SIXTY-FOUR (64) years ago, Dr Eric Williams, T&T’s
first prime minister, was a principal player in a Howard University
conference on The Economic Future of the Caribbean, which
makes interesting reading today.
The conference proceedings were re-published in 2004 by the
Majority Press, with a new preface by Erica Williams-Connell
and introduction by Dr Tony Martin.
Eric Williams’ paper set out four descriptive, four explanatory
and one implicitly prescriptive characteristic of the Caribbean
economy.
Descriptive
characteristics
The four descriptive characteristics were that:
n The Caribbean has remained agricultural (except for minerals
in a few instances);
n the sugar industry is king and dominated by foreign capital;
n the Caribbean economy has concentrated on export crops and
imported foods;
n (As a result) the small farm is the exception and not the
rule.”
Williams sought to explain the four above descriptive characteristics
by noting that:
“(The fact that) Caribbean economy has concentrated on
export crops (with the) domination of sugar (is) neither accidental
nor arbitrary.
“Outside vested interests have deliberately fostered
this specialisation on export staples... Food production is
encouraged only in the gravest emergency, as it was in 1914
and as it is today (1943).
“Trade in the Caribbean has followed the flag. Each unit
(territory) is geared towards some export market in which
it enjoys tariff protection in return for certain obligations.”
Williams then asserted that “Colonialism is the enemy
of Caribbean diversification…the most natural industry
of the Caribbean, sugar-refining was and is deliberately prohibited
by foreign competitors.
“Today (1943), the United States retains a higher tariff
on white sugar than on brown from Cuba and Puerto Rico.
“The encouragement of sugar-refining and development
of secondary industries will relieve the pressure of population
on the land.”
Implied prescriptive
characteristic
Williams identified a final characteristic with an implied
prescription:
“Inter-insular (ie Caribbean) relations are virtually
non-existent. The Caribbean, in fact, is a geographic expression...a
collection of isolated units, functioning independently of
the others.
Its development as a single region has been sacrificed to
the artificial political affiliations of its component parts.
Federation will make possible an economic development now
impossible, and give the Caribbean area a bargaining power
in the world which its isolated units do not now have.
The peoples of the Caribbean have for some years increasingly
recognised the principle of independence; it is time now for
...recognise the privilege of interdependence.”
To this we can add another prescription addressed by Williams,
where he concluded that diversification required:
“…tariff autonomy to protect the infant industries
from the potent and highly organised foreign manufacturers”.
Williams notes unbelievably (when one fast forwards to the
present) that:
“Caribbean sugar production has declined as a result
of economic nationalism in the world…Domestic beet sugar
in the United States costs one-third more than Cuban sugar,
Louisiana cane sugar is twice as much.…a striking illustration
of what a recent study by the Brookings Institution calls
‘the economic monstrosity of high-cost protected producers
driving the low-cost unprotected producer out of business.’”
Over the intervening 64 years, two of the four descriptive
economic characteristics have changed substantially: agriculture
and sugar are no longer dominant (except in employment terms
in some countries), but there is still a dominance of preferential
based export agriculture.
Domestic food production continues to be neglected except
in “the gravest emergency” (witness last week’s
Caricom heads meeting on food prices) and there is a persisting
weakness of small farming.
There also has been a greater continuity of preferences. Interestingly,
economic nationalism has now resulted, arguably, in the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) virtually eliminating, with our complicity,
the space for the “tariff autonomy” which Williams
saw in 1943 as a potent benefit of political independence.
Finally, in terms of prescription, the Caribbean Community
(Caricom) now exists and serves as flagship for regional interdependence,
but dominated by structures and policies mimicking another
reality (the European Community).
Moreover, Caricom excludes the non-English-speaking Caribbean
(save Haiti in some respects) and remains largely stagnant
in a Sargasso Sea of insularity and centripetal external forces.
The appraisal of Williams’ legacy as politician, and,
as well, that of his party in terms of his 1943 economic manifesto,
as it were, deserves derivative appraisal.
More on this next week
