The agricultural economies of the small island states of the Caribbean are being undermined by the neo-liberal drive towards a lop-sided global 'free' market.
Maurice Bishop, the assassinated revolutionary leader of Grenada, used to illustrate the vulnerability of economies reliant on the export of cash crops by comparing the prices of bananas and tractors. Speaking in 1982, a year before his death, he said "In 1970 11 tons of bananas would buy a tractor; today it takes 25...
more »The agricultural economies of the small island states of the Caribbean are being undermined by the neo-liberal drive towards a lop-sided global 'free' market.
Maurice Bishop, the assassinated revolutionary leader of Grenada, used to illustrate the vulnerability of economies reliant on the export of cash crops by comparing the prices of bananas and tractors. Speaking in 1982, a year before his death, he said "In 1970 11 tons of bananas would buy a tractor; today it takes 25 tons. In 1976 1 ton of nutmegs would buy a car; today it takes 5 tons." A 500% price increase in 6 years.
Since then things have got worse. The tariff and quota system, which protected the Windward Islands' banana industry from competition from Central and South American 'dollar' bananas, is being phased out, following pressure from the WTO. Attempts to develop a niche market for Fairtrade bananas have had some success, but their higher price keeps the niche small.
At the same time, cocoa, nutmeg and sugar prices have not kept pace with the cost of imports, while moves to replace agriculture with tourism have overstretched natural resources and produced little more than low-paid service jobs.
As these visible components of the economy have declined, they have been supplemented by a largely invisible one: drug-smuggling. Analysis of bank transactions in Dominica, for instance, shows that despite a savage decline in income from bananas, money continues to flow inwards. Stories abound of secret landing strips and cocaine-laden yachts.
Colombian drug cartels, moving into the economic vacuum, are the flip-side of WTO neo-liberalism. Take away 'barriers' to free trade, remove 'artificial' protection from 'inefficient' small producers, and the market takes over: cocaine prices find their 'true' level, drug barons become unimaginably wealthy, and the small farmers of the Eastern Caribbean - well, they have neither oil, nor weapons of mass destruction, so you won't be hearing much about them at all.
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