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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 1 JULY, 2018
B Y S C O T T T I M C K E & L E V I G A H M A N
PROGRESS ATWHAT COST?
Panel discusses impacts of austerity policies
PANEL DISCUSSION
Over half a century ago,
the Caribbean’s own
postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon asserted that
capitalism would create “geographies of hunger” and
“shrunken bellies” across the Global South. Sadly,
we believe this bleak prediction and picture of the
future remains valid in the present day. For this
reason, the Departments of Literary, Cultural, and
Communication Studies and Geography recently
assembled a panel to publicly discuss the causes and
consequences of austerity, a government policy not
coincidentally associated with the all too familiar
phrases: “tighten your belt” and “band your belly.”
But under austerity policies, who exactly has to
tighten their belts? Andwho ismaking such a demand?
Panelists raised these and many other issues. The
discussions took place on the evening of April 18 at the
UWI Teaching and Learning Complex at 27 Circular
Road, St Augustine.
Daren Conrad led the session, noting that real
GDP has declined since 2013, which he attributed
to poor fiscal management. Suggesting this needed
urgent attention given declining energy revenues, he
said targeted spending, slight currency devaluation,
and more effective public services were needed.
Conrad also said orienting consumption patterns
towards domestically produced goods was equally
important, arguing that public policy choices like
this can ease hardships for the general public, but
only if management structures change. His final
recommendation was that TT’s economy ultimately
needs to shift to knowledge- and service-based society.
Inverting expectations, SunityMaharaj highlighted
T&T’s uneven prosperity, and how such imbalances
of privilege are detrimental to society. For example,
the expansion of private health care is connected
with the degradation of the public health sector. She
noted a similar dynamic is at play in both security
and education, among other things. In illustrating
her points, Maharaj queried whether it was worth
aspiring to a privatized conception of prosperity. For
her, the recession provides an opportunity to transform
Caribbean society by experimenting with alternative
models of “development.”
For Anne-Marie Pouchet, austerity policies
primarily benefit lending institutions, as well as
capitalists who continue to extract from the Caribbean.
She stated that while restructuring public spending
sounds neutral, in practice thesemeasures compromise
the already economically marginalized. Citing the
IMF’s admittance in 2017 that austerity policies do
more harm than good and consistently fail to achieve
their own objectives, Pouchet proposed members
of the public to “consider the source” when credit
rating agencies like Moody’s offer restructuring
recommendations.
One way to identify the social disparities of
austerity, Dylan Kerrigan suggested, is to enroll the
idea of “the sociological imagination.” This approach
seeks to analyze the context of the individual. Taking
the example of poverty, culture is the way people
react and develop ways to live with a situation, which
oftentimes may be illegal. This points to poverty
being human-induced, and hints at larger and more
complex social explanations. Kerrigan ended by noting
that, unfortunately, austerity policies are clouded in
modes of thinking contaminated by biases that blame
individuals, rather than seek explanations that look at
the larger circumstances people are living in.
With regard to gender relations, MeghanCleghorn
argued that austerity policies may encourage repressive
mores. She cited austere attitudes to sex education in
the public school system, one result of which has been
a high prevalence of HIV in young girls, which she said
hints at patriarchal and parochial currents in society.
For Cleghorn, outdated syllabi require overhauls and
should go along with progressive instruction. She said
in an economic downturn, domestic violence increases
as women tend to stay with their abusers because the
social services are down-scaled. For Cleghorn, true
development should consider psychological, sexual,
and gender issues.
Cheryl-Ann Boodram believed social workers
were seeing the ground-truth of a crisis situation
caused by neoliberal financialization and resulting in
the erosion of social norms. She said austerity was not
new to post-colonial societies where class hierarchies
have long caused unequal distribution andmaladaptive
access to resources. She said although there is a
rhetoric that people must “tighten their belts” and
adopt stringent measures, this does little more than
increase social inequality, as cuts to public services
Co-conveners of the public forum on austerity in T&T, from left, Levi
Gahman, (Lecturer of Political Geography and Critical Development
Studies) and Scott Timcke (Lecturer of Communications Studies).
Featured panelists of the public forum on austerity. From left, back row: Meghan Cleghorn; Adaeze Greenridge; Ian Dhanoolal; Trina Halfhide; Anne Marie Pouchet; Dylan Kerrigan.
Front row, from left: Cheryl-Ann Boodram; Daren Conrad; Sunity Maharaj.
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