THE HURRICANE THAT VENGEFUL CARIB-
bean deity whom no one can influence, much less
control, and whose destructive power is unmatched is
an appropriate metaphor for the role the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for
International Development have played in what they
regard as their waterfront property.
While the West celebrates its supposed victory over
socialism and the broken-down economies it spawned, in
the small nations of the Caribbean, free-market capitalism
is driving down living standards, undermining food self- sufficiency and forcing thousands to emigrate. In this
Report, Kathy McAfee, a researcher specializing in debt,
hunger and economic issues, examines the ideology of the
authors of this unnatural disaster, and its dogmatic appli-
cation in three islands of the English-speaking Caribbean:
Jamaica, Grenada and Dominica.
These countries have become debt peons. At the insis-
tence of multilateral lending agencies and development
specialists, they have subsidized foreigners to fell forests,
mine mountains, plow under food crops and build low-
wage sweatshops all to help pay off their debts. But the
competitive rush to export their resources has, not inci-
dentally, pushed commodity prices down, and they have only fallen further into debt. Nationalism has been crushed
by economic warfare and covert action (Jamaica) and by
outright invasion (Grenada), leaving the neocolonial elites
who control the region’s governments and whose power
depends on the influx of funds from the IMF, World Bank
and AID free to cooperate in transforming the islands
into an investors’ paradise.
Kathy McAfee argues that ‘structural adjustment,” the catch-phrase for the latest version of the market-
driven private-sector-led development model, is in es-
sence a “recolonization” of the Caribbean by foreign
capital. Structural adjustment is based on two notions: that poor nations can work their way out of debt by
providing even more cheap labor and raw materials to the
industrialized nations; and that the private sector should
determine how a society’s resources are used. The first is
an old story, dusted off and modernized to justify the
continued removal of the region’s resources. It has the
added effect of placing Caribbean nations in competition
to undersell each other’s exports, thus derailing efforts at
regional integration. The second is equally convenient for
justifying foreign control, since the “private sector” really amounts to foreign investors.
T
HE DIRECTORS OF THE IMF ARE NOT CHO-
sen by popular vote. No poor nation has any say in
formulating the policies of the World Bank. No one elects
the AID brass. Yet this financial elite easily the most
powerful group of people in the world decides the
destiny of millions. With all their talk of freedom and
democracy, their grand strategy for “development” comes down to the exploitation of natural and human resources
to benefit the wealthy implemented with an arrogance
that borders on the criminal.
An alternative model, based on food self-sufficiency,
regional integration and the use of local resources to meet
local needs, is scoffed at by the brokers of development
aid, despite successful experiments and positive feasibil- ity studies. With the Caribbean’s destiny in the hands of
foreign masters, development to benefit the region’s
people is an uphill struggle waged only by women’s
groups, small cooperatives and nongovernmental organi- zations.
“Our task is to widen people’s view of what is pos-
sible, and to expand our nations’ visions of themselves,” says Atherton Martin, a development activist from
Dominica. “The role of AID and the World Bank is just
the opposite: to convince us if we need a factory, we must
pay a foreign company to build it; if we need flour, we
must import it. That philosophy is what keeps us in debt
and. ..our governments vacillat[ing] between the practical
necessity of developing our own resources, and blind
allegiance to the ideology of private enterprise.”
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