Life and Debt
While I was sick, my wife and I watched a DVD we borrowed from the library. The library is a great source of finding interesting movies that you may not find at the video store. And it's free to borrow. And you can usually keep them for at least a week.
Anyway we borrowed the movie Life and Debt. It's more of a documentry about the contrast of what you see when you visit Jamaica as a tourist at the "mega-resorts" vs. the reality of life in a developing nation and how our globalization policies threaten the ability for them to even provide for themselves.
This movie shows you the unfair impact that the IMF, World Bank and huge U.S. corperations have in taking advantage of a struggling county.
The thing that troubles me most is that I don't know what actions can be taken to help. I know that if I buy fair trade Ethiopian coffee, that the farmers are being paid a fair wage for thier efforts. That is something that is direct and pretty easy to do. Jamaica (and other countries like them) doesn't even get a chance to develop a sustainable industry for itself. Because of the way that global policies are made, local farmers can't compete with imported foods. Corperations set up manufacturing factories where it is the least expensive for them, and that usually means Asia. Other than tourisim, there is nothing that I can do as a consumer (in our consumer driven society) that will support Jamaica. And that leaves me feeling bad.
So I don't know. Maybe the first step is knowledge. Check out this movie at the library, or buy it off the Life and Debt website, and see it for yourself. Maybe if enough people watch it, a solution can be found.
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Monday 04/07/2008 | 11:24 am
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