If it doesn’t break your heart…
This is another excerpt, appropriate I think, considering all the talk about victimization and terrorism. [Footnotes in brackets.]
Two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I sat in a dark Manhattan theater listening to a woman sob quietly in the seat next to mine. She wasn’t crying over the rubbled skyscrapers that used to stand just 20 blocks from here. Instead, it was the words of a Jamaican dairy farmer that had so deeply affected her. On the screen in front of us, Stephanie Black’s documentary Life and Debt told the story of Jamaica’s economic devastation under the policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The film is a powerful and eloquently made exposition of the kind of globalization that is excluded from Thomas Friedman’s Flat World thesis. In Life and Debt, we see the inner workings of a supposedly independent system of advisory and banking bodies which prey on weak developing nations in order to further the goals of their First World backers.
Perhaps the most strikingly unfair and tragic part of the film comes during an explanation of trade liberalization rules imposed on Jamaican dairy farmers during the Clinton era. While farmers in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union were allowed to continue heavily subsidizing their milk industry, the Jamaicans were forced to eliminate their own subsidies and reduce tariffs on foreign milk products. The result was that imports of powdered milk cost less than the Jamaican fresh milk supply. In a poor country where people can barely afford to feed their families, the powdered milk captured the market, forcing the Jamaican farmers to slaughter their cows and dump millions of dollars of unpasteurized milk.
When Life and Debt shows Stanley Fischer, Deputy Director of the IMF, being asked why Jamaica was forced to abandon it’s own trade barriers, he replies: “The reason is that Jamaica is a very small country. It’s not a country that could thrive by producing only for itself. We believe very firmly that countries are going to grow better if they’re integrated into the world economy and that means reducing tariffs. It needed to allow its importers and its people, access to goods from around the world rather than have them rely on this little,” Fisher holds back a laugh, “little economy.”
In the end it’s the Jamaican farmers, standing in their fields and factories, who sound the most honest. One man, speaking in the familiar island accent of Bob Marley, explains, “they told us you have to compete with us on a level playing field. Well, that is all double talk. In certain areas, the Americans subsidize their exported milk powder by 137%. Now nobody can compete with that.”
Another brings it all down to the bottom line. “The end of day result will be that we will have no national food security and that when milk powder finds its real cost, where there are no subsidies in Europe and North America, it will be more expensive than the milk we currently produce. What do we do in the meanwhile? We go out of business.”
Of course it wasn’t just the milk industry that was targeted. The same fate has come to local potato, onion, ginger, and carrot farmer, many of whom, after generations of working their land, have had to find new jobs. Suddenly, Samir Amin’s radical hypothesis of 3 billion subsistence farmers being forced to abandon their crops and head to the cities for work doesn’t sound so hypothetical. The only thing standing between these forces of globalization – which are not part of the Flat World – and small developing nations are the leaders who govern them. And even when they are not the corrupt, larcenous types that the World Bank has historically been happy to deal with, so often there is simply no other choice for a government that sees its economy failing.
Michael Manley, the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, was faced with exactly this situation when the 1973 world oil crisis nearly crashed his national economy. Despite having campaigned on an anti-IMF platform in 1976, one year later he was forced to sign an IMF deal, an act he describes as “one of the bitter, traumatic experiences of my public life.”
[At one point, Manley remembers, he attempted to bolster his failing agricultural sector by giving farmers loans at 10 per cent interest. But the IMF would not allow it. Manley traveled twice to Washington to protest the policy, saying “it is wrong economic policy, it is wrong socially! It is wrong to say that we must force the farmers to pay that rate of interest or you won’t lend us the money. And I remember saying, ‘which of you will face an American farmer and tell him that to borrow something for his farm, he’d have to pay 23 per cent? I said they’d run you out of the White House and out of Congress.’ Oh, they said, ‘that’s their business, we’re dealing with your business.’”]
Today, Jamaica is still saddled with debt, one half of every tax dollar goes to pay off the interest on their loans. The cities are plagued with crime and the security industry is one of the fastest growing sectors. Near the end of the film, a confidential World Bank memorandum evaluating the success of the reforms confirms that after twenty-five years, “these loans achieved neither growth nor poverty reduction.”
Walking out of the theater I heard one man say to his female companion, “if it doesn’t break your heart, then you don’t have one.” But all I could think about was that if some of those Jamaicans had access to the kind of money that Islamic militants do, they would have been just as driven to fly 747’s into any building called the World Trade Center. It is precisely this side of “world trade” – which remains beyond the understanding of average Americans – that provides the foundation for the alternate vision of globalization presented by “radicals” like Samir Amin. It is precisely these austere programs of “structural adjustment” imposed on nations like Jamaica that not only pushed them further from financial autonomy by crippling them with unmanageable debt, but also placed them in a new kind of dependence that reeked of the same kind of racism as that which dominated the colonial era.
As Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity remarked in Eugene Jarecki’s award-winning film Why We Fight, “It’s basically economic colonialism. No one uses the colonialism word, but instead of just taking over the countries, we have a better way. We just go in and have free markets. Whether we are trying to sell our products to their citizens or mine their resources, we need to be in that country for some reason and therefore we’re going to talk about free markets and free trade. But what’s really going on is we want our countries to get rich in your country.”
[Another quote from Charles Lewis in Why We Fight : “we have a process that has a seamlessness, where the corporate interests that stand to benefit are so intertwined and interwoven with the political forces that the financial elites and the political elites have become the same people.”]