ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with recommendations for the restructuring and revitalization of the agricultural sector. These recommendations emphasize the need to decentralize economic planning and programs, to involve rural communities and rural workers’ associations and to design policies and programs in rural areas that are labor intensive and economically diversified. The chapter considers the experiences of farmers and agricultural workers in specific rural communities. It focuses on communities that are characterized by large-scale outmigration to the United States. Contrary to conventional wisdom, as well as early ethnographic accounts of Dominican emigration, the immigrant population in the United States is neither predominantly rural nor from the ranks of the chronically unemployed or underemployed. The most positive findings come from the community of Licey al Medio where emigration was associated with increased agricultural production. The small body of studies on agricultural migrant communities increases our understanding of emigration’s local impacts.
