Caribbean
Jamaica in travail
Peter Kerr-Jarrett
This month the Jamaican people have been celebrating the twelfth anniversary of the island's independence. In the sprawling, sweltering capital of Kingston and in remote country villages with names like Rat-trap and Alligator Pond, parades and street dancing, craft displays and endless speeches combined in an exuberant, eclectic, now very Jamaican occasion — the 'jump-up' commemorating August 6, 1962. But in recent years the euphoria of the August celebrations has noticeably dimmed, as the island confronts the problems of autonomous development and undertakes the responsibilities as well as the sanctions of independence. Of course its situation is not exclusive. Every island in the Caribbean reflects to some degree the features of underdevelopment — high unemployment rates, widespread poverty, illiteracy and so on — but Jamaica's comparatively large population and high industrial growth rate magnifies them, and renders the search for practical solutions all the more urgent.
When the present government came to power in 1972 after a landslide victory, approximately 25 per cent of the population were unemployed, 55 per cent were illiterate (with another 15 per cent only semi-literate), and most Jamaicans had an annual income of less than £500. The main money-making areas of the economy were correspondingly unhealthy. Agricultural production had slipped, tourism had declined, while commodity price increases exceeded the percentage rise in industrial output. At the time no one, least of all the leaders of the People's National Party themselves, could have predicted their margin of success at the polls. Their victory was determined by a vigorous analysis of the island's plight as an historical consequence of colonialism, and a remedial programme that implied nothing short of a complete social revolution. And in the eyes of the electorate the leader of the party, Michael Manley, was fully equipped to head the enterprise. Young, energetic and articulate, the son of a former prime minister and PNP leader, he proselytised the idea of a 'new Jamaica' with evangelical fervour. In an island of deep religious sensibility his platform style earned him the nickname 'Joshua' and the Biblical analogue was emphasised by his appearances in public carrying a stick known as the 'rod of correction.' He took office in a national atmosphere of enthusiastic anticipation. Then the subsequent reality. Probably only a small percentage of the electorate really believed everything the government had promised, but many nevertheless regarded their vote as a symbolic commitment to a realisable future and the repudiation of a largely ignominous past. A future of industrial and technological development, egalitarian opportunity, economic self-reliance and honest, pragmatic government, a future in which the Jamaican wore a good suit to a good job. As against a history of colonial dependence, of an immobile agrarian economy and white social pre-eminence with the majority of the population in underpaid manual and domestic jobs, where • the government (though coloured in a country 98 per cent non-white) had proved in many cases vacillating, selfish and corrupt.
But the new Jamaica did not instantaneously materialise, and in a short time the new government had become entangled in the old paradoxes inherent in the economy. It found for instance that the credos of nationalism and negritude that it had formulated as the first necessary step in severing the island from its past were compromised by the necessity of encouraging tourism as a major source of revenue. Anti-white feeling on the island had
mounted sharply since the end of the 'sixties, and by 1973 a sufficient number of visitors had been robbed or insulted on the street to affect substantially the tourism figures. The government was obliged to introduce an extensive pro-tourist propaganda campaign via radio and the island's largest daily, the Gleaner. (Significantly, the daily radio audience in a population of 2 million is roughly 900,000 while only some 92,000 read a newspaper.)
Then there was, and still is, the problem of agriculture. Urban development projects, subsidies to emergent industry, and the verbal and financial encouragement of Jamaica's towncentred business and commercial activity proved incompatible with fostering interest in farming, which is now regarded generally as unrewarding and socially degrading. In the case of sugar, the staple crop in the eighteenth century slave economy and until recently the island's largest single industry, the antipathy runs particularly high. Shortage of labour is one of the domestic causes of sugar's dramatic post war collapse. Estates have closed down their factories one after another,-and at present only one of around twenty remaining shows an annual profit, while the industry in 1973 employed 9.1 per cent fewer Jamaicans than in the previous year. Bananas, the island's other substantial export crop, suffers a parallel decline — last year's figures showed a fall of 20,000 tons (or a little under 5 per cent) trom the export in 1972. Manley realises that agriculture is of paramount importance in a country of few natural resources, and he has initiated a series of programmes to check the drift away from the land. Increased subsidies and training schemes, government farms and the reform of the Ministry of Agriculture — all have been tried with varied, usually small success.
However so far the most drastic governmental measures have been directed at Jamaican business. In the attempt to channel the island's financial assets into local investment, an emergency policy of containment has been adopted. First there was an imposition of foreign exchange controls; then in 1973 Jamaicans were ordered to declare and withdraw all foreign investments and were given the choice of investing the money in Jamaican enterprises or accepting the equivalent value in government stock. The uncertainties of the former option and the low interest yield of the latter, coupled with the unprecedented restrictiveness of the maneouvre itself, induced an atmosphere of near-panic in business circles. This intensified when the government limited foreign purchase of Jamaican land and capital, as it beCame in effect impossible for a Jamaican to sell out and emigrate. The stipulation on the sale of foreign investments was recently rescinded. but a run on both Jamaican and foreign confidence is still very much in evidence. More recently, in the May budget of this year, it was announced that the American and Canadian bauxite companies on the island were to pay an extra hundred million dollars in taxes (bringing the toal to 207 million). The decision's long term effects on American involvement in the island of course remain to be seen.
These are some of the present difficulties, and there is not the space to cover other widespread effects and realities of the island's struggle for harmonious modernisation — realities like galloping inflation, food shortages and a sharply escalating crime rate. The problems are numerous and intense because the transformations that they represent are so rapid and fundamental. To minimise them is to undervalue the tremendous promise that their eventual solution holds for the country.
Peter Kerr-Jarrett was brought up and educated in Jamaica, England and US, graduating from Yale University,
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