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By Michael D. Roberts |
The effects of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon terror attacks, have left the Caribbean region in an acute state of political numbness and denial. Aside from the customary support for America and her subsequent actions, the consoling letters, and public statements about how sorry the region was, CARICOM leaders have not yet fully come to grips about the impact that these events will have on the quality of life of the Caribbean both in the short and long term. Already the bewilderment of the political leadership in the Caribbean is evidenced by the fact that they have failed to develop a collective emergency response to the negative fall-out of the U.S. situation or a plan to get the region out of this quagmire. There is the tendency to play political ostrich and bury their heads in the sand, and to hope that things are going to pan out and that Uncle Sam will be gracious as in the past.
Moreover, some CARICOM nations are too busy taking care of internal political bickering and wrangling to focus on the impact of something that happened thousands of miles from Kingston or Port-of-Spain. After all, as former U.S. House Speaker, Tip O'Neal said, "Politics is always local." So that for CARICOM's political leaders staying in power is infinitely more important than how will a U.S. and New York contraction in the economy harm the Caribbean.
In a region whose economies are basically agrarian, their economic policies as an archipelago of developing nations make them structurally dependent on foreign capital. And this dependency has increased three-fold over the past decade as traditional aid-donors England, Canada and the United States have shifted their focus to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, slowing aid to the Caribbean to almost a trickle. So that the WTC and Pentagon attack will further staunch this already measly aid flow, as America looks inward and prosecutes a war far from its shores. The blunt truth of the matter is that the Caribbean is no longer of geopolitical importance since the demise of the Soviet Union, and so there is no obligation for the industrialized west to pay to much attention to the region.
The truth of the matter is that for the Caribbean, today's economic development still resembles the mercantile policies of centuries ago where primary production of raw materials for use, and shipment to the metropolis of the colonial power characterized economics in the Caribbean. This reality has been further aggravated by the fact that following the attainment of independence, these governments adopted policies still in place today of import substitution. The quandary that Caribbean governments find themselves in today is how to proceed with economic development when their economies have been ruined by the dependence on one or two crops, when industrialization and manufacturing are fledgling and weak, and where the development of the service industry sector is solely and exclusively dependent on the tourism dollar.
Indeed, the first casualty of the WTC and Pentagon hits will be the Caribbean tourism industry and by year's end all of the governments in the region will face budget deficits as a result. As more and more tourists stay home in this important winter season, hotels all across the region will be forced to either fold or lay off many workers. Bear in mind that the tourism industry is in many CARICOM nations is the largest employer and the most important source of foreign currency. When foreign currency becomes even scarcer CARICOM governments will be hard pressed to purchase much-needed goods on the international market. And this will also have a heavy impact on the local private sector whose ability to also purchase goods on the overseas market will be greatly curtailed.
That is why CARICOM's leaders must come out of their present state of denial and find solutions to the real problems that loom on the immediate horizon. Rhetoric, self-aggrandizement, infantile strutting, and the "cock in the yard" syndrome, will get the region no place. The region's leaders must know that with the loss of over 70,000 jobs in New York City alone, and the contractions in the construction industry, remittances by families back to the Caribbean will slow down appreciably. In fact there is evidence that there is growing job loss in the Caribbean community that will help make things difficult for the region that gets approximately $1 billion annually from remittances from familes in the United States.
Then there is the issue of immigration restrictions and the new-found love affair with the 1996 Terrorism Act that gives the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) wider powers of search, detention, arrest and deportation. America has already tightened its borders and begun to make it difficult for people to enter the country on student and holiday visas, or to visit with relatives. This trend will continue making migration to the United States from the Caribbean to seek greener pastures a harder undertaking that will discourage the annual influx of soon-to-be undocumented immigrants.
Already, CARICOM nations are facing serious economic times as the effects of the United States recession sets in. The region's leadership must know that U.S. industries are laying off thousands of workers left, right and center and that any financial kindness that is likely to come the Caribbean's way from the U.S. will be miniscule indeed. Other traditional donors England and Canada have signed on to the Unites States war against Afghanistan and will help pay for this costly effort making aid donations to the Caribbean also very limited.
But perhaps the most serious impact for the Caribbean is that these acute economic problems could undermine the political structure in the region and pave the way for the rise of the narco-economy. More and more the problematic economic situation across the Caribbean will be linked to the present political failures. Increasingly, stagnating economies, high rates of inflation, reduced rates of capital; rising unemployment and a sagging health regime will undermine the popularity of political parties and their governments. High unemployment will help strengthen and develop the narcotics industry that could become a parallel underground economy that beings with it a new level of criminal activity that already cash-strapped CARICOM economies will have great difficulty in combating.
To sum up: The present agrarian nature of CARICOM economies, weak political structures, dependency on the industrialized nations for developmental aid, and the low level of the productive forces will be further undermined by the negative fallout of the WTC and Pentagon attacks. It was Grenada's revolutionary Prime Minister Maurice Bishop who said that "when America catches a cold, we in the Caribbean get pneumonia." The man was right, as usual, and right now the Caribbean is experiencing the first stages of this pneumonia one that could become acute and make the region far sicker than it already is.