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50 YEARS OF IN-DEPENDENCE IN JAMAICA: REFLECTIONS

Norman Girvan

Delivered at the SALISES 50-50 Conference, ‘Critical Reflections in a Time of

Uncertainty’, Kingston, 22 August 2012

I thank Brian Meeks, Mikey Witter and the rest of the SALISES team for inviting me to speak at

this Conference. Apart from the importance of the subject matter, there is personal significance

for me in that I have been associated with the ISER/SALISES from my student days at Mona in

1959—1962 and subsequently in a variety of capacities. I have fond memories of many lively

exchanges over the years and of luminaries who passed through its portals, many of whom are no

longer with us; like Lloyd Braithwaite, MG Smith, Lloyd Best, Archie Singham, George

Beckford, Carl Stone and many others.

At the time that Jamaica became independent I had just turned 21—in those days, “the age of

majority”-- and I had just graduated from the UWI with a degree in Economics. It was a natural

for me, and for many others of my generation, that our life vocation would be to use our

professional training in the project of nation building. In the case of my cohort, it was tinged

with regret at the collapse of the project for collective West Indian nationhood. Together with

others including Orlando Patterson and Walter Rodney, we were part of a group known as The

West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues, which discussed the problems of colonialism

in its economic, sociological and political dimensions; and the characteristics of an independent

West Indian nation that would eradicate these problems and transform the society. We always

saw our respective territories countries as variants of a common West Indian condition; and there

was never any doubt that these issues had to be tackled collectively. I like to say that I entered

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Mona as Jamaican nationalist and left as a Caribbean regionalist, and that the one melds

seamlessly into the other and that I believe that those who see a contradiction between the two

are either unaware of our history or choose to ignore it.

The disappointment we felt was not only due to the break-up of the Federation, but even more so

at what we perceived to be the neo-colonial character of the ‘Independence Pact’, represented by

a Constitution that preserved the British Monarch as the Jamaican Head of State, and entrenched

property rights. Orlando Patterson summed up the outrage in a famous editorial published in the

student magazine, The Pelican, which began with the declamation “We have been betrayed”,

and ended with a passionate cri de Coeur directed at our political leaders, “Oh you greedy cabal,

you fools, you cannot lead the people to independence wearing a waistcoat, you have been

brainwashed in the rank urine of British culture”1.

Looking back, it is clear that our cohort over-estimated the possibility for a radical

transformation, and under-estimated the forces of continuity, in societies that are after all not

new, but hundreds of years old, with deeply ingrained cultural values, patterns of behavior, class

and colour stratification, economic structures, and political habits; and that we failed to take

account of the role of emerging national elites in being content to acquire a limited degree of

autonomy within an existing system of internal and international hierarchical structures. Trevor

Munroe in his analysis of the politics of constitutional decolonisation2, showed that Jamaica’s

political class and the departing British had colluded in a transfer of formal political authority to

an institutionalised party duopoly of power; with the essentials of the system remaining intact;

and entrenched in a constitution that was virtually impossible to change without the agreement of

the two political parties.

1 I am quoting from memory from The Pelican June 1962 Editorial written by Orlando Patterson, as a student. 2 Trevor Munroe, The Politics of Constitutional Decolonisation in Jamaica. I.S.E.R.

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But for such a system to serve its purpose of delivering political stability, the population must be

made to believe that it is, in fact, what it is not. Louis Lindsay’s analysis of the Myth of

Independence3

and the ‘politics of symbolic manipulation’, drawing on Fanon, argued

persuasively that flag independence and five-yearly elections had become symbols to be

manipulated to give the population the illusion that it had acquired genuine control over its own

affairs, and real participation in political decision-making. The more things change, the more

they remain the same; but the more things remain the same, the more they have to appear to

change. Later, Carl Stone squared the circle by showing that patronage and clientilism had

become part and parcel of the functioning of the Jamaican two-party political system4. In the

1980s he pointed to the insidious dangers of garrison politics, and warned that the tail would end

up of wagging the dog. This was some 20 years before Dudus. Former PM PJ Patterson said in a

moment of candour, that Jamaican politics consisted of ‘warring tribes vying for scarce

benefits’5.

Is it in any wonder that voter participation in elections has shown a secular decline to just about

one-half in the last election—the current administration holding office on the basis of less than

one-third of the qualified voters--and that in a poll taken in mid-2011 a significant majority (60

per cent) of respondents said they believed Jamaican would have been better off had it remained

a British colony6These statistics are a damning indictment of the state of Jamaican democracy

and of the results of the independence project in the popular mind.

My reflections will, hopefully, help to explain statistics of this kind and to complement the

insights of these scholars with an overview of the political economy, post-colonial. Not fifty

years, perhaps, of Independence; but fifty years In Dependence. Before I proceed however, I

have to say that I sense an air of unreality in much of what has been talked about at this

Conference; in an apparent failure to fully take into account that the wider world in which we

3 Louis Lindsay, The Myth of Independence, ISER Working Paper 1975; reprinted 1975 4 Carl Stone, Democracy and Clientilism in Jamaica. I.S.E.R.

5 Quoted by Cedric Wilson, Commentary: The Power and the Glory, Jamaica Gleaner, Sunday February 19, 2006.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060219/letters/letters3.html 6 Jamaica Gleaner 28/06/2011; http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110628/lead/lead1.html

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live, and to which the Caribbean is of course closely linked, is enmeshed in deep crisis of

multiple dimensions: a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis—rising inequality and

social exclusion—a political crisis—incapacity of existing national and international structures

to handle these crises—and an environmental crisis, in that the life support systems of our planet

are being exceeded on a number of critical thresholds. Behind all this is what many keen

observers believe to be a civilizational crisis; meaning that our present model of civilization,

based as it is on the unlimited and permanent accumulation of material wealth, is fundamentally

unsustainable. Obviously this is not in my remit, but may I respectfully suggest that any

discussion of the region’s development over the next fifty years must take this global context as

one of its principal points of departure.

In my overview of Jamaica’s post-colonial political economy I will move quickly over the 60s

and 70s—in reality, the period to 1976—but focus especially on the last 35 years—from 1977 to

the present.

Industrialisation by Invitation

At the time of Independence it was generally believed that the road to economic development led

through foreign investment—Industrialisation by invitation—so the role of foreign capital was

the chosen subject of my doctoral thesis. My main conclusion was that, while foreign investment

had driven rapid growth in the Jamaican economy in the 50s and 60s, the economy had not

undergone the kind of structural changes that would permit growth to be self-sustaining after the

end of the bauxite investment cycle. This was pretty much confirmed after 1972, when the

Jamaican economy entered a prolonged growth crisis. The structural changes that were lacking

included a significant rise in national savings linked to productive investment through the agency

of national entrepreneurship and indigenous technological effort; agricultural and industrial

diversification; and a development-supportive national financial system. I attributed this failure

partly to the role of foreign firms in the economy. These ideas were generally shared by my

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generation of economists-- the New World Group and the Caribbean structuralists—with seminal

contributions on the Jamaican case made by Owen Jefferson and George Beckford.

Jamaica—the 1970s

In the first half of the 70s the Manley government implemented comprehensive and long overdue

social reforms in order to address the social deficit of the population which was a legacy of 300

years of colonial rule, slavery, and the plantation system. The state took control of much of the

commanding heights of the Jamaican economy and levied additional taxes on the bauxite

industry; and the government campaigned for a more just and equitable international system for

poor countries-- a New International Economic Order. The programme was derailed by the first

oil price shock, capital flight, disinvestment, by domestic and foreign opposition; and also by its

own internal errors and contradictions.

With its foreign reserves depleted, in 1977 Jamaica entered into what was to be the first of a

succession of adjustment programmes financed by the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-

American Development Bank and other Western donors. These loans were conditioned on the

adoption of neoliberal policy reforms of privatisation, liberalisation, and deregulation; and on the

privileging of market forces and of the role of the private sector . For 35 years of the 50-year

independence experience, therefore, Jamaican economic policy has been under the direct

supervision of Washington-based international financial institutions; or carried out within a

framework that they approve of, and is aimed at maintaining the confidence of donors and

investors.

One consequence of this is that successive Jamaican governments have surrendered many, if not

most, of the policy tools for the shaping of economic development which the state had acquired

in the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Among the most important were abolition of

the commodity marketing boards, elimination of state import trading, removal of import controls,

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reduction and elimination of tariff protection for industry and agriculture, removal of price

controls, elimination of credit controls, financial liberalisation, floating of the exchange rate,

elimination of preferential interest rates for agricultural credit, cuts in support for agricultural

research and development, and abolition of progressive income taxes. Previous state

interventionism may well have been excessive, and at times even inefficient and corrupt. But I

believe that the abandonment of such policy instruments went too far; and I know for a fact that

some of this happened not because government officials were convinced that it would be good

for the economy, but because they were forced to do it by the International Financial Institutions.

The last IMF agreement, made in 2010, is a clear demonstration of the extent to which the

government of Jamaica has lost the ability to independently determine its own policies7. The

Letter of Intent and its Annexes outline 10 undertakings by the GoJ in the area of fiscal policy,

three in monetary policy; and over 40 actions of structural reform under various headings over

one to two fiscal years; including undertakings to change a number of existing laws and

regulations. There are also nine different quantitative performance criteria which it must observe.

On top of all this the government of Jamaica is obligated to make daily reports to the IMF on 13

items, weekly reports on 6 items; monthly reports on 22 items, and quarterly reports on 10 items.

It would be an interesting project for some research student to compare the powers exercised by

the IMF over Jamaica’s economic policy with those exercised by the British Governor and the

Colonial Office in London under Crown Colony rule. I am of course not referring to power in the

constitutional sense, but the real power exercised by the IMF by means of financial leverage and

its intrusion into a vast range of public policies.

Jamaica—economic retrogression in the age of neoliberalism

I am going to argue that the results from this 35-year neoliberal policy orientation have not only

fallen far short of what was promised; but also that they have been accompanied by changes in

7 International Monetary Fund; Jamaica: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding. December 23, 2010.

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the nature of Jamaica’s economic life which are for the most part negative; and in some cases,

alarming. These results help to contextualise the voter apathy, the sense of powerlessness and the

noticeable tendency towards popular disillusionment with the independence project. I summarise

them under the rubric of nine inter-related processes; namely (1) economic stagnation, (2)

hollowing out of production, (3) tradification, (4), remittancisation (5) financialisation, (6)

informalisation, (7) criminalisation, (8) emigration, which I prefer to call human resource

decapitalisation, and (9) ) growth of indebtedness, which I call Debtifcation. Many of you will be

familiar with these developments, but perhaps as separate and disconnected processes.

Prolonged economic stagnation. For the 30 years from 1980 to 2010, Jamaica barely managed a

growth rate in its per capita income of 1 per cent per year; a growth performance that is below

that of key comparator groups of countries. In the last two decades the performance gap has

widened; in that since 1991 Jamaica’s per capita income growth has been less than one-third that

of Caribbean small countries and less than one-fourth that of developing countries of Latin

America and the Caribbean8.

Secondly, stagnation has been accompanied by the hollowing out of the productive base of the

economy; indeed it is largely the result of this hollowing out process. I define the productive

base as the three main goods producing sectors of agriculture, mining and manufacturing; and by

hollowing out I mean that the contribution to the economy of the three sectors has shrunk

drastically; to the point where their combined share in the GDP and in employment is about one-

half of what it was in the early 1980s9. Output has actually fallen in both mining and

manufacturing; and agriculture has had only marginal growth10

. The other side of the coin is that

as a society, we have become far more import-dependent in satisfying consumer needs;

consumer goods have doubled their share in total imports and food imports alone run at over $1

8 Data taken from World Development Indicators, The World Bank.

9 Data computed from STATIN, National Accounts

10 Hollowing out has ben shown by Dr Michael Witter in Agriculture, Then and Now and in manufacturing in Trade Liberalization: The Jamaican Experience. Available online.

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billion, which is about three times the value of the exports of the agricultural sector11

. Of course

tourism has grown, but we need to bear in mind that the degree to which tourism is integrated

with the rest of the economy through backward linkages is debatable; and that tourism is

extremely vulnerable to environmental degradation, international market trends, and climate

change.

The third process, which is a consequence of the first two, is what I call the accelerated

tradification of the economy. By this I mean that trading in imported goods has become one of

the ‘growth activities’ to an even greater degree than before. It is difficult to support this

statistically, since the share of wholesale and retail trade in the GDP today is about the same as it

was in 1980. But what is striking is that employment in the distributive trades has more than

doubled; and now accounts for one person in five of the employed labour force12

.

Another notable change—the fourth on my list---is the process of financialisation of the

economy. Financialisation has been a feature of the global capitalist economy since the 1970s; in

Jamaica it has been boosted by the huge growth of the internal debt—a matter to which I shall

shortly return.

To set this in context we need to consider that in 1971, finance in the Jamaican GDP was about

one-tenth the combined share of the basic producing sectors; today, it is about two-thirds of that

combined share and exceeds each of them individually—in the case of mining and agriculture,

by a wide margin. Now this is important because fnancialisation is one of the mechanisms by

which resources are transferred from the ‘real economy’ to holders of financial assets; and it

correlates with the hollowing out of the goods producing sectors. Also, we see no evidence of the

financial services industry becoming a net earner of export income—to the contrary, it has a net

earnings deficit13

.

11 $1,025 M vs. $337 M. Includes beverages and tobacco. Source Economic and Social Survey Jamaica 2011, tables 6.3 and 6.4; pp. 6.7-6.8 12

Data from Michael Witter, Trade Liberalization: The Jamaican Experience, 2002; and STATIN Labour Force, Annual. 13 US $160 million (excess of outflows over inflows) , finance and insurance services, 2010. Source BOP 2010, BOJ

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So how have people been surviving, responding, in the face of all this? This brings me to my

fifth process, informalisation of the Jamaican economy; the sixth, which is an extension,

criminalisation; and the seventh, emigration. The informal economy is believed to be around 40

per cent of the GDP14

. On criminalisation, you don’t want to go around collecting information on

activities like robbery, extortion, drug trafficking, gun smuggling, money laundering and white

collar crime—it could be hazardous to your health. A study by Dr Michael Witter study

concluded that in every single branch of the economy, informal activity and downright

criminality play a significant role15

. The Minister of Education is quoted in today’s Gleaner as

saying “ No longer do our young people feel that if you want money and be prosperous in

Jamaica that getting a good education is essential”. (Gleaner 22/08/12; p.A6; “We are in a

crisis!-Thwaites”).

Regarding emigration, I prefer to describe this as a form of decapitalisation—depletion of the

human resources of the country. Since the 1960s right up to the 2000s we have been losing

about one-third of our secondary school graduates and between 70 and 80 percent of our tertiary

level graduates16

. Clearly this is not a matter of neoliberal policies only; but I don’t believe that

neoliberal policies have helped; because the economy has stagnated, violent crime is endemic

and the social services are in poor shape.

The other side of this is that remittances by overseas Jamaicans have grown to become the

largest single source of foreign currency inflows for the Jamaican economy--more than earnings

from merchandise exports, more than foreign investment, more than loans, more than aid, and

more than tourism if you net out the direct leakage from tourist expenditure. So I speak of

remittancisation of the economy as the eighth process. I am not one of those who views this as a

good thing, or believes that these flows in any way compensate for the loss of human resources

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Estimate by The Inter-American Development Bank. Information supplied by Dr Michael Witter. 15 Michael Witter article in Dennis Pantin (Ed.) Caribbean Economy: A Reader. P. 458. 16 Andrew Pienkos, Caribbean Labour Migration, 2006. Annex Table 1; for 1990 and 2000;

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or for the government money spent on their education and training. I am aware of at least one

study which corroborates this17

.

I wish to suggest that the emigration—human resource decapitalisation—remittancisation circle

has a fourfold significance that is both social and economic in its dimensions. First, as an

indicator of the failure of the society to provide meaningful economic and social opportunities

for a substantial part of the educated population; second, as an indicator of the talent,

resourcefulness and energy of ordinary Jamaicans; third, as a source that is critical to sustaining

consumption levels in a large number of households and hence to maintaining the social fabric;

and fourth, as an indicator of the potential production that could be generated within Jamaica if

people had the opportunities here. No one knows the size of the Jamaican Diaspora economy;

but I have done a rough estimate myself which makes me believe that it could be as large as the

total GDP of the island of Jamaica itself18

. The true potential cost of emigration is this

production, and the contribution made by overseas Jamaicans in the recipient countries in all

walks of life, the leadership, in medicine, law, politics, academia, education, health, engineering,

business, information technology and many other fields.

I come now to the ninth process, the huge growth of Jamaica’s debt burden. Professor Kari

Levitt’s study showed that by1990 the servicing of the external debt was costing the Jamaican

economy over one-quarter of its annual output of goods and services19

. In the 1990s there was a

huge increase in the internal debt; due to the financial sector meltdown, the FINSAC bailouts

and high interest rates. At the root of this was the currency and financial deregulation of the early

1990s. This measure, carried out in a naïve belief in free market economics, was arguably the

greatest single policy mistake made in all of Jamaica’s 50-year post-colonial history.

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Prachi Mishra, Emigration and the Brain Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean. 2006. IMF Working Paper, WP/06/25 18

Remittances are the equivalent of about 16 percent of the Jamaican GDP. Let’s suppose that on average, each

remittor sends home a quarter of his or her income; then the total income of overseas Jamaicans is the equivalent of 64 percent of the Jamaican GDP. If labour income is about two-thirds of value added, then the GDP generated by

Overseas Jamaicans would be about the same as the Jamaican GDP. 19 Kari Levitt, The Origins, Growth and Consequences of Jamaica’s External Debt, 1970-1990; in Kari Levitt, Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community, IRP, 2005.,p 111.

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In a 1999 paper, I showed that Jamaica was caught in an internal debt trap, in which debt service

payments exceeded new borrowing, but the stock of debt continued to grow20

. The cost of

government debt servicing had grown from 45 to 113 per cent of government revenue and from

15 to 39 percent of the GDP. The government had paid out $70 billion more in interest and

amortisation than it had received in new loans, but the stock of government debt had increased

by $223 billion. I argued that the burden of the debt burden had become a drag on Jamaica’s

economic growth and human capital formation. I suggested that there should be negotiated

restructuring of the internal debt; with the savings allocated to investment in rebuilding the social

and economic infrastructure. This did not happen; and during the 2000s economic growth was

the lowest of the three decades since 1980s. By 2009 a debt default was threatened; and the IMF

virtually made debt restructuring a condition of its Stand-By agreement. But it seems the savings

from the Jamaica Debt Exchange were used mainly to reduce the fiscal deficit, rather than to

invest in rebuilding productive capacity. And it is now clear that the 2009 programme was

inadequate. A 2012 report on the Jamaican economy showed that “Jamaica remains one of the

most highly indebted countries in the world,. Jamaica’s large debt burden has displaced most

other public expenditures, taking up almost 50 per cent of total budgeted spending over the last

four fiscal years while health and education have been only around 20 per cent combined.”.21

I have a tenth process my list, which I call culturalisation; and it refers to the mushrooming of

cultural activity as sources of income and employment and as a source of foreign earnings. The

crucial point here is that is another indicator of the potential that originates in the creativity, the

resourcefulness and the talent of the mass of the Jamaican population; the potential that has so

recently, so joyously been shown by the extraordinary achievements of our athletes, in spite of

the limited money and resources we have, in spite of coming from one of the smallest countries

in the planet. As Professor Kari Levitt has written, development is a cultural process; it is rooted

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Jamaica’s Internal Debt Trap: An Interpretation, 1999. Available at www.normangirvan.info 21 Jake Johnston and Juan A. Montecino, Update on the Jamaican Economy. Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Washington D.C. May 2012. Executive Summary.

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in the culture and creative potential of a people, it comes from within22

. These things have

flourished, however; not for the most part because of economic policies but in spite of them.

The diversification dilemma

Apart from this last, the inter-connected processes I have described add up to an experience that I

call economic retrogression in the age of neoliberalism. I believe that once we see it in its

totality it becomes easier to understand why several announced plans for economic

diversification have had such modest results; plans like the National Industry Policy and those in

Vision 2030;. The overall policy framework isn’t supportive; in fact it is pointing investors in

other directions. Do we really expect that investing in agriculture and food production will be

attractive, when cheap subsidised food is freely imported; arable land is not available at low cost

to those who may want to farm it; praedial larceny is prevalent; bankers demand collateral that

you don’t have; you don’t know if your crop won’t be destroyed by floods or pests and even if it

isn’t, if you will be able to find a market for it? Or that entrepreneurs will flock into new export

businesses when it’s easier to invest in government paper, safer and more profitable to build

upper-class housing; and less risky to do import trading and fast food franchising; and hobbled

by high interest rates? Isn’t perfectly understandable that the best and the brightest of our young

people, for whom the professions of choice have been finance and IT, and far less so farming and

non-traditional exports? The thing to do was to get a business degree, preferably an MBA and

preferably in finance, and get a ‘good job’ in a leading financial institution! So what I am

suggesting is that diversification plans look very good on paper; but the overall environment of

fiscal, monetary and trade policies create a different reality on the ground, to which investors

respond.

22 Kari Levitt, Reclaiming Development.

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Recovering policy independence

At the core of the experience I have described is the policy recolonisation of the Jamaican state

and the gutting of its capacity to influence economic life except for the most elementary tools of

the fiscal budget and central bank operations. One must go further, and ask whether, given the

nature of the ‘Independence Pact’, the system that was inherited was not programmed in a way

that caused it to revert to external patrons; once its reproduction was disrupted by political and

economic shocks of the kind that occurred in in the 70s and 80s. This external reversion went

beyond the securing of material and political support to a form of intellectual ‘recolonisation by

invitation’23

, manifested by an increasingly ready acceptance by policy elites of the diagnostic

and prescriptive frameworks handed down by those with the money and the power. However, the

system may now have entered a phase of more or less permanent crisis, whose most powerful

manifestations are the on-going fiscal crisis of the Jamaican state; and inability to staunch the

continued hemorrhage of the educated cadre.

One is tempted to compare the present historical conjuncture with the situation as it obtained in

the 1930s, a century after Emancipation. Emancipation had generated enormous expectations

within the population, which were soon frustrated by the persistence of the planter-colonial

order, the frustration being partially relieved by the internal and external migrations of the 19th

century. By the turn of the century this form of relief has been exhausted; but it took the internal

and international consequences of the capitalist crisis of the 1930s to effect a rupture in the

established order.

We cannot rule out the possibility of another rupture of this kind, as we are in the midst of a

prolonged world capitalist crisis similar to that of the 1930s, at a time when the national project

appears to have run its course. However, emigration continues to be the wild card in the pack: in

the 1930s, returning migrants swelled the ranks of the disaffected at home; today, it is different.

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‘Recolonisation by Invitation’ (a variant of ‘Industrialisation by Invitation’) is a phrase invented by Michael Theodore in another context, referring to developments in legal education in Trinidad and Tobago. http://www.normangirvan.info/theodore-recolonisation-by-invitation/. ,

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The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street seem to have had no traction in Jamaica, or for that

matter in the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean; and I would guess that one reason for this is

that the social strata that predominantly drive these protests elsewhere, have already left and are

leaving in large numbers. There is also no certainty as to what would be the ultimate result of a

rupture, or even a revolutionary upheaval; as history offers numerous examples of the operation

of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

If the ruling elites in this country are to have a chance of rescuing the national project however—

and in its broadest sense the ruling elites include the intelligentsia such as those attending this

Conference, including myself—then they—we—have some big responsibilities to shoulder. A

fundamental step is self-recognition that we ourselves are amongst the principal beneficiaries of

the current order, and that we will need to be prepared to give up many of our accumulated class

privileges in order to dismantle the deeply entrenched structures of social and economic

exclusion, to create a society based on equity and social justice, and to fully liberate the huge

creative potential that evidently resides in the mass of the Jamaican population.

Another need is to recover, nurture, foster and encourage the habit of what Lloyd Best called

Independent Thought. Reading the policy discourse in the Jamaican media, one sometimes gets

the feeling that elites are caught in a kind of neo-liberal time-warp. The mantra that the less

regulation the better; and that the private sector are by definition the good guys and the state are

the bad guys; has been blown away by the global financial crisis. Think of CLICO, Stanford,

Madoff, Enron and the rest; think of the huge cost to the Jamaican taxpayer of Air Jamaica after

privatisation; think of the egregious corruption on a massive scale on Wall Street costing

trillions of dollars and throwing millions of persons into poverty all over the world; of Iceland

after the banks were privatised and finance was liberalised. The idea that you can fix an economy

by draconian austerity has been disproved by Greece, Spain, the UK, by IMF programmes in

Eastern Europe and by the on-going Euro zone crisis. Internationally, the extreme form of

neoliberalism that seems to accepted here is under fire and in retreat.

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Research undertaken by the United Nations Committee on Development Policy; for instance, on

development policies followed by dozens of countries since 1980; concluded that the

Washington consensus model ‘had not delivered its promised acceleration in growth’; and on

balance ‘seems to have been associated with reductions in growth and worsening income

distribution’; and that countries which did the best were those that liberalised selectively, mixing

orthodox and unorthodox policies’24

.

Recovering the intellectual and the regulatory capacity to undertake such selective policies must

be surely be a strategic objective of the Jamaican state. To this end, one immediate action could

be to impose a freeze on further incursions into the space of national policy making—known as ‘

policy space’ in the jargon. For example, the Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU gave

away far more policy space than was required by the rules of the WTO; and Jamaica is having

serious problems in its implementation. It is due for a comprehensive review in 2013 and this is

an opportunity to revisit it. We can resist making the same concessions in the Canadian FTA.

The same principle of enlarging national policy space might apply to the on-going IMF

negotiations.

Economists will recognise that what I am talking about here is the need for a developmental

state. There is an important caveat: this isn’t going to work unless the society has confidence in

the technical competence and the incorruptibility of state officials. There have to be muscular

mechanisms for transparency and accountability and transparency in policy making. That is one

of the lessons of the success of the developmental states of East Asia.

Regionalism and CARICOM

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Frances Stewart, Do we need new development models? Impact of neo-liberal policies. Paper prepared for the United Nations Committee on Development Policy. 2011. Also see Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Milica Uvalic, Learning from the past: which of the past/current development models is best suited to deal with the ‘quadruple crisis’? DESA Working Paper No. 116; ST/ESA/2012/DWP/116. Available online.

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In the final part of my reflections I want to say something about regionalism and linking it to the

strategic objective of the recovery of policy independence. 50-odd years ago CLR James said

that Federation was the only means by which the West Indies could take its place in the

community of modern nations. The Federation failed; but today Jamaica and other Caricom

states are experiencing the illusion of insular independence. I think CLR has been vindicated. I

am not advocating a new Federation, but I see the need for a much stronger Caricom, to

consolidate our collective identity as a Caribbean people and to cope more effectively with the

world of the 21st century; a world which is infinitely more complex, demanding and fast-

changing than half a century ago.

Trade preferences are on the way out, aid flows have been cut, the Caribbean doesn’t have the

strategic importance it used to have. There is a world food crisis, an energy crisis and an

environmental crisis. Transnational criminal organisations commanding huge resources have

pushed up our murder rates to be among the highest in the world. Demands on governments are

exploding while resources are shrinking and indebtedness has grown. In a recent paper, I spoke

of the looming possibility of a ‘perfect storm’ of intersecting developments that could end up

profoundly affecting the existence of Caribbean societies as we know them—‘existential

threats’25

. The silver lining on these clouds is that the reconfiguration of the global economy has

opened up new opportunities in trade, investment and tourism. Any idea that countries of our

size can individually mobilise the critical mass of resources and diplomatic clout is to deal with

these issues is, quite frankly, delusional. Much larger countries than ours are forming regional

blocs.

Caricom is the natural alliance bloc Jamaica; by history, size, culture and geography. George

Beckford used to say, the people of the Caribbean are already integrated; the only people who

don’t know it are the politicians. When Jamaica took 1-2-3 at the London Olympics, the whole

region stood up and cheered. When the Reggae Boys went to the Football World Cup, the whole

region was behind us. When the mighty West Indian Cricket team regularly vanquished all its

25 CLR James Memorial Lecture, http://www.normangirvan.info/girvan-clrjames-memorial-revised/

17

adversaries back in the day; who cared which island Viv Richards came from? Or Lara? Or

captain Lloyd? If Jamaica has a problem with exporting to Trinidad, there are ways to deal with

it.

In Beijing, Jamaica and some other Caricom countries have offices; each with a handful of

professionals; to service a vast country of 1.3 billion people. Surely it would be more effective to

pool these resources so that specialist expertise can be deployed in particular areas. There is a

mind-set of competitiveness that seems to prevail. At the Shanghai trade fair in 2010, there was

a Caricom house, with each country having its own booth; no coherence, no Caribbean brand. If

Chinese tourists are going to come all the way across the world to visit the Caribbean, why not

promote a Caribbean experience with multiple destinations?

There is a fear of a new Federation, of surrendering our sovereignty. I would make the

distinction between de jure sovereignty and de facto sovereignty. De jure sovereignty is a

question of the Constitution and the law; de facto sovereignty is the actual ability to make and

execute national policy independent of external constraints. As I see it, the issue for Jamaica and

other Caricom members is how to engineer an expansion of their de facto sovereignty by sharing

their de jure sovereignty in particular areas. In a paper which I helped to prepare along with

Havelock Brewster and others in 201126

; we proposed four areas for shared sovereignty: the

Common Market; external trade policy; regional security; and environment and climate change.

We proposed joint action in three sectors where tangible benefits could be realised: agriculture

and food security; maritime transport; and renewable energy production. I still believe these

proposals offer a way to rescue the regional project.

26 Re-Energising Caricom, http://www.normangirvan.info/re-energising-caricom-integration-prime-minister-tillman-thomas/

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A Vision

I said earlier that I have never recognised any contradiction between being a Jamaican nationalist

and a Caribbean regionalist. I would like to share with you my vision for our Community of

Caribbean nations. You might say that it is utopian, but does not our national anthem pray for

vision, lest we perish? So here it is:

We envision a Caribbean Community in which every citizen has the opportunity to realise

his or her human potential and is guaranteed the full enjoyment of their human rights in

every sphere; in which social and economic justice is enshrined in law and embedded in

practice; a Community from which poverty, unemployment and social exclusion have

been banished; in which all citizens willingly accept a responsibility to contribute to the

welfare of their fellow citizens and to the common good; and one which serves as a

vehicle for the exercise of the collective strength of the Caribbean region, and the

affirmation of the collective identity of the Caribbean people, in the world community27

.

An Independence wish for Jamaica

Some weeks ago Hope McNish published an Independence Wish for Jamaica28

. I think it should

be adopted as a Manifesto for our Second Independence. It calls in part for

a nation is not subject to manipulation by external powers and the dictates of

international funding institutions …

27

CARICOM: Towards a Single Development Vision and the Role of the Single Economy. http://www.caricom.org/jsp/single_market/single_economy_girvan.pdf 28 Hope McNish, A Jamaica 50 Message. http://www.normangirvan.info/a-jamaica-50-message-hope-mcnish/

19

farmers ensuring that

all arable lands are fully utilized for organic farming in order to provide our people with

healthy nutrition;

creativity, ingenuity and entrepreneurial talents to produce high quality goods for the

local and export markets;

It goes on in with wishes for employment, education, housing; public transport; health care,

public access to all beaches, environmental protection, true rehabilitation of prisoners,

accountability for political representatives; and citizens’ rights. To all of which I say, “Amen”.

The cynics will say it cannot happen. I say that if Marcus Garvey had not dreamed, if the leaders

of the 1930s had not dreamed, if Usain Bolt had not dreamed, would we be where we are today?

I say to Hope for, “Go for it”’. Without the Hopes of this world, what hope will there be for the

future of our island, of our region?

A Personal Note

I started on a personal note and I will end on one. My son, Alexander, is also presenting at this

Conference. You, and your generation, stand on the cusp of your own life’s journey as Jamaica

faces the challenge of its second independence; as I and my generation did on the cusp of

Jamaica’s first, half a century ago. It is like the handing over of the baton. But I want to remind

you all that the runner who passes the baton, doesn’t stop running; he keeps on for a while

longer, and cheers on his successors!

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We do not know what kind of Jamaica there will be, when the Centenary of Independence is

marked in 2062. But what we do know, is that, while most people present in this auditorium

won’t be around to see it; some of you will have the good fortune to be. You and your children

have a great responsibility. Perhaps you will remember this moment.

The Honourable Robert Nesta Marley sang, “Some people have hopes and dreams; some people

have ways and means”. So my message to your generation is: be bold enough to have hopes and

dreams, and have an unshakeable confidence in the ability, and the will, of our people to find

ways and means to realise them.

Thank you.