me that wasn’t obvious at first: it wasn’t that American corn growers could produce corn cheaper than Mexican corn growers. It was that the US corn growers were heavily subsidized by the government in all the ways we talk about: in research, in price supports, and in crop insurance.

Dave Chapman 35:33
They were guaranteed to make a living, and so when they sold their corn, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t actually a free market. It’s very hard to get to, isn’t it?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 35:33
It’s very hard. The island could not compete, and so they just had to…

Dave Chapman 35:53
What happened to agriculture in Jamaica when you lost the banana market to England?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 36:04
Exactly, it’s not just the agriculture market, but the people and the livelihoods, because people had depended on the whole sector for this particular crop. At least for that one cut, they could guarantee getting some resources in and paying these people. It really affected people. The place went into physical depression and mental depression, because people had no idea what the next thing they were going to do was, a livelihood issue. Trying to figure out what was the next market, what would they also end up doing?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 36:36
A lot of people in our region, which is, we had actually in the east, which is the parish of Virgin Islands in Jamaica, was where the largest banana plantations or estates were in that parish. Of course, it got really affected. All these people lost their jobs. I never really, to be honest, got shifted out of that.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 37:04
It’s interesting, now I’m hearing them coming back and saying that they want us to start growing banana again. I’m like, “What? After all of that?” To set all that industry back up again. It was really automated. They were really doing it, and then now to start, it’s like, “What are you talking about?”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 37:20
These things happen. Then the Cavendish, which is one of the bananas that has a particular disease now, it soon won’t be able to be grown. They have to come up with other varieties, which I think, if Jamaica thought about it, they would have shifted out of that main estate and gone to some of the other kinds of bananas, some of the fancier, more interesting ones, and shipped to the market.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 37:46
Now I think they’re looking at some of that, and even starting to do value-added products, like we do our banana chips. It could have pivoted and gone with other value-added products. We tend to be asked in these islands to do raw materials, then obviously it’s for export. They want that price point. But we’re trying to shift into more value-added products that not just can be exported to the US, but actually we have a whole region of people that we should be selling into.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 38:17
Because the US has the entire Caribbean and Central and South America to sell into. We often don’t think of ourselves as being a marketplace to consume these things, because it’s always been a focus for external extraction and sales. You want the foreign exchange, so you’re working to be able to send things overseas so you can get the foreign exchange, not understanding that everybody else is looking at you as a marketplace.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 38:44
You see that when you go into supermarkets. You see very clearly that this is really a market. I don’t think many other farmers think of it as that. I think now a few of them are shifting, because they can start taking things up the value chain and start selling into our market, and they’re looking at selling into the Caribbean and even South America. So very small, little incremental changes, but that’s what’s happening, I see.

Dave Chapman 39:13
In America, the majority of food is ultra-processed that people are eating. It’s from the middle of the supermarket, not from the edge: not from the dairy case, not from the vegetables, not from the meat, and not from the eggs. It’s all the Pringles and all of that stuff. Is that true in Jamaica as well?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 39:35
Actually, we’re really blessed for right now that it’s not. You do see some of the processed foods, but people are still very into eating their yams, their banana, and their cocoa. If you’re in a rural area, you probably know the person who brews your chicken, even though that whole poultry thing is a whole other conversation that we need to have. All that stuff is really coming from the US. The grain is coming from the US.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 40:05
All we get to do is just grow the chicken in six to eight weeks, and that’s it. But at least those chickens are being grown, and the people who have them, a lot of it is women who tend to take on this endeavor. At least they’re still feeding them some of the local products, like the coconut trash that they get from when they make their coconut oil, or they do their rice and peas.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 40:30
They’re giving them some healthy things. They’re giving them callaloo, or they’re giving them amaranth. They’re still feeding those birds something a little bit more natural. You find people are still wanting to have their fruits: the guavas, the soursop, and the strawberry. The fruits are still very seasonal, so they will more gravitate toward a traditional diet.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 40:55
But I see in Kingston, which is our capital city, where I see a lot of fast food chains like the KFCs and some of the other chains are coming in. People who normally would make a Sunday dinner, I see them lining up for KFC, which never used to happen. But we still love our breakfasts with our ackee and saltfish and our yellow yam or boiled banana. They’re still getting better nutrition from that.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 41:26
But I see it shifting, and I’m seeing the kids are getting all these little potato chip bags and all that kind of stuff, which is not good. We need to try to replace that with some healthier things. Hopefully, this is some of the work that we want to do in terms of our organic movement – to create some more healthy snacks for folks…

Dave Chapman 41:50
Let’s go to that, but one question first. There are kind of two general motivations pushing people to organic. One is to be healthy, and the other is to live on a healthy planet. Of course, it all comes down to health in the end, because if you’re living on a sick and degraded ecosystem, it’s not going to go well for you.

Dave Chapman 42:18
But a lot of people in America are thinking very literally, “Do I want to eat that potato because I think it might have pesticides in it,” or it might be nutritionally deficient because it was grown in a way that doesn’t enhance life in the soil. Other people are looking at it and thinking, “I want to do something that will help to address climate change, and I want clean water, and I want clean air.

Dave Chapman 42:49
I don’t want that CAFO. I’m not going to eat the meat anyway, but I don’t want that confinement livestock because I don’t want to get sick by having to breathe it.” I’m just curious, in Jamaica, in your young organic movement that is growing, is it clear that one of those is the force, or is it all…?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 43:09
Yeah, it’s really the health issue. It’s interesting, because when we’re at the farmers market, we can tell the people who the doctors have sent with the list. You see them walking around with the list, and I’m like, “All right,” and they tell me which doctor it is, and you see them come through, and I’m showing them this and this and this and that they can get. It’s really the health issue that’s pushing it.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 43:37
We have returning residents that come, and they have a lot of health issues that are coming from wherever, whether it’s the UK, Canada, or the US. That’s where the majority of people are. I’ll give you an example. It is interesting, because when I lived in Philadelphia and had a restaurant there, I would hear these stories at the counter where somebody would get diagnosed, where they’re given six months to live.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 44:05
They go home to Jamaica, and then they come back, and they go to the doctor and they can’t see where that cancer was. The doctors are like, “What did you do?” They went, they’re drinking coconut water, they’re eating cleaner foods, they’re getting all that stuff out of their system. They’re doing that detox. That’s what it is.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 44:22
The people that I see shifting are shifting because of health reasons, because they’re having all these kinds of things that we never normally have. Yes, we may have diabetes because of the amount of some stuff, but even with some of the sugars and stuff that we’re seeing now, that is what’s happening. The doctors are shifting, having that conversation, and they’re looking out for that. They’re coming to our spaces for that.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 44:48
We also have a lot of people that, as I said, are coming home, and they know about clean food. They’ve been given a prescription or something. They need to eat healthy, and they’re coming for that food. People are now waking up to the idea of what is happening with Bayer-Monsanto and the spread of glyphosate. Very slowly, people are realizing the amount of chemicals that are getting in, and trying to make that shift.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 45:15
It’s really the health. It is more health than, “Oh, let’s clean up this environment,” which is kind of interesting, because Jamaica’s major earning is really agritourism. Jamaica has painted the place as this beautiful, pristine beaches and all that stuff. They’ve done lots of studies, and what the tourist is asking for is locally grown and organic food when they come.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 45:41
They don’t understand that most of the food that they’re getting is actually imported into Jamaica. They have all those larger food service operators on a ship sending everything down. When they go into these hotels, they think they’re getting something that would be locally grown, and it isn’t. A very small percentage of that is. If they’re getting it, it’s all sprayed up.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 46:07
We’ve sold, in terms of the marketing of Jamaica as a very clean space, but if you look at the amount of pesticides and chemicals that we’re using on our food, it is that. Of course, that is leaching into the water, which is affecting all the coasts.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 46:23
They just did a study, University of the West Indies, Dr. Reid. Their study says they found 40 different pesticide residues in a group of fish that’s not only around Jamaica, but also in the Caribbean when they’re doing the testing. All that residue now is running off of the farmers’ fields into the springs and the ocean. You’re selling this pristine product, and it’s supposed to be a luxury brand you’re trying to sell, when the whole place is really affected.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 46:55
I think we need to clean up our act, and it’s going to come through a lot more education. For me, I see a lot of the farm stores selling stuff; they don’t know sometimes that there’s a whole counterpart of things that they can actually sell that is going to be a lot cleaner. Are you looking for whitefly? Whatever it is that you’re looking for, there’s a whole world out there of other products that are not as harmful.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 46:49
That’s because the Ministry itself has not set the tone of that, creating that balance. I’m always very practical. If you’ve been trained a certain way, it’s going to take a bit of time to make that conversion. But you need to make the conversion, and you need to also have all the products and education to allow you to know that you’re going to be working these systems until we get to a point where we can move into that much more healthy system, where we’re working directly with the organic intelligence of the planet.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 46:49
But it’s going to take a hot second to get the disconnection to happen. Until then, give us some cleaner products to work with. That’s the direction I’d like to see them transition into.

Dave Chapman 48:08
Yeah, I love that, Nicola. Organic intelligence compared to artificial intelligence. I will not hear artificial intelligence again without thinking about organic intelligence. That’s just spot on. You are doing all kinds of work. One of the things you’re doing is you went back to school and you’re getting a PhD at Tuskegee University. What’s your PhD in?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 48:36
It is Integrated Public Policy.

Dave Chapman 48:39
Okay. We’re back to policy. We’ve got to change the policy, right?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 48:45
We have to change the policy because it’s going to influence so much of the work. It’s really for us. It has to be done because we have to do it from the ground up. It’s interesting. In terms of another connection from the US to Jamaica, we have a very robust Peace Corps volunteer presence that comes every year into the system. There’s environmental thrust, and they always are asked to set up school gardens. It’s a beautiful thing.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 49:18
But because the teachers are taught to look through the lens of nature to teach anything, it becomes like, “Oh, why are they making us do this thing?” Again, it’s another disconnection for the children to not understand the environment that they live in.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 49:37
Yeah, really throughout, if you disconnect them from the environment and nature, then you can sell them all kinds of stuff. You can sell anything. It’s so important to integrate education in terms of we live on this planet, and that we are not just tourists; we’re really divinely connected to everything that’s on this planet.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 50:00
If we can start teaching and integrating from the teachers’ colleges all the way into K through 12 for us, and also in all the agricultural schools, we have to shift the policy because it’s been a policy of extraction farming that’s been going on, and a disconnection. It is just about, like, raping the planet.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 50:24
It’s about all those practices that happen from Columbus land, and it has always been an extractive system. It’s not about any kind of ecological thing. It’s always about what is the most I can get and squeeze out of this system. That’s what’s left.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 50:44
We’re seeing it on our soils now. We’re really seeing it after all these decades of doing that kind of extraction. Now you start to see where, obviously, with synthetic fertilizer, your yields are going to be much lower, and you want to open up more and more land space to farm. We’re seeing it now in Jamaica, and so we have to really make a change. To do that, it really is going to take a hot second. I’m very realistic, and this is not going to happen overnight.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 51:17
But we have to start putting the policy in place so that they have something else to lean on. If we don’t show anything else, then they’re going to keep saying, “Oh, it can’t work.” We have to now create and integrate an alternative system to allow them to say that you have a choice.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 51:34
If you want to be on the planet, you want to see these soils, you want to keep your luxury brand in terms of the tourism sector, you better start making these shifts, because if not, you won’t have anything to really sell on so many different levels, whether it’s food products or a lifestyle.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 51:56
I think that that’s the kind of work that I’m really interested in, making that shift across the agricultural sector so that we can start making that reconnection and start creating healthier food for ourselves and the next generation.

Dave Chapman 52:11
It feels, talking to you, like maybe Jamaica organic is at a tipping point, and with just a little bit of energy, there’s a lot of receptivity. People are ready to go. Is that how you feel?

Nicola Shirley Phillips 52:28
I really do feel that way. I really have to give credit to so many people who really came before me, whether through the members of Jamaica Organic Agriculture Movement, also a lot of the Rastas who came and are still there doing that good work. A lot of the musicians. They eat Ital, they clean up. Even though it’s a little dark in the Caribbean, really, in the world, we have an influence, and we’ve influenced a lot of things. I think that we should continue to do that work in terms of influencing some right consciousness that can happen.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 53:08
I think through the music, a lot of people love Bob Marley or any of those people. They always had something about a kind of liberty. We say liberty in Jamaica, the way we want to live. It’s definitely nature based. We need to always remind people of that.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 53:26
When people are coming to Jamaica, it’s really not just about sun and fun, but it is a cleaner lifestyle. If we want to do that and really promote it, we can. I think we’re at that point where we just need to start sharing that. That really is coming through trying to shift the educational framework so that we actually have people that…

Nicola Shirley Phillips 53:47
If we want to have an organic farm and get more people farming organic, we’re going to have to share that information to make them open up their eyes. For me, doing the permaculture courses that we’ve been doing here and organic farming courses, I have people that literally cry because they come to class and they’re like, “Why didn’t we know this before?”

Nicola Shirley Phillips 54:11
You don’t know the cycle of how the zones, the sectors of the sun work, and what rain and the whole thing. We haven’t been trained in that way. When you start to really sit back and look at what are we doing and why are we doing this, it makes people kind of wake up.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 54:29
I think there’s a movement afoot of making that shift for us. We just have to start to influence the policymakers and to start to integrate some of that other way of thinking to shift into that balance that we want to happen.

Dave Chapman 54:46
All right. Nicola, it’s very inspiring to talk with you. We should end soon, but I like to ask people if there’s anything that you want to say that hasn’t come up yet.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 55:05
One of the things that we’re doing is that we are at a point where the work that all those volunteers, we had 70 volunteers that came through that USAID program. That was the first time the US government ever let organic farmers and permaculture folks out of the state of the US and not said, “Oh, that’s not going to work. It’s not going to work.” We were able to show the evidence that people wanted to get this information.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 55:28
I’m really thankful for all the guys and gals that came down and really did that work, and all the local folks that did that work as well. We’re at a point now where we’ve had the farmers market. One of the things that we had when we designed the program with Chuck and Tony and those other guys and girls is that we wanted to be able to have more farmers markets around.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 55:57
We have the one farmers market in Kingston, and we’re in a process now of doing a distribution center to try to distribute products across the island, because people fly in and you may come and you want something clean. You call us, and then we want to be able to… We’re in a process now with the government trying to get that distribution center up.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 56:21
I’m going to do the plug. We do have a GoFundMe page, and we would really love some support. We have some money, but that project started in 2019. It’s 2026, and it hasn’t landed yet. It takes forever to get things done here, but I feel good about it, because I think once we do that, then we’ll be able to have more farmers add to that network of farmers. We’ve been doing this work. We’ve been training up farmers to be able to enter into that space.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 56:55
So just awareness, and also the awareness for people that are coming to Jamaica. When you come, you ask your hotel, where is this food coming from? Write a letter to the Ministry of Tourism like, “Is this food clean?” I want that asking campaign, because I think from that, if enough people start asking and start asking “Is this brand Jamaica clean?” we would get more farmers.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 57:26
It’s a shame that we have a 12-month growing season and we’re importing so much food. We need support for our farmers and asking them to grow more natural, more organic, and to really clean up our system. Because it doesn’t make sense to come and think you’re getting away from whatever, and then you stress your life and you pop yourself into a system where you’re not supporting the ecosystem to be healthy.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 57:54
I feel that if we could start asking those questions every time you come, think about Jamaica. You come into not just Jamaica, but these islands. What is the legacy that you’re leaving behind? Are you encouraging them to do these bad practices of farming because you’re eating it? You might knowingly eat clean in the US, and you’re putting yourself into a disadvantaged state by eating all this chemical when you come to Jamaica, because it’s just on a buffet.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 58:20
I want us to start asking those questions. I think from that questioning, then the leadership will wake up and say, “Oh, wait a second.” They don’t want to affect their bottom line, and so they will start encouraging more education, more farmers, more people moving into that direction. We would actually clean up this island, and also influence the rest of the Caribbean as well.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 58:45
If anything that I could ask for, that’s the biggest thing that I could ask for, is that vote with your dollar, ask the question. But I think the same thing the US did, we kept asking where is this clean food. We should do the same here.

Dave Chapman 59:03
Another amazing benefit is that when they’re buying that good local food, the money stays in Jamaica. It builds the economy. It starts to become a virtuous cycle. When you’re buying the food and the money goes to LA, or wherever, it’s more extraction.

Dave Chapman 59:24
More extraction, right.

Dave Chapman 59:29
Okay, Nicola, thank you so much. This is really a pleasure.

Nicola Shirley Phillips 59:35
Thank you.