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To the outsider, the Caribbean conjures up visions of milk-white, fine, powdery sand, such as you find at Mead’s Bay in Anguilla. The more informed tourist might also know Jamaicans love their reggae and dancehall; the Dominicans and the St. Lucians are captivated with their zouk while the Trinidadians are head over heels with their pan music and calypso. This music fills the starry nights in these islands where one can find tranquillity wrapped in blue.
But what does it mean from day to day, to be a young citizen of this part of the world?
There are a lot of us; the youth population is peaking and will begin to decline in 2010. 16-29s make up a large part of the workforce: ranging from 27% in Bermuda (the lowest), to 57% in Jamaica, 60% in St. Lucia and beyond. Ours is the important job of generating adequate output to support a reasonable standard of living for a soon “ageing” Caribbean population as we go through the 21st century.
“No problem, man”?
But unemployment is rife. While there is a lot of variation across the region, most countries have around 40% unemployment or higher among the 15-19s and around 28% unemployment among the 20-24s. Of all the Caribbean’s unemployed, just over half are 15-24.
At present our economies are based on agriculture (St. Lucia, Dominica & St. Vincent), tourism (Anguilla, Bahamas, Jamaica) and financial services (Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands & Turks & Caicos). All these industries are under some kind of pressure. Earnings from traditional sectors such as primary commodities continue their long-term decline. Caribbean countries have been undergoing a prolonged transition from being largely import protected and/or primary commodity producers to being liberalized economies.
That means countries have lost their preferential market access for bananas, sugar and garments for example – and are competing with other producers worldwide. Jamaica’s has been the longest experience of “structural adjustment,” stretching from the mid-1970s to 1996, and involving 18 agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Trinidad and Tobago began policy borrowing from the IMF and the World Bank in 1987. Guyana followed shortly afterwards, while Barbados sought assistance from the multilateral agencies at the turn of the 1990s. Dominica and Grenada also have undergone more “home grown” variants of structural adjustment. But in the meantime, concern over international crime has made OECD countries less happy with small states turning to financial services, while tourism from the United States has greatly suffered from the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001.
As part of the structural adjustment process, affected Caribbean governments have had to cut back on public sector employment and the provision of social services and support. One substantive result has been a worsening of poverty indicators across much of the region. In the larger Caribbean countries, an estimated one quarter to one third of the population is living below the poverty line.
Of course, structural adjustment is not solely responsible for our economic difficulties – and may yet, perhaps, produce some of the benefits promised. Over the decades, relying on protected primary industries may have held the development of the Caribbean back. Globalised markets are fierce, but they also portend opportunities. The question is, can those opportunities be seized within the kinds of policy frameworks we’ve seen in recent years?
Train for employment
Structural adjustment has not challenged existing inequalities. In the sugar producing countries, age-old class structures are still in place – and in some cases still along racial lines. Everyone is rightly concerned about the breakdown of the social fabric of Caribbean communities in the last ten years. What hasn’t broken down is differential access to educational opportunities, the job market and training, and most importantly, unequal participation in decision-making. The educated dominate the debate about how to organise education, their offspring get the best deal, and the cycle continues. Traditionally it has been trade unions that have challenged this state of affairs, through the likes of V. C. Bird Sr., Eric Williams, Robert L. Bradshaw and Eric Gairy.
Today, there is surely ever more reason for looking long and hard at these fractures in our societies. As globalisation proceeds, the accent on marketable skills as a precondition for employment is heightened. The manual jobs disappear, and the new jobs require language skills, IT skills, and many other hard earned “specialisms”. Where young people are excluded from skills acquisition today, it is when they need it most, and when their countries need it most. If there is one market above all that the state should intervene in, is the market in skills. And, returning to demographics, we have to guard against education and skills actually losing resources as the population ages.
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Damien E. Hughes, ESQ
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