While in Jamaica for a week on work, Maya Khankhoje had the dubious pleasure of being housed in an ultra luxurious country club which greatly contrasted with the poverty outside its gates.

Life and Debt: produced and directed by Stephanie Black. Edited by John Mullen. Narration by Jamaica Kincaid (based on A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid Ó 1987). Read by Belinda Becker. Cinematography by Malik Sayeed et al. www.lifeanddebt.org/links.html.

Life and Debt is a documentary about Life and Death, the care-free life of winter-weary tourists who regularly disembark on Jamaican soil and the slow and sometimes not-so-slow death of Jamaica's economy and of the inhabitants of the "island in the sun" that Harry Belafonte made so popular.

The circular narrative of the film opens with the arrival of a boatload of tourists and closes off with their departure. Like any good school essay, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, the middle consisting of drinking, eating, dancing, surfing, swimming, sunbathing, sightseeing and many of the mindless activities often associated with tourism from the North. The subtext, however, is not all that simple and sunny. It is a complex tapestry depicting the lives of individual Jamaicans against the backdrop of the demise of their traditional way of life. The master weavers of this tapestry are the CEO's of multinational corporations and their henchmen such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter American Development Bank whose collective policies add up to higher interest rates, lower wages, and a higher unemployment rate culminating in a recession.

Even though the film uses traditional documentary techniques, it has a rich artistic resonance thanks to poetic voiceovers by Jamaica Kincaid, archival footage of Harry Belafonte films and music by Bob Marley. The cinematography by Malid Sayeed and his team is stunning, black and white scenes depicting the bleak lives of average Jamaican and colour scenes showing azure skies, turquoise seas and flaming flowers. A group of Rasta rappers who sit around a fire, acts like a Greek chorus commenting on globalization and its impact on traditional Jamaican life.

"Once you cease to be a master, you no longer are human rubbish, you are just a human being. So too with the slaves, once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted, they are just a human being." J.K.

The substantive part of the film starts with an interview with Michael Manley, (two-term Prime Minister between 1972 and l992) taken a couple of years before the film was made because of his impending death from cancer. Even though he came to power on an anti-IMF platform, Manley was ultimately forced to ask for a hard loan from the IMF when his plea to OPEC countries to bail out poor countries failed. Algeria and Venezuela were willing to help, the Soviet Union was not. He called this "one of the bitter traumatic experiences of my public life". The tragic results of this wrong decision for the right reasons can be seen in the case studies below.

"These loans achieved neither growth nor development". M.M.

Countries from the South are often derided by countries from the North as Banana Republics. Yet bananas, highly prized for their nutritious value and their appeal to our ape-like instincts, are used to destroy the economies of the South. The US, owner of Chiquita -infamous for breaking a strike in Colombia in 1993 in which 40 workers died- pressured the WTO to stop the preferential treatment that Jamaica enjoys as a Commonwealth country in the banana trade with the UK. Jamaica's banana production collapsed in the face of a more "efficient" and poorly paid Central and South American banana market.

"We use machetes to farm, but the world uses machines. Can machete compete with machines?" David Coorek, former Minister of Finance.

Jamaica also had a thriving milk production until US, Australian, New Zealand and European Union farmers dumped subsidized milk solids into the island's economy, forcing Jamaican dairy producers to slaughter 700 cows and throw down the drain millions of dollars’ worth of milk production.

Independent farming is another victim of globalization in the island since luxury hotels import most of their produce from Miami in order to satisfy the aesthetic and culinary preferences of tourists. The Blue Mountains of Jamaica produce some of the best coffee in the world, but unfortunately the revenues are not pumped back into the economy since coffee production is owned by Japanese interests.

Whereas traditional modes of production are collapsing, new industries are cropping up. One of them is the garment industry in duty-free zones which function like extraterritorial enclaves of the United States. There, Jamaican workers are neither protected nor do they learn any new skills, because sewing a sleeve day in and day out does not train them to be tailors. And if the workers protest, Chinese workers are quickly flown in with two-year contracts and a decent salary saved back home.

"Our company is nothing but a red pin on a map somewhere". Anonymous worker.

Tourism, of course, is now the number one employer and security -which includes dog training- is the fastest growing industry today, with 300 dogs and several branches throughout the island. The growth of the coffin business -due to the violence that besets the island- is another macabre twist to what financial experts euphemistically call the "restructuring" of the economy. In fact, watch dogs are shown in the film as a wrap up to the theme of violence.

If Life and Debt doesn't make you hopping mad, it is because the woes of our millennium have numbed your senses. And if it doesn't mobilize you to take action, then there is definitely a problem. Black's deft direction, Manley's lucidity, Kincaid's poetry, Marley's music, Belafonte's voice as well as the voices of the average Jamaican, are bound to galvanize even the deadest of all souls.

“Every native is a potential tourist and every tourist is a native from someplace.” J.K.