We get the life, you get the debt
I recently watched a film by Stephanie Black called "Life and Debt." The film looks at how Jamaicans are struggling to survive due to US and other foreign economic agendas. The president of Jamaica was forced to sign the country's first IMF loan in 1977. As part of the IMF agreement, they had to lower tariffs and open up the country to foreign trade. US goods (often heavily subsidized by our government) starting flooding the Jamaican market and the local industries could not compete with the cheap US prices. The film shows a milk company that had to go out of business because it could not compete with the cheap price of powered milk coming into the country. The film also showed Free Trade Zones (usually foreign garment manufacturing companies) where employees worked 10 hour days, 5 to 6 days a week for $30.00! On NPR this morning, there was a discussion about economic problems in Africa that revolved around the same issue--the local economies in Africa can't compete with the cheap goods coming from the US and Europe.
Not only are we destroying local economies all over the world, but (in my opinion) the goods that we are flooding these countries with are inferior and unhealthy (e.g., powdered milk vs. fresh local milk, frozen chickens pumped with chemicals vs. fresh locally raised chickens, McDonalds vs. homemade mom and pop vendor food, cheap clothes made from cheap synthetic materials, vs. beautiful hand-stiched locally made clothes from 100% wool, leather, cotton), not to mention the stuff we export to these countries that we would never touch ourselves (low grade meat products).
It is depressing.
Not only are we destroying local economies all over the world, but (in my opinion) the goods that we are flooding these countries with are inferior and unhealthy (e.g., powdered milk vs. fresh local milk, frozen chickens pumped with chemicals vs. fresh locally raised chickens, McDonalds vs. homemade mom and pop vendor food, cheap clothes made from cheap synthetic materials, vs. beautiful hand-stiched locally made clothes from 100% wool, leather, cotton), not to mention the stuff we export to these countries that we would never touch ourselves (low grade meat products).
It is depressing.
posted by Sara at 6:46 AM
2 Comments:
Also include the fact that used clothing from the US is sold by the bale and import to Africa. Then it is sold so cheaply, local manufacturers can't compete.
yeah, and I watched another film called "Suspended Dreams" today in my anthropology of the Middle East class. The film was made in 1992 in Lebanon-post civil war. Part of the film focused on the destruction of the environment and one scene showed hundreds of barrels of toxic waste dumped into Lebanon from America, Italy, and a few other countries. Basically we bribed a war-torn, financially unstable country to bury our trash. Isn't that nice?
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