United States of Amnesia:
“Forgetting” How the IMF Ruined Agriculture in Jamaica
August 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The August 3 issue of the New York Times ran an article titled “As Cost of Importing Food Soars, Jamaica Turns to the Earth.” As the article notes, Jamaica and the other island nations in the Caribbean are located in one of “the world’s most fertile regions.” But Jamaica imports most of its food, and the cost of imports has doubled in the past decade—leading to a severe food crisis as Jamaica is increasingly unable to afford the cost of imports to meet the food needs of the people. In response, the governments in Jamaica and other countries in the region are promoting local small-scale farming.
The Times article reveals a part of something real going on, but it’s like looking at a large painting in a dark room with a flashlight focused on a small part of the picture. The Times “forgets” to pose and get into the larger question of why Jamaica is in the situation it is today. Why is it that Jamaica, despite the fertility of its land, must import most of its food?
It doesn’t take some long, complicated investigation to find the basic answer. It’s readily available—for example, in the film Life and Debt, which came out in 2001 and is widely available online. As the film compellingly shows, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank—international financial institutions controlled by the U.S. and its imperialist allies—directly caused the ruin of Jamaica’s agriculture.
Through the 1970s and ’80s, the Jamaican government signed on to billions of dollars in loans from those institutions. One of the many onerous conditions of this debt was that Jamaica drastically lower the tariffs on imports, including imported agricultural products. This led to a flood of imported food into Jamaica—everything from potatoes, vegetables, and fruit to meat and milk. Produced by agribusinesses in the U.S. and other countries, often with government subsidies, the imports were cheaper than locally produced food. Jamaican farmers were not able to compete, and many were forced out of agriculture altogether. One scene in Life and Debt shows a dairy operator, who had been in business for several generations, throwing away thousands of gallons of unsold milk obtained from local cows, because they could no longer compete with imported milk powder.
Haiti is another country mentioned in the Times piece. But once again, historical amnesia sets in—the Times neglects to even mention that most of the food eaten by the Haitian people used to be domestically grown, until Haiti also got pulled into the IMF debt trap. As one of the conditions for IMF loans in the 1980s, Haiti reduced tariffs that protected Haitian rice and other products from imports. Haitian farmers could not compete with imported rice, including those from U.S. rice growers who receive government subsidies. Before long, local rice production collapsed in Haiti, and thousands of farmers were forced to move to the cities to search for work. The U.S. also insisted that Haitian peasants do away with their huge and valuable pig population, due to some threat to the U.S. pig population, and this had a devastating impact on the people in Haiti.
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