Norris McDonald | ‘Land of My Birth’: Food insecurity under IMF’s neo-capitalism

Jamaica is locked in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) ‘debt trap’ and has now reached, and long passed, what can be called a ‘debt saturation point’.

This means that no matter how much money is borrowed from the IMF ad nauseum, it will never have any positive impact on Jamaica’s ability to achieve self-sustaining economic growth.

To me, the news that Jamaica has secured US$1.7 billion of funding from the IMF appears to be nothing more than a continuation of a dismal debt spiral that started in 1977.

Let’s recall my February 16, 2022 Gleaner article, ‘A ‘fenke-fenke’ Budget, a ‘bang-belly’ economy, and a cry for justice’. In this article, I stated that the Budget’s economic growth target was unrealistic.

This was especially true, given the negative global climate; the large amount set aside for debt payment; and what one can call weakness in the Government’s investment plans.

I also suggested that if there were no dramatic increase in investment in agriculture to create savings on food imports, then there would be difficulties, as now, down the road.

This decision by the Government to borrow more from the IMF – while deemed well-intentioned – to me is just a further increase in Jamaica’s debt burden.

‘LAND OF MY BIRTH’

For almost 50 years, there appears to be either a lack of imagination in how Jamaica’s national affairs are managed or a religious-like belief that the IMF road will create a better quality of life for the Jamaican people.

These are some of the issues and challenges examined by Leroy E. Cooke in his book Land of My Birth (Negro Rivers Publishers, 2021).

Leroy Cooke’s incredible book gives an in-depth analysis of how Jamaica, under the Michael Manley government, ended up in this IMF quagmire that Jamaica now faces.

Back then, the Manley government grappled with the issue of closing a narrow ‘foreign exchange-budget gap’.

Eventually, because of different policy choices and an increasing, complex and hostile national and international political environment, Manley “lost the window of opportunity” of escaping the IMF debt trap.

Opportunity lost is difficult to be regained; therefore, the Manley government got booted from office in 1980 by Edward Seaga.

Many people, including his American patrons, felt that Mr Seaga was “an economic wizard” who could make Jamaica a shining outpost for capitalism by creating an “economic miracle” here.

James Bovard, however, writes in a very dismissive December 1, 1987 article, titled ‘Jamaica: No Free Market, No Miracle’, that, much to the disappointment of Seaga’s American supporters, the expected economic miracle never came.

According to Bovard, in 1980 Prime Minister Edward Seaga “received over US$2 billion as Washington, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund tried to ensure Seaga’s success”.

It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Despite all this money and imperialist political support, “Seaga’s efforts at promoting an economic revival have been a dismal failure”, James Bovard concludes.

The question we face, my friends, is whether it is possible for Jamaica to achieve an ‘economic miracle’ under the debt-drowning yoke of the millstone IMF?

Let us face this ‘bitta truth’.

Jamaica has produced many public servants from different political and ideological pursuits. But none has been able to produce self-sustaining economic growth for the Jamaican economy under an IMF scenario.

IMF’s NEO-CAPITALIST STRATEGY

Some people think the IMF strategies can work, but I certainly don’t agree.

And my point of view is backed by years of historical data and analysis that show that there is not even one country in the world where the IMF can claim a success story.

One key political economic strategy of the IMF, in the context of a ‘One Don’ imperialist world order, is to create an import-oriented economy in which food supply comes mainly from the capitalist world market, and more directly from America.

Jean-Martin Bauer is the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Haiti. He recently revealed how “free-market policies ruined Haiti’s smallholder farmers and left the country heavily reliant on food imports”.

Poor countries such as Jamaica and Haiti, among others, have seen their rural agriculture destroyed.

And yet, over US$20 billion in farm subsidies are pumped by the US government into American agriculture, which, under ‘crop insurance’, sometimes pay people to literally not farm.

In 2020, with the outbreak of COVID-19, this farm subsidy increased to U$50 billion.

To better understand this, it is important to keep in mind that the IMF agricultural subsidies and state sector investment are forbidden by the IMF and their One Don bosses.

VICIOUS HUNGER, DEBT-DEATH CYCLE

My dear friends, this is truly a vicious cycle, a real death-debt trap; rising hunger put the population towards starvation point.

Then, as the population gets increasingly restless, as we have seen in Haiti, Sri Lanka, Jamaica and numerous other places, there is an expectation that the government ought to create a ‘peaceful climate’ for capitalism to thrive.

In the meantime, over 352 million people in the developing countries, and in poor countries such as Haiti and Jamaica, become miserably hungry, to the point that their lives are at risk.

Rising hunger and starvation is a fact of life for many poor people.

Caribbean countries have seen an increasingly dangerous rise in food insecurity when compared with other parts of the world.

And this is part of the urgent political economic problem that must be addressed.

How can a country such as Jamaica, or any country for that matter, keep borrowing money to pay for imported food that they can grow or manufacture?

Where is the hope for the future?

Where is the plan to boost national agriculture to make the country less dependent on importing food using borrowed money?

A people who cannot feed themselves are forever doomed to depend on others for scraps, handouts and their life-sustaining food. In the end, they put themselves at the mercy of vicious global loan sharks such as the International Monetary ‘Banksters’!

That is just the ‘bitta’ truth!

Norris McDonald is an economic journalist, political analyst, and respiratory therapist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com.