The Diaspora And The Rolling Heads Of State
 

It was befitting to hold the meeting bringing together the Caribbean community in New York and the Caribbean heads of state at York College, City University of New York, where the President of that institution, Marcia Keizs and the Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs have roots in the Caribbean and a majority of the 6,000 student body are either first or second generation Caribbean.

As one of the Caribbean heads of state remarked, he had to travel to New York to address an audience of Caribbean people as the movement of Caribbean people within the region remains limited with the exception of the students in higher education moving among the Mona, Cave Hill and St. Augustine campuses of the University of the West Indies. The Friday evening meeting on June 20, 2008 was designed to facilitate an intellectual exchange between leaders and non-leaders about the Diaspora and the future of CARICOM.

The Diaspora community already plays a critical role in the form of remittances. Billions of dollars are sent to the respective islands to help out family members, to expand existing homes, to start businesses, and to provide some of the basic necessities of life. In many islands remittances have been instrumental in reducing the percentage of people living in poverty.

The format of the exchange enabled designated heads of state to address the audience and to allow the audience to ask questions or to make comments. This kind of mass questioning tends to attract to the open microphones speakers who are long-winded and with wide ranging concerns that invariably brings a certain incoherence to the discourse.

The world economy has changed dramatically since the initiation of CARICOM. In 2008, CARICOM is to make further strides in the development of a single market economy. Even within the units of CARICOM, there are no economies of scale. There are opportunities for investment and for the pooling of resources. The economist, Dr. Norman Girvan, has produced a paper outlining the future for further economic expansion. Trinidad and Tobago has emerged as the economic giant in the region and is standing even taller as the price of oil soars towards one hundred and fifty dollars per barrel. T and T is overflowing with investment capital at the same time non-exporting oil countries in the region are reeling from the rapid rise in oil and food prices that are now the norm in the world economy.

CARICOM at the beginning of the year signed a trade agreement with the European Union that opens those economies to Caribbean products and European products to the Caribbean region. CARICOM or CARIFORUM can no longer look inwards. It must look outwards either as a region or as independent islands. There is the dire urgency to put together an export oriented strategy to compete in the global economy of the 21st century.

The crime calamity in the Caribbean basin is indeed an outgrowth of the economic crisis and even though some sorely needed initiatives will be able to strengthen the shaky social order, long term stability will depend on the strengthening of the export sector in relationship to the world economy.

The Caribbean entered the world economy as an exporter of sugar with African slave labor. By the beginning of the 19th century, sugar production in the old English colonies had peaked and was unable to match the yield per acre of the new sugar-cane fields in Cuba. In the post-emancipation years and post-colonial interlude, the economies of the Caribbean remained moribund, starred of British investment capital and survived through the British protectionist system reserved for primary producers of the colonial empire. That arrangement created a condition of chronic surplus labor and forced segments of the Caribbean labor force to seek their fortunes elsewhere such as in the banana fields of Central America, the sugar-cane fields of Cuba, the construction complex of the Panama Canal, and the industrialized factories in the United States at the advent of World War 1. In the post-second world war, thousands fled the region to work in the industrial and service enterprises of the United Kingdom.

In the post-colonial years in an age of global protectionism, most Caribbean countries opted for the developmental strategy of industrialization by invitation hiding behind the high walls of tariff barriers. That resulted in an economy with an export producing primary sector of sugar and banana and the new sector of light manufacturing serving the needs of the domestic market. The developmental strategy accelerated the movement from country to town where the limited manufacturing sector lacked the capacity to absorb the burgeoning labor force. Salvation came through the export of skilled and unskilled labor to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The growth in the labor force has tapered off in the contemporary period and the unemployment rate in April 2006 was estimated at 134,000 or 10.7 percent of the labor force. Nonetheless, Jamaica has a precarious stratum of own-account workers estimated at 376,000. In the goods producing sector, there are 200,000 people employed in agriculture, 105,000 in construction and a mere 80,000 in manufacturing. Traditional agriculture, particularly sugar-cane, there is an effort to adapt that industry through the conversion of sugar-cane into the fuel producing ethanol. The purchase of the sugar industry by Brazilian investors should make the sugar industry more viable and contribute to reducing Jamaica’s dependency on fossil fuel and with sufficient capacity to export ethanol to the United States.

Jamaica’s economy in the last decade has seen the expansion of the alumina industry and a massive increase in the tourist sector. Alumina and bauxite are highly capital intensive and only 7,000 workers are absorbed in the mining industry. The tourist industry is labor intensive but has failed to absorb all those looking for work as the burgeoning squatter settlements are rampant in the parishes where tourism is concentrated.

Jamaica has made some headway in the export of manufacturing goods. That sector exports approximately $700m in 2006 and if Jamaica is going to absorb its surplus labor problem, there will have to be exponential growth in that sector of the economy, particularly in agro-products.

The Jamaica exporting sector is assisted by state policy. Members of the Jamaica Exporters Association are eligible for loans with reduced interest rates. But what is desperately needed is a strategic developmental plan that brings together venture capitalists from abroad and Jamaica’s indigenous bourgeoisie aimed at creating large scale production of juices like guava, june plum, etc. aimed at flooding both the European and the United States market. Micro-enterprises cannot compete in a global market and Jamaica is in need of large scale production aimed at mega-markets to absorb Jamaica’s surplus workers.

All the successful countries that have made the transition from fledgling developing countries, like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and China, have made it through adopting an export-oriented strategy.

What is required is the emergence of an entrepreneurial class with a clear understanding of the complexity of globalization that will partner with government to build that export capacity. In this age of globalization, CARICOM must look outwards and build the necessary bridges with the Caribbean Diaspora to ensure that the Caribbean is not trapped in the backwater of globalization.

 

The Importance Of Giving Thanks For The First Sixty Years Of The UWI
 

Our University of the West Indies was founded in 1948 at a time when I was busy with my senior Cambridge exams but even then I knew that it was a time of potentially world shaking events –the foundation of the state of Israel, the establishment of the World Health Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a time when as a young adult I was increasingly aware of the stifling nature of a segregated Barbadian society, and the stirring of a West Indian consciousness. This stirring was enhanced by seeing the great George Headley in that same year captain the West Indies against England in the Test match at Kensington Oval-when Walcott and Weekes in the colony match before laid waste the English bowling spearheaded by a portly trundler named Tremlett.

That West Indian consciousness was stirred in part by the stories of my Barbadian friends who were returning from Mona for holidays. They told tales of things that were foreign to me at that time –naughty night clubs, asking a young lady to the cinema without having to sit in the drawing room and be quizzed by her father who wanted to know how you were doing in school! They were tales of things that a Barbadian boy from Merricks in St. Philip could only read about.

So I went to Mona, and I could quite truthfully paint you tales of my early days there with the same nostalgia that Gray would express when he revisited Eton and there would indeed be similarity as our campus sat at the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Gray wrote:

Ah happy hills! Ah peasant shade!
Ah fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain.

In those early days there was for us few the heady ferment of the prospects of a West Indies Federation, debates about what it should and should not do. I recall my Barbadian compatriots reviling me when I said on radio that Barbados was not a fit place for the Capital of the Federation as it was a society stultified by what Keith Hunte would describe recently as a system of apartheid practiced by consenting adults.

But while I think I could entertain you with tales of my other associations with stories, some of which may be tinged with the passions of Paul and Barnabas or fall into the category of what Saint Paul himself would describe as infirmities of the flesh, this is not the time or place to do so. However, I hope I do stimulate you who are alumni to reminisce about your own days in one or other of the University sites.

But let me fast forward to the present and persuade you that this is a time for all Caribbean persons to use the occasion of an anniversary to give thanks for the institution and to do so in two special contexts. The first years of any University have to be trying ones and we must give thanks that ours has passed through the early years that saw dimming of the flame of things Caribbean. It survived the dissolution of the Federation and weathered the fissiparous tendencies that were the consequence of much of the inter-country wrangling. But eventually the Caribbean leaders formally decided that the university should remain a regional institution in perpetuity.

We should give thanks in the context of today being the first day of Caribbean American Heritage month for 2008. So I wish us to give thanks for an institution that has become even in its first sixty years a part of a proud Caribbean heritage, which has already and will increasingly contribute to the richness of the Caribbean American heritage. Here I must pay tribute to Dr. Claire Nelson, founder and president of the Institute of Caribbean Studies to whose persistence and dedication we owe the designation of such a month. The ICS website reminds us that “National Caribbean American Heritage Month has been established to recognize the historic relationship between the people of the Caribbean and the people of the United States as well as to recognize the many contributions of Caribbean immigrants and their descendants to the well-being of America. From founding father Alexander Hamilton to Hip Hop star Wyclef Jean, National Caribbean American Heritage Month provides a focal point for ingathering of the diverse voices and peoples that constitute Caribbean America – a Mosaic of Cultures… a Montage of Peoples.”

I have no doubt that the day will come when names like Sha Shana Crichton , Franklyn Knight , the President and past President of the Washington Chapter of the Alumni Association, our own Rev.Kort right Davis and others of our alumni will be among those names we will cite.

But it is now more in my capacity as Chancellor that I wish to engage you more formally and less personally and ask that you give thanks for our University and suggest why we should do so. We should rejoice that it has grown, that the little acorn represented by 33 intrepid students has now become a mighty tree with over 35, 000 thousand students from forty countries in the world. It is no longer an institution with a single geographical locus, and as you know, there are major campuses at Mona in Jamaica, Cave Hill in Barbados and St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago with what were called extension services in the other countries. But Council has decided that our presence in what was called the non-Campus territories, would be denoted the University of the West Indies in that country, so we will have the UWI in Grenada for example. There is an extension of the Mona Campus in Montego Bay. There is now a UWI presence in every one of the CARICOM countries except Surinam and Guyana. I was in Guyana last week and continue to believe in its Caribbean destiny, and I look forward to the day when we welcome Guyana back into the fold of the University of the West Indies.

In the past year, under the leadership of its Vice Chancellor Professor Nigel Harris, the University has undertaken one of its most significant transformations. It has developed a fourth campus and called it an open campus which will be the formal entity that embraces teaching by the University throughout the Caribbean. It will promote the increasingly popular “blended learning” which is a mix of distance education and presential teaching.

But let me tell a story about how I think of our contribution to things Caribbean. A few years ago I was justifying the merits of a university like ours to a very wise gentleman. Our conversation had begun by his putting to me this proposition. He said, “We give shovels to three men. Why it is that one man digs in the earth, plants seed and reaps a harvest; the second one leans on his shovel and does nothing and the third uses his shovel to bash someone in the head for reasons we often do not fathom? What would encourage all these to act like the first man?” I proposed that it was education in its pristine sense that could make the difference. I suggested that education might provide that veneer of civil accommodation that could address the differences. I also spoke about our Caribbean situation and posited that it was because of the university that so many of us had used our shovels productively and it was because of our education there that fewer of us had become shovel leaners or resorted to violence. It would be supreme arrogance to contend that the University was the sole contributor to education or even higher education in the Caribbean, but I do believe that at least in the case of the latter we can claim preeminence.

But there are other tangible products for which we can give thanks, and the obvious one is our graduates who now number over 75,000 and can be found all over the world. The University offers degrees and diplomas in every subject that could contribute to Caribbean development. There are degrees in all the traditional disciplines and some non-traditional ones such cricket studies, sports management, international trade policy, heritage studies, national security and strategic studies and hundreds of others. And still there are instances in which we should do more.

Our research covers a phenomenal range. Did you know that research at UWI has produced a new and improved steel pan, which I am told is as revolutionary as were the early ones fashioned from discarded oil drums? We have shown how the Middle Passage has affected our health. Blacks increased their blood pressure as they crossed the Atlantic so that high blood pressure is commoner in the USA than in West Africa and intermediate in the Jamaica. Because of concern with the current food crisis scientists are re-examining research that the University has carried out and is carrying out on a wide range of local foods. Some of the world’s greatest expertise in yams is in the University at St. Augustine. Apparently our research shows that yam flour makes better bread than breadfruit flour and all breadfruits are not the same!

The University has produced most of the Region’s Prime Ministers-I believe seven sitting heads of government are our alumni and several of the leaders of the opposition are as well. There are Governors General, Chief Justices, numerous members of parliament, civil servants and business men and women who are our alumni. There is no doubt about the contribution our graduates have made in every sphere of Caribbean life. Let me predict that the renascence of West Indies Cricket will be spurred by current developments at the University.

How is all this supported? I am thankful that ours is still a public institution as I would not wish such an institution so central to Caribbean development, the only one dedicated to producing regional public goods to be a predominantly private institution. Our trajectory is towards a mixed enterprise. Therefore we need the support of private individuals and this sixtieth Anniversary is for us a time to make a direct and open plea to a wide range of persons and institutions for support. I believe that our alumni should represent our most important source of support. Their contributions may not be the greatest in terms of quantity, but they should be in terms of numbers of contribution and such support can be during life or after death as they are numerous instruments to facilitate that kind of giving.

But it is not only our alumni to whom we are appealing. We believe that all Caribbean people have a stake in our institution and can contribute to the work it is doing. I have recalled elsewhere that it was in the sixtieth year of her reign that Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Rudyard Kipling marked the occasion by a poem which perhaps has relevance for us. I particularly like the second verse of that famous recessional.

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

And so in this year of our diamond jubilee, this is a time to urge that we recall where we have come from as a people, where we can go and the role of the University of the West Indies in the journey and ask with all humility that we do not forget.

(Sir George Alleyne is the Chancellor of the University of the West Indies..He was at the time addressing a Commemorative Service in Washington that marked the 60th Anniversary of the UWI.).