Subsidized American food imports destroy Jamaican farming and force tourism dependence

Evidence

Life and Debt adapts to a Jamaican context Kincaid’s Antiguan polemic against tourism and against the neocolonial politics of unequal freedom of movement. This is a film about arrivals, departures, and those unable either to arrive or depart. Yet the most consequential arrival is the hardest to depict: the advent of the “free market” in the form of IMF structural adjustment, rendered visible by planes disgorging federally subsidized American milk, onions, and potatoes at prices that destroy unsubsidized Jamaican farmers whose operations were small scale but intergenerational. To compensate for the resultant agricultural collapse and the rising debt that follows from importing more subsidized American food, Jamaica must increase its dependence on tourists who, disgorged from sleek jets, are then immured in dedicated pleasure zones. Black’s film sets up an implicit link between the visiting tourists’ structured getaways and the structural adjustment visited upon the locals from which there is no getaway. We see guard dogs being trained to segregate mobile pleasure-seekers from trapped, angry locals forced to live their dislocated lives in place. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 60

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the mechanism by which subsidized imports undercut smallholders is a strong teachable case for the extraction/globalization strand.
• XREF: Parallels the neocolonial economy analysis and the Caribbean plantation strand from Black Marxism readings. — connects to: Federal commodity food programs perpetuate colonial dependency on Native lands — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 722; Extraterritorial production pollutes the US through imported goods. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 1000; Post-war farm subsidies favoring big farms destroyed the small-dairy economy. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1427 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Postwar U.S. land seizures destroyed Guam’s self-sufficient food economy #exemplifies (0.75) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 241
• Capitalism’s market expansion inherently disrupts soil and displaces subsistence farmers #corroborates (0.72) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 278
• Colonialism systematically dispossesses the colonized of resources under a justifying discourse of hierarchy #corroborates (0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 246