This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora.
In late spring of 2005, a meeting took place at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, overlooking Lake Ontario in Toronto. Suits circulated, handshakes proliferated, introductions were made.
The large grouping included university professors, consultants, Canadian government officials, non-governmental types, members of the Caribbean consular corps, business executives, representatives of Caribbean associations in Canada, and a scattering of independent, interested people.
The gathering was for a Canada-Caribbean Diasporas and Development Conference, convened by the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL), with the support of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). One researcher underlined the importance of the Caribbean, as a region with one of the highest levels of remittances per capita in the world. Given that such financial flows constitute about 14% of the region’s Gross Domestic Product, we begin to see why remittances are fast becoming the new golden egg in the eyes of the development and international financial community. For these policymakers, remittances potentially hold the key to economic development and poverty reduction.
Hence the preoccupation with counting: How might we measure it? Keep track of it? To what use can we put it? How can we ensure remittances are delivered most efficiently? How might we promote competition within the financial sector (banks, money transfer agencies), all in the interests of a free market?
Many would say that the landmark discussion that took place in Toronto involved the major stakeholders: government; private and financial sectors; diaspora groups. One might ask, however, about those who generated such staggering levels of remittances (it needs to be said that this is decidedly not a middle-class driven phenomenon). They were not there that fine day, except as statistics in the studies rolled out for our consumption. Or perhaps in the person of the bellhops and waitresses, immigrants whose paycheck goes partly and directly to Western Union.
Today the most common Caribbean export is not sugar, rice, coffee, bananas, bauxite, but its people. Recent levels of out-migration are the product of economic dislocation, steady companion to the introduction of structural adjustment programmes across the region from the mid 1980s onwards. The transnationalization of household life, with individuals migrating in order to keep families going at home, is now a fact of life for most. In a study carried out among hundreds of Guyanese women in the early 1990s, almost everyone knew someone who had migrated or directly depended on remittances.
Back to Westin Harbour Castle, where remittances found an enthusiastic reception among developed donor countries and multilateral and development agencies. Even the IMF and World Bank, we were told, were listening. It is interesting, ironic even, that the same institutions that have been the architects of neoliberal policies that have destroyed livelihoods and lives, devastated Caribbean social structure, and led so many to seek a life ‘in foreign’, now want us to see remittances as one answer to a structural problem they have in large part created.
Worryingly, this latest interest does not necessarily signal a reversal of policy, but its intensification. Many of the groups present at the conference were from professional associations, alumni and village development organizations, all of which have channeled significant monies and in kind donations to communities and institutions in the region.
All of this in the context of neoliberal policies that have led to substantial public disinvestment in relation to the provision of education, health, infrastructure and other essential social services.
The supposed magic bullet of remittances raises the question, then, of whether the resources of Caribbean women and men overseas, individually and collectively, are being called upon to do the work of the state. Are remittances, a popular response to marginalization, being hijacked to offer officially sanctioned bandaid relief, a solution to local unemployment, and a safety valve against social unrest?
We should consider what working people might have to say about this latest effort to recruit them to subsidise an intolerable and inequitable global system that led to their departure in the first place.
How might they respond to initiatives from on high to capitalize on their survival strategies, their efforts to hold down a day and night shift, two and three poorly paid and insecure jobs, all to support loved ones in at least two countries? Their voices are conspicuous in their absence from a new solution to the Caribbean’s woes that so clearly depends on their labour. The garish neon sign at the Westin Harbour Castle reads “Not you. Your money.”
