As we recover from the Mash revelry after the long weekend, perchance we may turn our thoughts to what we can do to really make our republican dream of a self-reliant and self-assured people become real. Or of course, we may choose to begin planning for the next big bash, which we can market for tourists to watch how “the natives” cavort with great abandon. Much as the Trinidadians will be doing this coming weekend, with their Carnival extravaganza.
But we should take note that even though one invited foreign economic “expert” has advised that the Caribbean should concentrate on tourism, because we have a comparative advantage in this area, the advice of even more eminent economic experts have done nothing to remove the developed countries – the present source of our tourists – from their economic crisis. So, he says, we should look towards China for tourists, since with the explosive growth of their economy, there are now hundreds of millions of Chinese in a position to jet across the world for a vacation.
We would have thought, however, that the expert may have spared a thought as to why China was able to accomplish that astounding economic success, when at independence in the 1960s and 70s, every West Indian territory, including Guyana, was light years ahead of China by every economic, and social metric. And it was not a matter of size as some may reflexively retort, as we relapse into our habitual exculpatory mode.
Singapore, which long ago spurted ahead of every other ex-British colony, is still far ahead of China and more to the point was smaller than even Trinidad but without any of the latter’s petroleum reserves. In fact, the Prime Minister of Singapore has explicitly compared his country’s success with the stagnation of the West Indies, especially Jamaica. What we want to suggest therefore is that while tourism should always be a source of income to any economy, it cannot be positioned as the linchpin of that economy. To do so would be to forever place the future of the Caribbean at the whims and fancies of the always fickle wealthy.
As Singapore did 50 years ago, we have to look strategically ahead and plan how we can integrate ourselves into the global economy, not as producers of fun and frolic and certainly not of primary products such as sugar and timber. Our population is too minuscule to create our own markets and our productive capabilities are too small to compete in the manufacture of anything but niche products. Where we can compete is in the brave new world of information communication technology (ITC).
The recent purchase of WhatsApp, a company with only 55 employees, by Facebook for US$19 billion, is an indication of the evolution of the capitalist mode of production, still the most efficient ever. Marx claimed that the value of products was based on the amount of labour that went into them, but that is not true. The value of something is whatever people will pay for it. If you have a product people want enough, you can get a high price.
More than a decade ago, NY Times’ Thomas Friedman, referring to products such as computer chips, pointed out that the lighter the weight of the new exports, the more value was embedded. Today, the connectivity that WhatsApp delivers is totally weightless, but has more value than all the Caribbean Islands combined.
The lesson for the Caribbean is to pursue even more assiduously the path signalled by former Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo, when he decided to initiate liberalisation in his telecoms sector, distribute 90,000 free Internet-ready laptops and bring in the infrastructure for total Internet connectivity. The education system must put its shoulder to the wheel to ensure that young Guyanese deliver us to this brave new ICT world.
