Cooper

IT LOOKS like a straightforward case of life and death: if we don't go running back to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 'wi a go dead fi hungry'. Is it as simple as that? Dealing with the IMF is a lot like sharecropping. In the post-slavery southern United States, African-Americans who were robbed of the promised 40 acres and a mule made a deal with the Devil: they would plant crops on rented land and share the fruits of their labour with the owners. But dig-out-eye landlords fixed the rules of the game in such a way that the cost of farming always exceeded the value of the crop. The sharecropper was permanently enslaved in debt.

The parallels with our own condition in the supposedly independent Carib-bean are obvious. Michael Manley put it tersely in his book, The Poverty of Nations: "Imperialism does not come to an end when a particular country achieves its political independence. If the economic organisation remains sufficiently in foreign hands, it will continue to be subjected to foreign domination and exploitation to the benefit of the external power."

Michael Manley's big chat

But even Michael Manley had to put his tail between his legs and go crawling to the IMF. Despite his big chat, he had to bow to the whip of the foreign dominatrix. Why? The grass-roots economist George Beckford gives a persuasive answer in his influential book, Persistent Poverty. The subtitle, "Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World," reminds us that we are living the legacy of plantation slavery. Poverty is an uninvited guest that refuses to 'tek weh itself.'

But Beckford was not advocating that we passively accept impoverishment: "Back to back, belly to belly, I don't give a damn for I done dead already." In chapter eight, "Possibilities for Change and Transformation," he asserts that "the process of transformation to a development path that would ensure benefits to everyone in plantation society must involve radical change in the institutional structure - particularly the economic, social, and political arrangements. This is bound to be painful."

Elections looming

With elections looming, Prime Minister Golding really cannot run the risk of proposing painful prescriptions for our economic ills. It would take too much courage. He dare not contemplate a return to the trauma of the 1970s when the middle class felt compelled to run away from democratic socialism; and the masses of the people who had no means of escape remained trapped in the maximum-security plantation prison. So the IMF appears to be the lesser of two evils. But are the IMF's new conditionalities actually different from the old? Is the new IMF not just the old IMF in drag?

The American filmmaker, Stephanie Black, has produced and directed a classic documentary, Life and Debt, which brilliantly analyses the debilitating effects on Jamaica of the combined assault of the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. The 'pop-down' politics of globalisation is a recurring theme. For example, most of our dairy farmers were put out of business because of the dumping of cheap milk products in our market.

Released in 2001, the feature-length documentary remains painfully current. On the 1970s campaign trail, Manley had optimistically declared that "better must come". But, in fact, things went from bad to much worse. Falling into the arms of the seductive IMF was a betrayal of the trust of the Jamaican people. Manley confesses in the film that signing his first agreement with the IMF was "one of the more bitter, traumatic experiences of [his] life".

Creative Industries

The energising reggae sound track of Life and Debt reaffirms the powerful role of music as a weapon of resistance against the powers of darkness in high and low places. The stellar cast of musicians and song-writers includes Bob Marley, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, the Wailers, Dean Fraser, Buju Banton, Morgan Heritage, Sizzla, Anthony B, Suzanne Couch, Brian Jobson, Bobby Dixon, Clement Dodd, Harry Belafonte, Peter Tosh, Yami Bolo and Mutabaruka. It was Mutabaruka who gave the documentary its clever title.

With the decline of agriculture, mining and tourism, we can no longer depend on the traditional sectors for economic growth. It is the new creative industries that are our competitive advantage in a globalised world. Our history has certainly taught us how to transform deprivation into the raw material of art and make money from it. We know how 'fi tun wi hand mek fashion'. We can, indeed, live off our intellectual property. We ought to establish a ministry of creative industries - not quite the same as a ministry of culture - that would invest in the development of entrepreneurship in a wide range of fields.

Sharecropping with the IMF is a short-term fix. It is not a sustainable solution to our deep-rooted problems of persistent poverty. The answer lies in Marcus Garvey's challenging prophecy: "We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind." Freedom from the stranglehold of dependency can only be achieved when we produce what we want and want what we produce. It's as simple as that: life or debt. We definitely don't need an IMF loan agreement with a noose attached.

Carolyn Cooper is professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Send feedback to: karokupa@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.