Globalization for Dummies

Most tourists see Jamaica as a playground of multi-blue skies and seas, beckoning beaches and postcard sunsets; a place where visitors can participate in beer-chugging contests and learn new dances. But most locals live in a far-removed world of rising unemployment and crime, and restricted health care and education services. So it goes in Life and Debt, a documentary by producer-director Stephanie Black that fingers globalization and such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for decimating the island’s agriculture and industry infrastructure, and replacing colonialism and empty government coffers with economic bondage.

Black pieces together a sort of “Globalization For Dummies” that identifies economic policies supposed to benefit the Jamaican populace and then builds a case that they do not. The film simplifies but does not trivialize complex subject matter as it introduces us to the “mechanism of debt” and a “new world order of trade” perpetuated by such groups as the IMF, World Trade Organization, Inter-American Development Fund and Group of Seven (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States). Black makes it easier to understand the financial superstructures, ideologies and day-to-day realities that impact Jamaica than it is to balance your checkbook. Her analysis is debatable but very fluidly explores the social and moral costs attached to the aggressive tentacles of Big Business.

Life and Debt is not really entertaining in the literal Cineplex sense of the word. It is provocative and highly resonant, and informative without being dry or terminally academic. The voice-over narration is adapted from Jamaica Kincaid’s 1987 nonfiction book A Small Place (which dissects life on Antigua). It laces us up in tourist shoes (“If you come to Jamaica as a tourist this is what you will see.”), then escorts us behind the tropical beauty and façades of encouraged hedonism into a land that is convulsing from growing pains and financial crisis.

“When you sit down to eat your delicious meal,” we are told, “it’s better that you don’t know that most of what you are eating came off a ship from Miami.” There is a world of something in this. That world, we are soon shown, is a Catch-22 in which the international institutions positioned to help Jamaica become self-sustaining actually plunge the country into deeper poverty and unrest. Loans for internal improvement include stipulations that Jamaica reduce trade barriers for foreign products and devalue its currency to encourage foreign investment. This approach, according to evidence here, has fattened a few people at the expense of an entire culture.

These issues are addressed eloquently in interviews with Jamaican farmers and workers. These people want to know how overseas produce can cost less than locally grown fruits and vegetables. They want to know why they must dump fresh milk and butcher surplus livestock while powdered milk cheapened by American subsidies gluts the market. Their integration into the world economy, once a production issue of machete versus machine, is now driven by conditional short-term loans that choke long-term development. Politicians, banking officials and three Rasta elders also share their comments.

Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte monopolize the U.S. banana trade, making the once Green Gold of Jamaica a risky income source. America, overwhelmed by demands for the white meat of chickens, dumps dark meat into the country, crippling the local poultry trade. Kingston Free Zones, a result of a 1980s Caribbean-based initiative supporting cheap manufacturing and assembly, exploit local laborers. And the plea from onion farmer to beef rancher to garment sewer is the same: “Give us back our market.”

Most of Life and Debt was shot in 1998 but its issues remain in today’s headlines. IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff recently accused Nobel-winning economist Joe Stiglitz of “slander, self-aggrandizement and intellectual vanity” for alleged cheap shots in Stiglitz’s best-selling new book, Globalization and Its Discontents. Stiglitz says that the IMF worsens recessions and poverty by demanding that crisis-torn countries implement budget cuts and higher interest rates to restore market calm. Gee. Is there an echo in the room?