Break The Cycle Now!

12, Jul 1999
The transfer of technology is a myth. If like us you are a captive dependent economy, all that happens is you become even more dependent when you are chained to their technology and as undeveloped societies you remain purchasers and leaseholders of outdated stuff that has to be constantly upgraded at higher costs from the source.

The banana farmer, the commission agents, as well as the governments are all tied in to this ongoing, self-perpetuating system of earning foreign exchange reserves US dollars with the logic that demands exportation to a strong dollar economic area or DIE.

The Geest boats arrive once every two weeks to take the bananas out of Dominica, St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada and ship the cargo across the Atlantic to preferential treatment of soft tariffs within the European Community.

When the Geest boats are in port, everything else comes to a standstill. Filling those boats are the be-all and end-all of existence. When the boats leave there is some respite and then its on to preparation for the next arrival within 14 days. There is virtually no time.

And such great care is taken because any "spotting" on a bunch of the fruit renders the bunch useless and it is left to rot. No one stops to think, far less to consider other means of survival, either in terms of diversification or developing downstream productive capacity out of the banana sector.

Reggie Dumas in his piece on Thursday last made the point about the failure to even develop and deepen the intra-Caribbean market for bananas and banana derivatives which could provide some salvation from the disaster the Eastern Caribbean islands presently face in regard to preferential treatment in Europe and the objections to this raised by the WTO (World Trade Organisation), backed strenuously by the USA.

Dumas talked about getting foreign, canned peaches and apricots instead of fresh bananas for breakfast in the hotels around St Kitts and one can almost hear a St Lucian banana farmer responding to that in the following manner: "How much bananas the St Kitts hotel will buy six bunches?"

The point is that the banana farmer, the commission agents, as well as the governments are all tied in to this ongoing, self-perpetuating system of earning foreign exchange reserves US dollars with the logic that demands exportation to a strong dollar economic area or DIE.

But it is all a dead-end nevertheless, because these very foreign reserves are quite quickly eaten up by imports to satisfy other requirements of our mono-culture economies, eg consumer durables and food. The result is that the only accumulation is primitive accumulation and there is nothing significant in terms of national savings and investments to generate fundamental and diversed development that can really make the difference. We must break the cycle.

The question we must ask ourselves is: why couldn't the recently held Caricom Summit of Caribbean Heads of Government and technocrats not decide there and then to establish immediately in the Eastern Caribbean, two or three manufacturing plants to develop downstream industries out of the banana sector, the research for which, according to Dumas, has already been done.

At that Summit, the economies of the Windward Islands should have been declared as being in crisis and the political will should have been summoned to at least sow the seeds for the basic diversification of the Eastern Caribbean economy. That was not done and so the 20th Caricom Summit must be declared a colossal fake.

But what can we expect from leaders many of whom are party to the view that sovereignty is old hat and pass. (this was widely promoted at the time when the Shiprider Agreements were being signed).

It has also been a commonplace notion, given the deepening of the ongoing globalisation process, that the conception of "national economies" is no longer a reality, such a view being propagated particularly by Robert B. Reich in his book, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, published in 1991.

And to further confound the situation, since the collapse of the USSR, the pernicious assessment has been advanced by leading Western social analysts and political-economists that "ideology has come to an end".

Imagine that! The science of ideas, relative to the constant, all-embracing development of the human condition, has come to an end. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of our present leaders have bought into such idiotic notions.

Have we then reverted once again to a kind of "Middle-Ages" (ie 5th-15th century) when the world seemed devoid of reason and enlightenment and coherent abstract speculation? Are we now to be beholden only to the dictates and vagaries of the market-place and to the demands and requirements only of pure capital accumulation? For, mind you, that is the specific feature of this present stage of globalisation.

If that is the view and the perspective that inform Caribbean leaders, then all they will be able to do first and foremost when faced with crises is to BEG. And as mendicants they shall seek, as is the present case with bananas, to appeal to the conscience and goodheartedness of the international captains of industry "for mercy" and fair play and most of all technical assistance.

William Rogers, then US Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, answered such pleas way back in1976: "Many of the developing countries are trying to impose a doctrine of total internationalisation on the industrial countries, which alone have the technological and financial capacity... The US has offered to find financing and to transfer the technology... But total internationalisation is out of the question..."

The transfer of technology is a myth. If like us you are a captive dependent economy, all that happens is you become even more dependent when you are chained to their technology and as undeveloped societies you remain purchasers and leaseholders of outdated stuff that has to be constantly upgraded at higher costs from the source.

The Japanese broke that vicious circle by stripping down high-tech pieces, doing their own blueprints from these and developing their own prototypes from which they were able to create a divergent technological base and face the world on their own terms. We on the other hand keep choosing to beg.

This is why we were so amused when the Prime Minister of Barbados at the Summit criticised the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development), yet another multilateral agency like the IMF and World Bank, for devising international standards for taxation and ascribing international application of these standards, ie criteria by which tax regimes everywhere will be judged, without any global consultation having taken place.

Soon no dependent country will qualify for multilateral financing if specific tax structures are not in place. And here we go again.