COVI-19, Caribbean Futures and the Unfinished business of Decolonisation
One Caribbean Nation.
COVID-19, Caribbean futures and the unfinished business of decolonisation
 |
| Dr. Don Marshall |
As the current decade dawned, a set of protracted global interacting and converging crises foretold serious challenges ahead for countries pursuant of meeting the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Three months into the year 2020, the coronavirus pandemic known as COVID- 19 marked the convergence of the hitherto crises.
The three principal crisis aspects have been:
The three principal crisis aspects have been:
1) the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society (with the net effect of transposing its volatility onto everyday life and social reproduction); 2) a global power-shift in the locus of production, growth and capital from hegemonic Western geo-spaces to Southeast Asia (implying long-term changes in norms, values and praxis in global governance structures and institutions); and 3) climate change effects beckoning adaptation and a shift away from urban fossil fuel production paradigms.
The World Health Organisation’s elevation of COVID-19 to pandemic status in March 2020 has seen a variety of management and containment responses simultaneously across countries that radically call upon a set of social, political and bio-security calibrations. These altogether overturn dominant doctrines about market society and world civilization, development and the biosphere. It is as if the Anthropocene epoch of humanity’s relationship within the web of life, extending back to the 15th century, has come to a tipping point.
At an earlier time when the existential crisis was perceived as both imperial and capitalist – not about sustainability in a climate-impacting sense – solutions took on either a socialist or capitalist variant.
Activists, intellectuals and country leaders of the Global South clamoured for a New International Economic Order (circa 1975).
Raul Prebisch, Houari Boumediene, Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, Mohammed Bedjaoui, Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie were some of the movement’s champions.
They and others pushed for a future of global sovereign equality, the redress of historical wrongs and ongoing power inequities, and an overhaul of the transnational legal regime deemed illegitimate as it was secured prior to the emergence of a Group of Non-Aligned States that will comprise the majority of independent, sovereign states in the United Nations General Assembly. A neoliberal cosmo-vision of free markets, free trade, expansion of credit, financial sector enhancement and a maximally open world economy began to crystallise from the mid-1980s coincident with the marketing of globalization. The latter was about the reach, ease and ways of accessing the global via computer and digital technology, the securitization of risk, and artificial intelligence.
In the Caribbean, national development concerns shifted away from the decolonization imperative of self-reliance, social democratic protections and subsidies, accumulation strategies around oil and mineral extraction and the promotion of mass-based tourism – towards an adaptation and accommodation to the new globalisation imperative of liberalized markets, international and local business facilitation, and the promotion of finance sector-led growth as a means of wooing investment in the nascent productive sectors that are under-capitalised.
Industrial deepening policies, food security programmes and research and development platforms neither featured in the country-by-country development agendas nor form a part of the promotion of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). The fetters to cross-border flows of capital and fractions of labour would remain a prevailing preoccupation 30 years after the Grand Anse Declaration.
The upshot was that the global financial downturn of 2008/2009 led to crises across Caribbean countries, particularly reflected in their public finances and in their high debt-to-GDP ratios. Recall that in 2002, Caribbean countries appealed for concessionary finance arrangements for countries achieving middle-income status defined strictly by per capita gross national income. Aging infrastructures, weak technology infrastructures, high levels of income inequality, susceptibility to hurricanes and climate change effects highlight levels of susceptibility and bioinsecurity that can negatively affect growth and well-being.
Discussions of this sort commenced at the Monterrey Conference in Mexico under the theme Finance for Development, dedicated to addressing the finance for development challenges confronting developing countries. The pragmatic answer to their dilemma was to access financing from capital markets, that is Western private capital. Operating in a world of quarterly and yearly performance benchmarks, capital market fund managers tend to manage credit risks with short-term policy metrics such as budget discipline and inflation control.
These beckon a raft of long-term economic policies that have come to be associated with austerity.
Eleven years on, the political economy of Caribbean development confronts the COVID-19 pandemic without food security; a limited economic diversification; a set of functionally well run CARICOM and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) institutions, but a moribund
The World Health Organisation’s elevation of COVID-19 to pandemic status in March 2020 has seen a variety of management and containment responses simultaneously across countries that radically call upon a set of social, political and bio-security calibrations. These altogether overturn dominant doctrines about market society and world civilization, development and the biosphere. It is as if the Anthropocene epoch of humanity’s relationship within the web of life, extending back to the 15th century, has come to a tipping point.
At an earlier time when the existential crisis was perceived as both imperial and capitalist – not about sustainability in a climate-impacting sense – solutions took on either a socialist or capitalist variant.
Activists, intellectuals and country leaders of the Global South clamoured for a New International Economic Order (circa 1975).
Raul Prebisch, Houari Boumediene, Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, Mohammed Bedjaoui, Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie were some of the movement’s champions.
They and others pushed for a future of global sovereign equality, the redress of historical wrongs and ongoing power inequities, and an overhaul of the transnational legal regime deemed illegitimate as it was secured prior to the emergence of a Group of Non-Aligned States that will comprise the majority of independent, sovereign states in the United Nations General Assembly. A neoliberal cosmo-vision of free markets, free trade, expansion of credit, financial sector enhancement and a maximally open world economy began to crystallise from the mid-1980s coincident with the marketing of globalization. The latter was about the reach, ease and ways of accessing the global via computer and digital technology, the securitization of risk, and artificial intelligence.
In the Caribbean, national development concerns shifted away from the decolonization imperative of self-reliance, social democratic protections and subsidies, accumulation strategies around oil and mineral extraction and the promotion of mass-based tourism – towards an adaptation and accommodation to the new globalisation imperative of liberalized markets, international and local business facilitation, and the promotion of finance sector-led growth as a means of wooing investment in the nascent productive sectors that are under-capitalised.
Industrial deepening policies, food security programmes and research and development platforms neither featured in the country-by-country development agendas nor form a part of the promotion of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). The fetters to cross-border flows of capital and fractions of labour would remain a prevailing preoccupation 30 years after the Grand Anse Declaration.
The upshot was that the global financial downturn of 2008/2009 led to crises across Caribbean countries, particularly reflected in their public finances and in their high debt-to-GDP ratios. Recall that in 2002, Caribbean countries appealed for concessionary finance arrangements for countries achieving middle-income status defined strictly by per capita gross national income. Aging infrastructures, weak technology infrastructures, high levels of income inequality, susceptibility to hurricanes and climate change effects highlight levels of susceptibility and bioinsecurity that can negatively affect growth and well-being.
Discussions of this sort commenced at the Monterrey Conference in Mexico under the theme Finance for Development, dedicated to addressing the finance for development challenges confronting developing countries. The pragmatic answer to their dilemma was to access financing from capital markets, that is Western private capital. Operating in a world of quarterly and yearly performance benchmarks, capital market fund managers tend to manage credit risks with short-term policy metrics such as budget discipline and inflation control.
These beckon a raft of long-term economic policies that have come to be associated with austerity.
Eleven years on, the political economy of Caribbean development confronts the COVID-19 pandemic without food security; a limited economic diversification; a set of functionally well run CARICOM and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) institutions, but a moribund
CSME; tourism and international business sectors highly reliant on the discretionary spend/decisions of Europeans and North Americans; a critical mass of servicesrelated workers who have begun to be displaced; and denizens of public sector workers, institutions, companies and firms wholly reliant on Caribbean governments’ ability to meet monthly salaries, monthly transfers, and obligations to creditors and contractors.
The region has to guard against COVID- 19 contagion in any single country for the multifaceted spill-over effect this will have across families and all manner of relations.
An overwhelmed public health system crisis anywhere is a regional crisis at once. If this can be achieved, the green shoots for recovery lay at the collective potential of the region.
Investments and employment in the alternative energy sectors, and the maritime economy have just begun. The biotechnology potential of the region, its flora, fauna and biomass - remains untapped; production integration across CARICOM is largely unexplored; and the potential for value-added agriculture, computer gaming and creating online platforms of value for the arts and other products remain in an embryonic state.
If ever there was a time for ideas around industrial deepening, featuring levers of state guidance and equity arrangements with private investors - both at the regional and local level, that time is now. COVID-19 presents challenges of a completely different order globally and regionally. It requires multifaceted, international and regionwide responses backed by supportive State policies and interventions. Time and space do not permit a fuller explanation of such, but international development orthodoxies of recent vintage cannot hold for the present, medium or longer term. What is important is securing geo-spatial security that is compatible with the biosphere and advancing human dignity. Inter-imperial relations and contests will persist, and so too the State as a political site of action and theatre of accumulation. These processes will remain saturated with struggles for influence, by resistance registers and formations of new subjectivities such as investors, `worker-entrepreneurs’, consumers and citizens.
Don D. Marshall, PhD is the Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Economic Research at Cave Hill Campus.
The region has to guard against COVID- 19 contagion in any single country for the multifaceted spill-over effect this will have across families and all manner of relations.
An overwhelmed public health system crisis anywhere is a regional crisis at once. If this can be achieved, the green shoots for recovery lay at the collective potential of the region.
Investments and employment in the alternative energy sectors, and the maritime economy have just begun. The biotechnology potential of the region, its flora, fauna and biomass - remains untapped; production integration across CARICOM is largely unexplored; and the potential for value-added agriculture, computer gaming and creating online platforms of value for the arts and other products remain in an embryonic state.
If ever there was a time for ideas around industrial deepening, featuring levers of state guidance and equity arrangements with private investors - both at the regional and local level, that time is now. COVID-19 presents challenges of a completely different order globally and regionally. It requires multifaceted, international and regionwide responses backed by supportive State policies and interventions. Time and space do not permit a fuller explanation of such, but international development orthodoxies of recent vintage cannot hold for the present, medium or longer term. What is important is securing geo-spatial security that is compatible with the biosphere and advancing human dignity. Inter-imperial relations and contests will persist, and so too the State as a political site of action and theatre of accumulation. These processes will remain saturated with struggles for influence, by resistance registers and formations of new subjectivities such as investors, `worker-entrepreneurs’, consumers and citizens.
Don D. Marshall, PhD is the Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Economic Research at Cave Hill Campus.
(From Barbados Today)
Comments