FILM-US: No IMF, No Cry

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Jul 3 2001 (IPS) - When then Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley was first forced to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1977, it was a major retreat for his People’s National Party.

Manley had been elected five years earlier on an anti-IMF platform, nationalising certain industries and urging a doctrine of independence from the West that included closer ties with Cuba.

“The Jamaican government will not accept anybody, anywhere in the world telling us what to do in our own country,” Manley had declared. “Above all, we’re not for sale.”

But the economic realities of a nation emerging from four centuries of slavery and British colonial rule proved to be grimmer than he previously imagined. Jamaica was, as Manley later put it, “strapped for cash” and in need of help.

Thus began the stranglehold of debt that has taken hold of more than 100 countries. Today, Jamaica owes 4.5 billion dollars to multilateral lending institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank and is sliding further and further away from economic self-sufficiency.

‘Life and Debt’, a new documentary by Stephanie Black, looks beyond the Caribbean island’s sugary beaches and hedonistic resorts to the export processing zones where women assemble sportswear in windowless factories for 30 dollars a week, and the dying dairy farms that have been out-priced by imported powdered substitutes.

Jamaica Kincaid narrates the film, with voice-over passages adapted from her non-fiction book, ‘A Small Place’. The film also includes interviews with farmers, economists, Rastafarian philosophers and average people whose lives and livelihoods have been drastically impacted by the open-border trade policies enforced by lenders like the IMF under so-called structural adjustment programmes.

In the simplest terms, “structural adjustment” occurs when governments that have been unable to service their debts must renegotiate the terms, which become increasingly onerous.

In Jamaica, Black notes, spending on education, health and other social sectors has been slashed by more than half – mainly to pay off the unmanageable debt. Subsidies to local industries have been withdrawn, and any measure deemed an “artificial” barrier to the free movement of goods and capital has been eliminated.

One result is that small farmers are forced to compete for market space with huge overseas agricultural concerns – in this case, based in the United States – that are often subsidised by their own governments. In one scene, the filmmakers visit a supermarket where imported produce is easily muscling out the more expensive locally grown fruit and vegetables.

And when farmers in Jamaica win contracts to export crops like carrots or cherry tomatoes to the United States, their shipments are frequently rejected as unacceptable in size or appearance. “How can the machete compete with the machine?” wonders one aggravated farmer.

Interwoven with these scenes of mounting desperation is footage of blissfully ignorant US tourists lounging poolside at their hotels, partying in nightclubs and enjoying a fantasy version of the island that is a universe removed from the vast slums of cities like Kingston – which planes ferrying tourists almost always bypass for the more upscale Montego Bay airport.

“When you sit down to eat your delicious meal, it’s better that you don’t know that most of what you are eating came off a ship from Miami,” Kincaid says in her calm, melodious lilt.

The IMF and World Bank’s new claim to be champions of impoverished developing countries is somewhat undercut by their 25-year history of managing – or mismanaging – Jamaica’s economy.

Manley recalls in an interview that when he approached the IMF to get a break on the country’s debts, he had hoped for a long-term deal that would encompass a realistic development plan. Instead, he says, he was bluntly told that development “is your problem…We’re just here to solve your cash flow” to other creditors.

“Cross-conditionality,” Manley tells the filmmakers, means that “your neck is in two nooses.”

The World Bank itself estimates that a mere 10 percent of the loans has actually been invested in the country; the balance has been used to fend off creditors.

Its own Country Assistance Note from December 1998, which was never meant for public disclosure, concedes that “three structural adjustment and five sectoral adjustment loans since 1981, accompanied by a series of IMF operations, have increased Jamaica’s debt burden and left the country no better off in terms of growth or poverty reduction.”

Kincaid puts it more succinctly. “The Jamaica of my childhood no longer exists,” she says.

‘Life and Debt’ had a sold-out opening at the annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York, which ran Jun 13-28. The film division of Tuff Gong International – which was founded by reggae legend Bob Marley in 1965 – is distributing it.