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1
50 YEARS OF IN-DEPENDENCE IN JAMAICA: REFLECTIONS
Norman Girvan
Delivered at the SALISES 50-50 Conference, ‘Critical Reflections in a Time of
Uncertainty’, Kingston, 22 August 2012
I thank Brian Meeks, Mikey Witter and the rest of the SALISES team for inviting me to speak at
this Conference. Apart from the importance of the subject matter, there is personal significance
for me in that I have been associated with the ISER/SALISES from my student days at Mona in
1959—1962 and subsequently in a variety of capacities. I have fond memories of many lively
exchanges over the years and of luminaries who passed through its portals, many of whom are no
longer with us; like Lloyd Braithwaite, MG Smith, Lloyd Best, Archie Singham, George
Beckford, Carl Stone and many others.
At the time that Jamaica became independent I had just turned 21—in those days, “the age of
majority”-- and I had just graduated from the UWI with a degree in Economics. It was a natural
for me, and for many others of my generation, that our life vocation would be to use our
professional training in the project of nation building. In the case of my cohort, it was tinged
with regret at the collapse of the project for collective West Indian nationhood. Together with
others including Orlando Patterson and Walter Rodney, we were part of a group known as The
West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues, which discussed the problems of colonialism
in its economic, sociological and political dimensions; and the characteristics of an independent
West Indian nation that would eradicate these problems and transform the society. We always
saw our respective territories countries as variants of a common West Indian condition; and there
was never any doubt that these issues had to be tackled collectively. I like to say that I entered
2
Mona as Jamaican nationalist and left as a Caribbean regionalist, and that the one melds
seamlessly into the other and that I believe that those who see a contradiction between the two
are either unaware of our history or choose to ignore it.
The disappointment we felt was not only due to the break-up of the Federation, but even more so
at what we perceived to be the neo-colonial character of the ‘Independence Pact’, represented by
a Constitution that preserved the British Monarch as the Jamaican Head of State, and entrenched
property rights. Orlando Patterson summed up the outrage in a famous editorial published in the
student magazine, The Pelican, which began with the declamation “We have been betrayed”,
and ended with a passionate cri de Coeur directed at our political leaders, “Oh you greedy cabal,
you fools, you cannot lead the people to independence wearing a waistcoat, you have been
brainwashed in the rank urine of British culture”1.
Looking back, it is clear that our cohort over-estimated the possibility for a radical
transformation, and under-estimated the forces of continuity, in societies that are after all not
new, but hundreds of years old, with deeply ingrained cultural values, patterns of behavior, class
and colour stratification, economic structures, and political habits; and that we failed to take
account of the role of emerging national elites in being content to acquire a limited degree of
autonomy within an existing system of internal and international hierarchical structures. Trevor
Munroe in his analysis of the politics of constitutional decolonisation2, showed that Jamaica’s
political class and the departing British had colluded in a transfer of formal political authority to
an institutionalised party duopoly of power; with the essentials of the system remaining intact;
and entrenched in a constitution that was virtually impossible to change without the agreement of
the two political parties.
1 I am quoting from memory from The Pelican June 1962 Editorial written by Orlando Patterson, as a student. 2 Trevor Munroe, The Politics of Constitutional Decolonisation in Jamaica. I.S.E.R.
3
But for such a system to serve its purpose of delivering political stability, the population must be
made to believe that it is, in fact, what it is not. Louis Lindsay’s analysis of the Myth of
Independence3
and the ‘politics of symbolic manipulation’, drawing on Fanon, argued
persuasively that flag independence and five-yearly elections had become symbols to be
manipulated to give the population the illusion that it had acquired genuine control over its own
affairs, and real participation in political decision-making. The more things change, the more
they remain the same; but the more things remain the same, the more they have to appear to
change. Later, Carl Stone squared the circle by showing that patronage and clientilism had
become part and parcel of the functioning of the Jamaican two-party political system4. In the
1980s he pointed to the insidious dangers of garrison politics, and warned that the tail would end
up of wagging the dog. This was some 20 years before Dudus. Former PM PJ Patterson said in a
moment of candour, that Jamaican politics consisted of ‘warring tribes vying for scarce
benefits’5.
Is it in any wonder that voter participation in elections has shown a secular decline to just about
one-half in the last election—the current administration holding office on the basis of less than
one-third of the qualified voters--and that in a poll taken in mid-2011 a significant majority (60
per cent) of respondents said they believed Jamaican would have been better off had it remained
a British colony6These statistics are a damning indictment of the state of Jamaican democracy
and of the results of the independence project in the popular mind.
My reflections will, hopefully, help to explain statistics of this kind and to complement the
insights of these scholars with an overview of the political economy, post-colonial. Not fifty
years, perhaps, of Independence; but fifty years In Dependence. Before I proceed however, I
have to say that I sense an air of unreality in much of what has been talked about at this
Conference; in an apparent failure to fully take into account that the wider world in which we
3 Louis Lindsay, The Myth of Independence, ISER Working Paper 1975; reprinted 1975 4 Carl Stone, Democracy and Clientilism in Jamaica. I.S.E.R.
5 Quoted by Cedric Wilson, Commentary: The Power and the Glory, Jamaica Gleaner, Sunday February 19, 2006.
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060219/letters/letters3.html 6 Jamaica Gleaner 28/06/2011; http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110628/lead/lead1.html
4
live, and to which the Caribbean is of course closely linked, is enmeshed in deep crisis of
multiple dimensions: a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis—rising inequality and
social exclusion—a political crisis—incapacity of existing national and international structures
to handle these crises—and an environmental crisis, in that the life support systems of our planet
are being exceeded on a number of critical thresholds. Behind all this is what many keen
observers believe to be a civilizational crisis; meaning that our present model of civilization,
based as it is on the unlimited and permanent accumulation of material wealth, is fundamentally
unsustainable. Obviously this is not in my remit, but may I respectfully suggest that any
discussion of the region’s development over the next fifty years must take this global context as
one of its principal points of departure.
In my overview of Jamaica’s post-colonial political economy I will move quickly over the 60s
and 70s—in reality, the period to 1976—but focus especially on the last 35 years—from 1977 to
the present.
Industrialisation by Invitation
At the time of Independence it was generally believed that the road to economic development led
through foreign investment—Industrialisation by invitation—so the role of foreign capital was
the chosen subject of my doctoral thesis. My main conclusion was that, while foreign investment
had driven rapid growth in the Jamaican economy in the 50s and 60s, the economy had not
undergone the kind of structural changes that would permit growth to be self-sustaining after the
end of the bauxite investment cycle. This was pretty much confirmed after 1972, when the
Jamaican economy entered a prolonged growth crisis. The structural changes that were lacking
included a significant rise in national savings linked to productive investment through the agency
of national entrepreneurship and indigenous technological effort; agricultural and industrial
diversification; and a development-supportive national financial system. I attributed this failure
partly to the role of foreign firms in the economy. These ideas were generally shared by my
5
generation of economists-- the New World Group and the Caribbean structuralists—with seminal
contributions on the Jamaican case made by Owen Jefferson and George Beckford.
Jamaica—the 1970s
In the first half of the 70s the Manley government implemented comprehensive and long overdue
social reforms in order to address the social deficit of the population which was a legacy of 300
years of colonial rule, slavery, and the plantation system. The state took control of much of the
commanding heights of the Jamaican economy and levied additional taxes on the bauxite
industry; and the government campaigned for a more just and equitable international system for
poor countries-- a New International Economic Order. The programme was derailed by the first
oil price shock, capital flight, disinvestment, by domestic and foreign opposition; and also by its
own internal errors and contradictions.
With its foreign reserves depleted, in 1977 Jamaica entered into what was to be the first of a
succession of adjustment programmes financed by the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-
American Development Bank and other Western donors. These loans were conditioned on the
adoption of neoliberal policy reforms of privatisation, liberalisation, and deregulation; and on the
privileging of market forces and of the role of the private sector . For 35 years of the 50-year
independence experience, therefore, Jamaican economic policy has been under the direct
supervision of Washington-based international financial institutions; or carried out within a
framework that they approve of, and is aimed at maintaining the confidence of donors and
investors.
One consequence of this is that successive Jamaican governments have surrendered many, if not
most, of the policy tools for the shaping of economic development which the state had acquired
in the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Among the most important were abolition of
the commodity marketing boards, elimination of state import trading, removal of import controls,
6
reduction and elimination of tariff protection for industry and agriculture, removal of price
controls, elimination of credit controls, financial liberalisation, floating of the exchange rate,
elimination of preferential interest rates for agricultural credit, cuts in support for agricultural
research and development, and abolition of progressive income taxes. Previous state
interventionism may well have been excessive, and at times even inefficient and corrupt. But I
believe that the abandonment of such policy instruments went too far; and I know for a fact that
some of this happened not because government officials were convinced that it would be good
for the economy, but because they were forced to do it by the International Financial Institutions.
The last IMF agreement, made in 2010, is a clear demonstration of the extent to which the
government of Jamaica has lost the ability to independently determine its own policies7. The
Letter of Intent and its Annexes outline 10 undertakings by the GoJ in the area of fiscal policy,
three in monetary policy; and over 40 actions of structural reform under various headings over
one to two fiscal years; including undertakings to change a number of existing laws and
regulations. There are also nine different quantitative performance criteria which it must observe.
On top of all this the government of Jamaica is obligated to make daily reports to the IMF on 13
items, weekly reports on 6 items; monthly reports on 22 items, and quarterly reports on 10 items.
It would be an interesting project for some research student to compare the powers exercised by
the IMF over Jamaica’s economic policy with those exercised by the British Governor and the
Colonial Office in London under Crown Colony rule. I am of course not referring to power in the
constitutional sense, but the real power exercised by the IMF by means of financial leverage and
its intrusion into a vast range of public policies.
Jamaica—economic retrogression in the age of neoliberalism
I am going to argue that the results from this 35-year neoliberal policy orientation have not only
fallen far short of what was promised; but also that they have been accompanied by changes in
7 International Monetary Fund; Jamaica: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding. December 23, 2010.
7
the nature of Jamaica’s economic life which are for the most part negative; and in some cases,
alarming. These results help to contextualise the voter apathy, the sense of powerlessness and the
noticeable tendency towards popular disillusionment with the independence project. I summarise
them under the rubric of nine inter-related processes; namely (1) economic stagnation, (2)
hollowing out of production, (3) tradification, (4), remittancisation (5) financialisation, (6)
informalisation, (7) criminalisation, (8) emigration, which I prefer to call human resource
decapitalisation, and (9) ) growth of indebtedness, which I call Debtifcation. Many of you will be
familiar with these developments, but perhaps as separate and disconnected processes.
Prolonged economic stagnation. For the 30 years from 1980 to 2010, Jamaica barely managed a
growth rate in its per capita income of 1 per cent per year; a growth performance that is below
that of key comparator groups of countries. In the last two decades the performance gap has
widened; in that since 1991 Jamaica’s per capita income growth has been less than one-third that
of Caribbean small countries and less than one-fourth that of developing countries of Latin
America and the Caribbean8.
Secondly, stagnation has been accompanied by the hollowing out of the productive base of the
economy; indeed it is largely the result of this hollowing out process. I define the productive
base as the three main goods producing sectors of agriculture, mining and manufacturing; and by
hollowing out I mean that the contribution to the economy of the three sectors has shrunk
drastically; to the point where their combined share in the GDP and in employment is about one-
half of what it was in the early 1980s9. Output has actually fallen in both mining and
manufacturing; and agriculture has had only marginal growth10
. The other side of the coin is that
as a society, we have become far more import-dependent in satisfying consumer needs;
consumer goods have doubled their share in total imports and food imports alone run at over $1
8 Data taken from World Development Indicators, The World Bank.
9 Data computed from STATIN, National Accounts
10 Hollowing out has ben shown by Dr Michael Witter in Agriculture, Then and Now and in manufacturing in Trade Liberalization: The Jamaican Experience. Available online.
8
billion, which is about three times the value of the exports of the agricultural sector11
. Of course
tourism has grown, but we need to bear in mind that the degree to which tourism is integrated
with the rest of the economy through backward linkages is debatable; and that tourism is
extremely vulnerable to environmental degradation, international market trends, and climate
change.
The third process, which is a consequence of the first two, is what I call the accelerated
tradification of the economy. By this I mean that trading in imported goods has become one of
the ‘growth activities’ to an even greater degree than before. It is difficult to support this
statistically, since the share of wholesale and retail trade in the GDP today is about the same as it
was in 1980. But what is striking is that employment in the distributive trades has more than
doubled; and now accounts for one person in five of the employed labour force12
.
Another notable change—the fourth on my list---is the process of financialisation of the
economy. Financialisation has been a feature of the global capitalist economy since the 1970s; in
Jamaica it has been boosted by the huge growth of the internal debt—a matter to which I shall
shortly return.
To set this in context we need to consider that in 1971, finance in the Jamaican GDP was about
one-tenth the combined share of the basic producing sectors; today, it is about two-thirds of that
combined share and exceeds each of them individually—in the case of mining and agriculture,
by a wide margin. Now this is important because fnancialisation is one of the mechanisms by
which resources are transferred from the ‘real economy’ to holders of financial assets; and it
correlates with the hollowing out of the goods producing sectors. Also, we see no evidence of the
financial services industry becoming a net earner of export income—to the contrary, it has a net
earnings deficit13
.
11 $1,025 M vs. $337 M. Includes beverages and tobacco. Source Economic and Social Survey Jamaica 2011, tables 6.3 and 6.4; pp. 6.7-6.8 12
Data from Michael Witter, Trade Liberalization: The Jamaican Experience, 2002; and STATIN Labour Force, Annual. 13 US $160 million (excess of outflows over inflows) , finance and insurance services, 2010. Source BOP 2010, BOJ
9
So how have people been surviving, responding, in the face of all this? This brings me to my
fifth process, informalisation of the Jamaican economy; the sixth, which is an extension,
criminalisation; and the seventh, emigration. The informal economy is believed to be around 40
per cent of the GDP14
. On criminalisation, you don’t want to go around collecting information on
activities like robbery, extortion, drug trafficking, gun smuggling, money laundering and white
collar crime—it could be hazardous to your health. A study by Dr Michael Witter study
concluded that in every single branch of the economy, informal activity and downright
criminality play a significant role15
. The Minister of Education is quoted in today’s Gleaner as
saying “ No longer do our young people feel that if you want money and be prosperous in
Jamaica that getting a good education is essential”. (Gleaner 22/08/12; p.A6; “We are in a
crisis!-Thwaites”).
Regarding emigration, I prefer to describe this as a form of decapitalisation—depletion of the
human resources of the country. Since the 1960s right up to the 2000s we have been losing
about one-third of our secondary school graduates and between 70 and 80 percent of our tertiary
level graduates16
. Clearly this is not a matter of neoliberal policies only; but I don’t believe that
neoliberal policies have helped; because the economy has stagnated, violent crime is endemic
and the social services are in poor shape.
The other side of this is that remittances by overseas Jamaicans have grown to become the
largest single source of foreign currency inflows for the Jamaican economy--more than earnings
from merchandise exports, more than foreign investment, more than loans, more than aid, and
more than tourism if you net out the direct leakage from tourist expenditure. So I speak of
remittancisation of the economy as the eighth process. I am not one of those who views this as a
good thing, or believes that these flows in any way compensate for the loss of human resources
14
Estimate by The Inter-American Development Bank. Information supplied by Dr Michael Witter. 15 Michael Witter article in Dennis Pantin (Ed.) Caribbean Economy: A Reader. P. 458. 16 Andrew Pienkos, Caribbean Labour Migration, 2006. Annex Table 1; for 1990 and 2000;
10
or for the government money spent on their education and training. I am aware of at least one
study which corroborates this17
.
I wish to suggest that the emigration—human resource decapitalisation—remittancisation circle
has a fourfold significance that is both social and economic in its dimensions. First, as an
indicator of the failure of the society to provide meaningful economic and social opportunities
for a substantial part of the educated population; second, as an indicator of the talent,
resourcefulness and energy of ordinary Jamaicans; third, as a source that is critical to sustaining
consumption levels in a large number of households and hence to maintaining the social fabric;
and fourth, as an indicator of the potential production that could be generated within Jamaica if
people had the opportunities here. No one knows the size of the Jamaican Diaspora economy;
but I have done a rough estimate myself which makes me believe that it could be as large as the
total GDP of the island of Jamaica itself18
. The true potential cost of emigration is this
production, and the contribution made by overseas Jamaicans in the recipient countries in all
walks of life, the leadership, in medicine, law, politics, academia, education, health, engineering,
business, information technology and many other fields.
I come now to the ninth process, the huge growth of Jamaica’s debt burden. Professor Kari
Levitt’s study showed that by1990 the servicing of the external debt was costing the Jamaican
economy over one-quarter of its annual output of goods and services19
. In the 1990s there was a
huge increase in the internal debt; due to the financial sector meltdown, the FINSAC bailouts
and high interest rates. At the root of this was the currency and financial deregulation of the early
1990s. This measure, carried out in a naïve belief in free market economics, was arguably the
greatest single policy mistake made in all of Jamaica’s 50-year post-colonial history.
17
Prachi Mishra, Emigration and the Brain Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean. 2006. IMF Working Paper, WP/06/25 18
Remittances are the equivalent of about 16 percent of the Jamaican GDP. Let’s suppose that on average, each
remittor sends home a quarter of his or her income; then the total income of overseas Jamaicans is the equivalent of 64 percent of the Jamaican GDP. If labour income is about two-thirds of value added, then the GDP generated by
Overseas Jamaicans would be about the same as the Jamaican GDP. 19 Kari Levitt, The Origins, Growth and Consequences of Jamaica’s External Debt, 1970-1990; in Kari Levitt, Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community, IRP, 2005.,p 111.
11
In a 1999 paper, I showed that Jamaica was caught in an internal debt trap, in which debt service
payments exceeded new borrowing, but the stock of debt continued to grow20
. The cost of
government debt servicing had grown from 45 to 113 per cent of government revenue and from
15 to 39 percent of the GDP. The government had paid out $70 billion more in interest and
amortisation than it had received in new loans, but the stock of government debt had increased
by $223 billion. I argued that the burden of the debt burden had become a drag on Jamaica’s
economic growth and human capital formation. I suggested that there should be negotiated
restructuring of the internal debt; with the savings allocated to investment in rebuilding the social
and economic infrastructure. This did not happen; and during the 2000s economic growth was
the lowest of the three decades since 1980s. By 2009 a debt default was threatened; and the IMF
virtually made debt restructuring a condition of its Stand-By agreement. But it seems the savings
from the Jamaica Debt Exchange were used mainly to reduce the fiscal deficit, rather than to
invest in rebuilding productive capacity. And it is now clear that the 2009 programme was
inadequate. A 2012 report on the Jamaican economy showed that “Jamaica remains one of the
most highly indebted countries in the world,. Jamaica’s large debt burden has displaced most
other public expenditures, taking up almost 50 per cent of total budgeted spending over the last
four fiscal years while health and education have been only around 20 per cent combined.”.21
I have a tenth process my list, which I call culturalisation; and it refers to the mushrooming of
cultural activity as sources of income and employment and as a source of foreign earnings. The
crucial point here is that is another indicator of the potential that originates in the creativity, the
resourcefulness and the talent of the mass of the Jamaican population; the potential that has so
recently, so joyously been shown by the extraordinary achievements of our athletes, in spite of
the limited money and resources we have, in spite of coming from one of the smallest countries
in the planet. As Professor Kari Levitt has written, development is a cultural process; it is rooted
20
Jamaica’s Internal Debt Trap: An Interpretation, 1999. Available at www.normangirvan.info 21 Jake Johnston and Juan A. Montecino, Update on the Jamaican Economy. Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Washington D.C. May 2012. Executive Summary.
12
in the culture and creative potential of a people, it comes from within22
. These things have
flourished, however; not for the most part because of economic policies but in spite of them.
The diversification dilemma
Apart from this last, the inter-connected processes I have described add up to an experience that I
call economic retrogression in the age of neoliberalism. I believe that once we see it in its
totality it becomes easier to understand why several announced plans for economic
diversification have had such modest results; plans like the National Industry Policy and those in
Vision 2030;. The overall policy framework isn’t supportive; in fact it is pointing investors in
other directions. Do we really expect that investing in agriculture and food production will be
attractive, when cheap subsidised food is freely imported; arable land is not available at low cost
to those who may want to farm it; praedial larceny is prevalent; bankers demand collateral that
you don’t have; you don’t know if your crop won’t be destroyed by floods or pests and even if it
isn’t, if you will be able to find a market for it? Or that entrepreneurs will flock into new export
businesses when it’s easier to invest in government paper, safer and more profitable to build
upper-class housing; and less risky to do import trading and fast food franchising; and hobbled
by high interest rates? Isn’t perfectly understandable that the best and the brightest of our young
people, for whom the professions of choice have been finance and IT, and far less so farming and
non-traditional exports? The thing to do was to get a business degree, preferably an MBA and
preferably in finance, and get a ‘good job’ in a leading financial institution! So what I am
suggesting is that diversification plans look very good on paper; but the overall environment of
fiscal, monetary and trade policies create a different reality on the ground, to which investors
respond.
22 Kari Levitt, Reclaiming Development.
13
Recovering policy independence
At the core of the experience I have described is the policy recolonisation of the Jamaican state
and the gutting of its capacity to influence economic life except for the most elementary tools of
the fiscal budget and central bank operations. One must go further, and ask whether, given the
nature of the ‘Independence Pact’, the system that was inherited was not programmed in a way
that caused it to revert to external patrons; once its reproduction was disrupted by political and
economic shocks of the kind that occurred in in the 70s and 80s. This external reversion went
beyond the securing of material and political support to a form of intellectual ‘recolonisation by
invitation’23
, manifested by an increasingly ready acceptance by policy elites of the diagnostic
and prescriptive frameworks handed down by those with the money and the power. However, the
system may now have entered a phase of more or less permanent crisis, whose most powerful
manifestations are the on-going fiscal crisis of the Jamaican state; and inability to staunch the
continued hemorrhage of the educated cadre.
One is tempted to compare the present historical conjuncture with the situation as it obtained in
the 1930s, a century after Emancipation. Emancipation had generated enormous expectations
within the population, which were soon frustrated by the persistence of the planter-colonial
order, the frustration being partially relieved by the internal and external migrations of the 19th
century. By the turn of the century this form of relief has been exhausted; but it took the internal
and international consequences of the capitalist crisis of the 1930s to effect a rupture in the
established order.
We cannot rule out the possibility of another rupture of this kind, as we are in the midst of a
prolonged world capitalist crisis similar to that of the 1930s, at a time when the national project
appears to have run its course. However, emigration continues to be the wild card in the pack: in
the 1930s, returning migrants swelled the ranks of the disaffected at home; today, it is different.
23
‘Recolonisation by Invitation’ (a variant of ‘Industrialisation by Invitation’) is a phrase invented by Michael Theodore in another context, referring to developments in legal education in Trinidad and Tobago. http://www.normangirvan.info/theodore-recolonisation-by-invitation/. ,
14
The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street seem to have had no traction in Jamaica, or for that
matter in the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean; and I would guess that one reason for this is
that the social strata that predominantly drive these protests elsewhere, have already left and are
leaving in large numbers. There is also no certainty as to what would be the ultimate result of a
rupture, or even a revolutionary upheaval; as history offers numerous examples of the operation
of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
If the ruling elites in this country are to have a chance of rescuing the national project however—
and in its broadest sense the ruling elites include the intelligentsia such as those attending this
Conference, including myself—then they—we—have some big responsibilities to shoulder. A
fundamental step is self-recognition that we ourselves are amongst the principal beneficiaries of
the current order, and that we will need to be prepared to give up many of our accumulated class
privileges in order to dismantle the deeply entrenched structures of social and economic
exclusion, to create a society based on equity and social justice, and to fully liberate the huge
creative potential that evidently resides in the mass of the Jamaican population.
Another need is to recover, nurture, foster and encourage the habit of what Lloyd Best called
Independent Thought. Reading the policy discourse in the Jamaican media, one sometimes gets
the feeling that elites are caught in a kind of neo-liberal time-warp. The mantra that the less
regulation the better; and that the private sector are by definition the good guys and the state are
the bad guys; has been blown away by the global financial crisis. Think of CLICO, Stanford,
Madoff, Enron and the rest; think of the huge cost to the Jamaican taxpayer of Air Jamaica after
privatisation; think of the egregious corruption on a massive scale on Wall Street costing
trillions of dollars and throwing millions of persons into poverty all over the world; of Iceland
after the banks were privatised and finance was liberalised. The idea that you can fix an economy
by draconian austerity has been disproved by Greece, Spain, the UK, by IMF programmes in
Eastern Europe and by the on-going Euro zone crisis. Internationally, the extreme form of
neoliberalism that seems to accepted here is under fire and in retreat.
15
Research undertaken by the United Nations Committee on Development Policy; for instance, on
development policies followed by dozens of countries since 1980; concluded that the
Washington consensus model ‘had not delivered its promised acceleration in growth’; and on
balance ‘seems to have been associated with reductions in growth and worsening income
distribution’; and that countries which did the best were those that liberalised selectively, mixing
orthodox and unorthodox policies’24
.
Recovering the intellectual and the regulatory capacity to undertake such selective policies must
be surely be a strategic objective of the Jamaican state. To this end, one immediate action could
be to impose a freeze on further incursions into the space of national policy making—known as ‘
policy space’ in the jargon. For example, the Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU gave
away far more policy space than was required by the rules of the WTO; and Jamaica is having
serious problems in its implementation. It is due for a comprehensive review in 2013 and this is
an opportunity to revisit it. We can resist making the same concessions in the Canadian FTA.
The same principle of enlarging national policy space might apply to the on-going IMF
negotiations.
Economists will recognise that what I am talking about here is the need for a developmental
state. There is an important caveat: this isn’t going to work unless the society has confidence in
the technical competence and the incorruptibility of state officials. There have to be muscular
mechanisms for transparency and accountability and transparency in policy making. That is one
of the lessons of the success of the developmental states of East Asia.
Regionalism and CARICOM
24
Frances Stewart, Do we need new development models? Impact of neo-liberal policies. Paper prepared for the United Nations Committee on Development Policy. 2011. Also see Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Milica Uvalic, Learning from the past: which of the past/current development models is best suited to deal with the ‘quadruple crisis’? DESA Working Paper No. 116; ST/ESA/2012/DWP/116. Available online.
16
In the final part of my reflections I want to say something about regionalism and linking it to the
strategic objective of the recovery of policy independence. 50-odd years ago CLR James said
that Federation was the only means by which the West Indies could take its place in the
community of modern nations. The Federation failed; but today Jamaica and other Caricom
states are experiencing the illusion of insular independence. I think CLR has been vindicated. I
am not advocating a new Federation, but I see the need for a much stronger Caricom, to
consolidate our collective identity as a Caribbean people and to cope more effectively with the
world of the 21st century; a world which is infinitely more complex, demanding and fast-
changing than half a century ago.
Trade preferences are on the way out, aid flows have been cut, the Caribbean doesn’t have the
strategic importance it used to have. There is a world food crisis, an energy crisis and an
environmental crisis. Transnational criminal organisations commanding huge resources have
pushed up our murder rates to be among the highest in the world. Demands on governments are
exploding while resources are shrinking and indebtedness has grown. In a recent paper, I spoke
of the looming possibility of a ‘perfect storm’ of intersecting developments that could end up
profoundly affecting the existence of Caribbean societies as we know them—‘existential
threats’25
. The silver lining on these clouds is that the reconfiguration of the global economy has
opened up new opportunities in trade, investment and tourism. Any idea that countries of our
size can individually mobilise the critical mass of resources and diplomatic clout is to deal with
these issues is, quite frankly, delusional. Much larger countries than ours are forming regional
blocs.
Caricom is the natural alliance bloc Jamaica; by history, size, culture and geography. George
Beckford used to say, the people of the Caribbean are already integrated; the only people who
don’t know it are the politicians. When Jamaica took 1-2-3 at the London Olympics, the whole
region stood up and cheered. When the Reggae Boys went to the Football World Cup, the whole
region was behind us. When the mighty West Indian Cricket team regularly vanquished all its
25 CLR James Memorial Lecture, http://www.normangirvan.info/girvan-clrjames-memorial-revised/
17
adversaries back in the day; who cared which island Viv Richards came from? Or Lara? Or
captain Lloyd? If Jamaica has a problem with exporting to Trinidad, there are ways to deal with
it.
In Beijing, Jamaica and some other Caricom countries have offices; each with a handful of
professionals; to service a vast country of 1.3 billion people. Surely it would be more effective to
pool these resources so that specialist expertise can be deployed in particular areas. There is a
mind-set of competitiveness that seems to prevail. At the Shanghai trade fair in 2010, there was
a Caricom house, with each country having its own booth; no coherence, no Caribbean brand. If
Chinese tourists are going to come all the way across the world to visit the Caribbean, why not
promote a Caribbean experience with multiple destinations?
There is a fear of a new Federation, of surrendering our sovereignty. I would make the
distinction between de jure sovereignty and de facto sovereignty. De jure sovereignty is a
question of the Constitution and the law; de facto sovereignty is the actual ability to make and
execute national policy independent of external constraints. As I see it, the issue for Jamaica and
other Caricom members is how to engineer an expansion of their de facto sovereignty by sharing
their de jure sovereignty in particular areas. In a paper which I helped to prepare along with
Havelock Brewster and others in 201126
; we proposed four areas for shared sovereignty: the
Common Market; external trade policy; regional security; and environment and climate change.
We proposed joint action in three sectors where tangible benefits could be realised: agriculture
and food security; maritime transport; and renewable energy production. I still believe these
proposals offer a way to rescue the regional project.
26 Re-Energising Caricom, http://www.normangirvan.info/re-energising-caricom-integration-prime-minister-tillman-thomas/
18
A Vision
I said earlier that I have never recognised any contradiction between being a Jamaican nationalist
and a Caribbean regionalist. I would like to share with you my vision for our Community of
Caribbean nations. You might say that it is utopian, but does not our national anthem pray for
vision, lest we perish? So here it is:
We envision a Caribbean Community in which every citizen has the opportunity to realise
his or her human potential and is guaranteed the full enjoyment of their human rights in
every sphere; in which social and economic justice is enshrined in law and embedded in
practice; a Community from which poverty, unemployment and social exclusion have
been banished; in which all citizens willingly accept a responsibility to contribute to the
welfare of their fellow citizens and to the common good; and one which serves as a
vehicle for the exercise of the collective strength of the Caribbean region, and the
affirmation of the collective identity of the Caribbean people, in the world community27
.
An Independence wish for Jamaica
Some weeks ago Hope McNish published an Independence Wish for Jamaica28
. I think it should
be adopted as a Manifesto for our Second Independence. It calls in part for
a nation is not subject to manipulation by external powers and the dictates of
international funding institutions …
27
CARICOM: Towards a Single Development Vision and the Role of the Single Economy. http://www.caricom.org/jsp/single_market/single_economy_girvan.pdf 28 Hope McNish, A Jamaica 50 Message. http://www.normangirvan.info/a-jamaica-50-message-hope-mcnish/
19
farmers ensuring that
all arable lands are fully utilized for organic farming in order to provide our people with
healthy nutrition;
creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurial talents to produce high quality goods for the
local and export markets;
It goes on in with wishes for employment, education, housing; public transport; health care,
public access to all beaches, environmental protection, true rehabilitation of prisoners,
accountability for political representatives; and citizens’ rights. To all of which I say, “Amen”.
The cynics will say it cannot happen. I say that if Marcus Garvey had not dreamed, if the leaders
of the 1930s had not dreamed, if Usain Bolt had not dreamed, would we be where we are today?
I say to Hope for, “Go for it”’. Without the Hopes of this world, what hope will there be for the
future of our island, of our region?
A Personal Note
I started on a personal note and I will end on one. My son, Alexander, is also presenting at this
Conference. You, and your generation, stand on the cusp of your own life’s journey as Jamaica
faces the challenge of its second independence; as I and my generation did on the cusp of
Jamaica’s first, half a century ago. It is like the handing over of the baton. But I want to remind
you all that the runner who passes the baton, doesn’t stop running; he keeps on for a while
longer, and cheers on his successors!
20
We do not know what kind of Jamaica there will be, when the Centenary of Independence is
marked in 2062. But what we do know, is that, while most people present in this auditorium
won’t be around to see it; some of you will have the good fortune to be. You and your children
have a great responsibility. Perhaps you will remember this moment.
The Honourable Robert Nesta Marley sang, “Some people have hopes and dreams; some people
have ways and means”. So my message to your generation is: be bold enough to have hopes and
dreams, and have an unshakeable confidence in the ability, and the will, of our people to find
ways and means to realise them.
Thank you.