bob, back at the beginning of march i read a review of a movie called "Life and Debt". i had considered posting here about it because the similarities to the situation in RD could not be ignored, but i suspected that it would not be properly appreciated.
just to summarize it is about the effect that globalization, IMF and World Bank involvement, as well as US manipulation of the WTO, has had on the Jamaican economy over the past 30 years. needless to say it does not paint a rosy picture for any 'third world' economy.
and, for those people who need to know, stephanie black (the creator of the film) is an American.
check out the links below also.
Mar. 29, 01:00 EDT
How IMF aid sank the Jamaican economy
Jennifer, Wells
SOMETHING TO DO this weekend.
Haul thy carcass over to the Carlton Cinema and spend 86 minutes watching Stephanie Black's Life And Debt.
No, it wasn't an Oscar contender and no, it won't be hosting the hundreds who will surely wake up this morning thinking, "Gee, I wonder what Halle Berry looks like beneath that garnet-coloured gossamer dress." Time to see Monster's Ball.
Rather, Life And Debt is one of those documentaries that reminds us how true life can weave as distressing a narrative as any old fiction dreamed up by Hollywood.
The place-line: Jamaica. The story line: the 30-year decline of the post-independence Caribbean island aided and abetted by the likes of the International Monetary Fund.
Yup, this is a movie with an agenda, and if you think the IMF should not be shellacked for the "assistance" it has provided to developing countries like Jamaica you'd best not go. Black's view is that neither the IMF, nor the World Bank, nor the United States with its complaints to the World Trade Organization over Jamaica's banana exports have done the country any favours.
Michael Manley, the former Jamaican prime minister, is the story's heart, captured by Black in his waning days before he succumbed to cancer. His beautifully rounded vowels lofting into the air, Manley recalls getting into bed with the IMF in the first place — "One of the bitter, traumatic experiences of my life." Manley's filmic counterpoint is provided by IMF deputy managing director Stanley Fischer, who once gave a speech in which he extolled Article IV of the IMF's charter, which pledges to foster "orderly economic growth with reasonable price stability."
That's nowhere close to Jamaica's experience. The country, strapped for cash and spurned by the private banking community, reached out to the IMF for hundreds of millions of dollars in loans only to fail to meet the fund's repayment requirements. Manley blames the tearing down of trade barriers, the resulting tide of imports and the ultimate collapse of much of the country's economic base.
The dairy industry is one. Swamped by the influx of low-priced American milk powder, which the film charges was subsidized at home at rates in excess of 100 per cent, Jamaican dairy farmers found themselves stuck with cows to be milked, but no market. The industry was destroyed, the cows shipped to the slaughterhouse. Fischer's assertion that countries "grow better" when integrated into the world economy didn't wash with the dairy producers, or the potato farmers who could only helplessly watch as poundage of cheaper spuds from Idaho — not to mention the fertilizer and the potato seed — landed with a thud in the open-air markets.
McDonald's arrived, as you would expect, and tens of millions of dollars were spent upgrading a meat processing plant in anticipation. But McDonald's wouldn't take the island product.
The banana farmers started laying off workers 'round about the time the United States launched a complaint with the World Trade Organization. The tariff-free guaranteed market that tied Jamaica to the European Union was, charged the United States, unconstitutional and discriminatory. Not that Jamaican bananas had anything to do with the U.S. banana market, which is serviced exclusively by Latin America. Jamaica's arrangement with the EU was meant to help lift the country out of what Manley calls "that old colonial crisis of finance." The U.S. complaint merely served to advance the world market interests of the likes of Dole and Del Monte.
The remedy, or someone's idea of a remedy, arrived in the creation of "free zones," prefab manufacturing plants where thousands of Jamaicans signed on to sew up shirts with such labels as Tommy Hilfiger and Brooks Brothers. Every piece that goes into the assembly is U.S. made, right down to the thread, and the product, of course, is quickly shipped to the United States by the container load. The jobs are low-wage, but apparently not low enough for the manufacturers, who started moving assembly to even cheaper sewing bunkers in such locales as Mexico. Such is the face of free trade in Kingston.
Black paces her economic odyssey with music from the Marleys (Ziggy and Bob) and Peter Tosh, which is pleasing, though her interweaving of stereotypically beer guzzling tourists is wearying. And Manley does appear too saintly. His reaching out to fugitive financier Marc Rich (the same Marc Rich pardoned by former U.S. president Bill Clinton) back in '89 for a $50 million "cash advance" is one episode that could have illuminated how desperate the prime minister grew in his search for funds.
That's picking a nit. Ultimately, the IMF loans neither aided Jamaica's economic growth nor its poverty reduction. The picture of milk flowing in the streets tells the whole story in a shot. Catch it if you can.
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www.pbs.org/pov/lifeanddebt
www.lifeanddebt.org/about.html
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