Saturday Market Day, and the Caribbean Economy You Cannot See

The region's oldest marketplace opens before dawn and closes by noon, moves in cash, and never files a return. It is also where a surprising share of the food actually moves.

Saturday market is the Caribbean's oldest continuous business, older than the banks and most of the states. In Castries, Kingstown, St George's and Roseau, the stalls fill before six, the vendors are overwhelmingly women, and the ground provisions, the yams and dasheen and green figs, come down from the hills the day before.

It is an informal economy that formal statistics barely register, yet it feeds the towns and puts cash directly into rural hands with no intermediary. The market woman is a distributor, a credit provider and a price-setter, and her ledger lives in her head.

Governments have long promised to modernize the markets, and some have, with roofs and stalls and cold storage. The better projects understood that the market is a social system as much as a retail one. The worse ones built a clean building the vendors would not use, because a market is made by who stands next to whom, not by the architecture.