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Colonialism Under A Microscope

Colonialism Under A Microscope image
Parent Issue
Month
June
Year
1990
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

"Green Gold: Bananas and Dependency in the Eastern Caribbean" by Robert Thomson, Latin America Bureau, 1989, $7.50 paper.

In the 1970s, over 70,000 people left the Windward Islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent as legal or illegal emigrants. Confronted with unemployment rates on all four islands surpassing 50% and receiving little sympathy from their respective governments -all of them deeply in debt - the islanders had little choice. In a scenario all too familiar in the so-called Third World, the population was starving on islands that had once fed and provided work for all.

Robert Thomson's "Green Gold," another in an excellent series of essays from the Latin America Bureau, examines why. And again the scenario is a familiar one: all four islands have been underdeveloped by a colonial metropole - in this case London - for whom they are forced to develop a luxury crop rather than developing their own respective countries. The islanders' future is mortgaged for the colonizers' present. And the nominal independence of the four islands doesn't change this relationship a bit. Political independence is undercut and circumscribed by economic dependence.

What makes "Green Gold" stand out from numerous case studies of similar phenomena is its focus on four islands - the largest of them, Dominica, only 750 square miles - whose small size exponentially magnifies the consequences of dependency and underdevelopment. Following Thomson's genealogy of the islands' present banana economy is like looking at colonialism under a microscope.

After a brief overview of the islands' demographics - in which he notes that the Windward Islands remain the only place in the world where more than 50% of foreign exchange earnings are made through bananas - Thomson turns his lens to the British company Geest, which has an almost complete monopoly on imports and exports into the Windwards. Geest not only controls the transportation network which ships the islands' bananas to Britain, but also the ripening centers in which they are developed and the wholesale networks that distribute them.

After each of these Geest subsidiaries takes its slice of the profits, the cut left over for the growers is less than 10% of the original market price. Since most of the islands' capital is repatriated by Geest, there is little money left for developing basic human services, such as education and health. Close to half of the islanders are illiterate; under 5% complete secondary education. Since most basic foodstuffs (including 100% of cereals and 80% of meats) have to be imported at prices many growers can't afford, over half of them consume less than 80% of the calories necessary for good health.

Moreover, Geest takes none of the many risks involved with cultivation of bananas. "Banana work," writes Thomson, "is a risky business. The crop is highly susceptible to fungal disease and grown in an area hit by numerous hurricanes. But it is the banana farmer who bears the costs of the industry." Geest, learning from the experience of its fellow banana conglomerates in Central America, doesn't own any land on the Windward Islands - thereby avoiding hurricanes, diseases, and labor unions which have played such a large role in both Eastern Caribbean and Central American history.

Taking advantage of its huge banana profits, its lack of capital in the Windwards themselves, and the growing surplus of bananas on the world market, Geest is in a position to pull out of the Windwards completely should the islanders decide to "make trouble." The islanders themselves - who have been prevented from diversifying so that Geest's diversification might be possible - are trapped by a dependency on the banana market and the firm that connects them to it.

That dependency is compounded by the small size of most plots and limited credit options available to their owners. Close to 80% of all the growers work plots of ten acres or less; 95% of those on St. Vincent and Dominica have five or less hand tools as their only form of equipment. Close to 70% of Windward farmers have no access to credit. Poor and vulnerable, the growers have very little leverage in their negotiations with Geest concerning prices. As Thomson reluctantly concludes, "ironically, it seems the Windward Islands need Geest more than Geest needs them, even if most of the profits from bananas have always found their way to Lincolnshire rather than to the Eastern Caribbean."

In his final chapter, Thomson offers some solutions to this dilemma, the most obvious of which involves crop diversification. But such a move is itself impossible, he warns, until growers receive enough money for their bananas to implement diversification in the first place. Possible alternative crops such as nutmeg and coffee require four to five years to mature; if the growers are to use some of their precious little land to grow them, their fewer banana stalks must earn them more money. Even now, close to half the islands' farmers earn less than the $400 U.S. which the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute defines as necessary for subsistence level existence.

But not only Geest stands in the way of such a transition. As Thomson's sobering account of the Grenadan Revolution makes clear, no Caribbean country that tries to reduce its economic dependency and consequent political subservience can expect much sympathy from either Britain or the U.S. Only if the Windwards bind together, suggests Thomson, will they have a chance of overcoming Geest. And, one might add - recalling Dominica's enthusiastic support for the Grenadan Invasion in 1983 - only if the islands bind together can they hope to stand up to the United States.

Mike Fischer is a member of Solidarity and an editor of the Detroit-based magazine, Against the Current.

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