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Essay On Life And Debt

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A Gift or a Trap? Imagine yourself as a tourist. You have come fed up with your daily ritual of your 9 to 5. You feel as if you are going to go insane if you do not have a break from the routine. Subsequently, you find yourself booking a two-week trip to Jamaica, your dream vacation where you will focus on yourself, and only yourself. The outside world doesn’t matter; all you want to care about is having the best quality vacation you possibly can. This is precisely the problem that Stephanie Black, interweaving text by Jamaica Kincaid, attaches to Jamaica’s current economic climate in her 2001 documentary “Life and Debt”. Once a self-reliant economy, Jamaica has become highly dependent on the global market due to the economic interference of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, implementing of their globalist views. The film recounts the history of Jamaica’s economy and its present-day status as an economy attempting to …show more content…

The country used to have a strong agricultural sector prior to the intervention of the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank. Banana producers Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte now control 90% of the banana industry, as it is much cheaper to produce bananas in South America than in Jamaica. Also harmed by the free trade market has been the dairy industry. What was once a thriving industry has also succumbed to the free trade market, as it does not meet government requirements. Instead of Jamaican citizens receiving fresh milk, majority of their dairy comes in the form of powdered milk. Although this powdered milk cost more to produce overall, the cost of it to be imported is less than what it costs to produce milk in Jamaica. A pivotal scene is shown in the film of a dairy farmer dumping 3,000 quarts of fresh milk into the

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