Central Eleuthera

When Eleuthera was divided into three districts in 1996, Central got the administration and the agriculture—the middle segment that produces rather than processes. Governor's Harbour, the administrative capital, sits at the island's center point not by accident but by geometry. In a territory 110 miles long and one mile wide, putting the capital anywhere else would create impossible travel times. The hilly interior that makes the north too rugged for farming and the south too flat provides Central Eleuthera's defining characteristic: arable land.

Pineapples made this district matter. By the 1950s, Eleuthera supplied 80% of the pineapples consumed in the United States, with most cultivation concentrated in Central's Gregory Town area. The industry collapsed when shipping costs and economies of scale shifted production to Hawaii and Central America. By 2024, only fifteen active pineapple farmers remained, most over age 55, producing 10,000-15,000 pineapples per acre—a fraction of industrial-scale operations. The government allocated $2.5 million to revive production, partnering with Costa Rican experts who achieve yields five times higher per acre. But this isn't just about agricultural technique—it's about whether small-scale farming can compete with import economics.

The revival faces the same challenge that killed the industry the first time: Eleuthera is 110 miles from everywhere that matters. Shipping fresh produce from an island with irregular freight service to price-competitive markets means your pineapples cost more and arrive later than Costa Rica's. The economic logic that made Eleuthera's pineapple industry viable in the 1950s—proximity to U.S. markets, limited competition—reversed completely by the 1970s when air freight and container shipping made distance less relevant than scale.

Yet young farmers are returning, frustrated with expensive pesticide-laden imports. They're not competing on volume but on local consumption—supplying Eleuthera's tourism sector and Nassau's premium markets where "Eleuthera pineapple" carries heritage cachet. The annual Gregory Town Pineapple Festival celebrates this agricultural identity even as the industry represents a vanishing economic base. Central Eleuthera produces about 150,000 pineapples annually across all farmers—roughly what a single industrial farm produces in a week.

Governor's Harbour provides the administrative glue that binds the three districts, hosting the Eleuthera Business Outlook conference and coordinating development across the island's 110-mile length. This centralization creates inefficiency—a resident of North Eleuthera dealing with government paperwork faces a 35-mile journey—but the alternative of duplicating administration in each district proved more expensive than the inconvenience.

By 2026, Central Eleuthera faces a question about its middle position: Is being the administrative and agricultural center enough when North processes the tourists and South hosts the mega-resorts? The district's pineapple revival is less about export markets than about identity—maintaining the agricultural character that distinguishes Central from its tourism-dependent neighbors. Sometimes the middle segment's job is simply to remember what the organism used to be.