The world is in crisis. Pre-existing comorbidities of inequality, unemployment and poverty exacerbated by a still raging and deadly novel coronavirus pandemic and its socio-economic repercussions, increases in the cost of living boosted by the imperial proxy war in Ukraine and sanctions imposed on Russia by the West, have resulted in what the UN calls a three-dimensional crisis of soaring food prices, rising energy prices, and tightening financial conditions.

In response, long-simmering social and political discontent has boiled over and protests, growing in size and intensity, are taking place in numerous countries and on every continent. And yes, including Jamaica.

According to a UN brief issued earlier this month, “the war in Ukraine, in all its dimensions, is producing alarming cascading effects to a world economy already battered by COVID-19 and climate change, with particularly dramatic impacts on developing countries.”

And it issued a dire warning of the coming “perfect storm” of social conflict: “In an environment of already high levels of socio-economic stress due to the impacts of COVID-19, the rise in food prices threatens knock-on effects of social unrest.”

The brief notes that as many as 1.7 billion people in 107 countries are exposed to at least one of three risks — food, energy and finance. “These are countries,” says the report, “where people struggle to afford healthy diets, where imports are essential to satisfy the food and energy needs of their populations and where debt burdens and tightening resources limit governments’ ability to cope with the vagaries of global financial conditions.” It is an apt description of Jamaica.

Given elevated levels of socio-economic stress and unfolding impacts of climate change, just one of these three channels — debt distress, food shortages, or blackouts — is enough to trigger collapse, the UN warns.

Let’s just consider the finance or debt crisis and its relevance for Jamaica.

Arguing that the world is on the brink of a global debt crisis, the UN notes that 60 per cent of least developed and other low-income countries are already at high risk of, or in, debt distress and so heavily indebted that they are unable to provide for those of their citizens most vulnerable to rising prices.

And the cost of debt servicing keeps rising for developing countries. “Even before the start of this crisis developing countries spent on average 16 per cent of their export earnings in servicing their debt obligations, with small island developing states spending more than twice this figure. By comparison, after the Allied Powers restructured Germany’s debt in 1953, debt servicing payments never exceeded 3.4 per cent of export revenues in any year.”

According to the World Bank, Jamaica’s total debt service (percentage of exports of goods, services and primary income) was 51.22 per cent in 2020, more than three times the average for developing countries. Of Jamaica’s $912 billion austerity budget for FY 2022/2023, debt servicing will consume $307.5 billion or 34 per cent.

Arguing that there is no time to lose to put in place the necessary measures to preclude a generalised debt crisis, and the consequential social and political instability, the UN makes a series of recommendations for debt relief, debt restructuring and debt service payment suspension. “The international financial system,” it says “has the instruments and the capacity to respond accordingly and rise to the challenge of the moment. Leadership and political will can make this possible. There is no reasonable explanation for not doing so.”

In March, 2021, at the UN global summit on international debt and liquidity, Prime Minister Andrew Holness remarked: “Debt servicing has come at tremendous socio-economic cost to our populations, which have borne the burden of steep cuts in public expenditures. Extreme fiscal contractions are having a dramatic impact on our ability to meet our sustainable development and climate action commitments. Given the limited fiscal space to mount an effective response to the crisis and avail our people of much needed vaccines, they are forced to increase their borrowing, which adds to already high debt service. Countries require a combination of debt relief and a major injection of liquidity.”

The prime minister proposed (among other things) that the temporary suspension of debt-service payments owed by 73 low-income countries to their official bilateral creditors be extended; that private creditors voluntarily participate in the debt service suspension initiative (DSSI) on comparable terms; and that the DSSI be extended to middle-income countries, like Jamaica. He proposed that DSSI beneficiaries would use freed-up resources to increase social, health and economic spending in response to the COVID-19 crisis.

However, de blinkered ‘Dacta’ will have none of it. While the UN and his trusty Washington consensus partners speak of crisis on top of crisis, he, who has an enormous capacity for deceit and denial, as public servants have, to their chagrin, recently discovered, talks about an economy that is “rebounding”; that the pace and magnitude of economic growth is astounding; that jobs are being “restored”; and that Jamaica is well and truly on its way to pre-COVID nirvana. In his fantastical view, the exceptional and soon to be economically independent Jamaica, the model for others to emulate, should not be “confused with other highly indebted middle-income countries”.

For him and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Jamaica’s debt is sustainable and debt relief, debt restructuring and debt repayment delays are bad ideas which will send the wrong signal to the market. All those in favour from the putrid echo chamber say aye. Ayeee! The Ayes have it. It is full steam ahead to his sacrosanct 60 per cent debt to gross domestic product (GDP) target by FY 2027/2028, if not before. There is to be no discretion on debt reduction he stubbornly insists.

Meanwhile, social spending will be cut. According to the IMF, the government “intends to cut programme spending (goods and services and transfers) excluding the social protection programme PATH as a per cent of GDP, but no decisions have been made.”

In discussions about debt, one of the things which is seldom commented on, is the direct and causal relationship between public debt and household debt. When the one declines, the other rises because the government has skillfully and stealthily shifted the debt burden onto the backs of households and corporates.

Jamaica, and it is not just us because the neoliberal template is global, has adopted austerity measures to reduce public debt while allowing household and corporate private debt to explode. As the Government reduces its investment in public services, cuts taxes on the rich, increases them on the poor and hollows out the public sector in order to reduce public debt, citizens borrow more to pay for public services once provided to them by the State. A prime example is the ramshackle, underfunded and undignified public transportation system which has made car ownership necessary and created a surge in debt to finance car purchases for personal use and as taxis. Another is student debt. This is deliberate government policy. Public debt is being reduced at the same time that the public is being forced into personal debt peonage.

According to the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ), since 2011, total real household debt to real disposable income has been rising steadily, indicating increasing indebtedness as well as a deterioration of the debt servicing capacity of households. Between 2019 and 2020, the ratio of household debt to disposable income increased by 10.2 percentage points to 71.5 per cent, well above the 10-year annual average of 49.3 per cent. In other words, about $72 of every $100 of household income was required to “pay down” debt in 2020 compared to $33 of every $100 in 2006. In real terms, household debt grew by 9.4 per cent in 2019 and although the pace slowed due to the pandemic, it nevertheless increased by 3.4 per cent in 2020. In 2021, household sector debt grew by 8.9 per cent relative to 2020.

Mr Keith Duncan, scion of People’s National Party (PNP) socialist royalty, a banker, leader of the Lost Boys, head of EPOC and leading Pollyanna, said a few days ago that, “we are over the worst of the crisis” in Ukraine and that “things will always play themselves out”. The man, at one with ‘De Dacta’, is truly fantastical. Yet not all the occupants of the crowded echo chamber inside De Dacta’s neo-liberal church are imbued with the same unrealistic optimism as Mr Duncan. Messrs John Mahfood and Dennis Chung, two of the church’s leading evangelists, have of late been overcome by depression, anxiety and gloom as they contemplate the “dilemma” of a difficult year ahead and the need for further austerity. What they fear most of all is social unrest.

But there is not a word from anyone about shifting from the “sound” surplus-generating, debt-reducing policies they so ardently support. Nothing about alternative policies. Just a bribe here and there to lawless taxi drivers to keep the peace and a few crumbs to purchasers of electricity.

Meanwhile, things are falling apart and Jamaica is gripped by social unrest. It is just not organised and is deliberately channelled towards the dead end of “personal responsibility” and interpersonal violence. For far too many of our citizens, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. The prime minister concedes that life is “miserable”. A 2021 UNICEF study found that 18 per cent of Jamaican children under five years of age suffered from malnutrition, a situation that had moved from bad to worse.

A recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report on the state of food security and nutrition in the world showed that undernourishment in the Jamaican population as a whole had increased from 7.4 per cent to 7.7 per cent between 2006 and 2020; and that the prevalence of anaemia in women of child bearing age (15-49) stood at 20 per cent in 2020.

A state of anomie exists throughout the land. Young, and many not so young, people are alienated, oppressed, depressed and violently self-destructive. Crime and violence are rampant, including of the type perpetrated by the captured State and by socially murderous private institutions such as banks and disservice providers.

Social injustice and class and racial oppression rooted in slavery and colonialism are reinforced by a global ruling class and a dependent, comprador, national ruling elite with their contemporary ideas, practices and policies and a habitus of me first which flow from them.

Personal responsibility is the doctrine according to Andrew, an anti-intellectual, opposed to thought and to “alien ideology” who considers himself a “practical” man. Who then will lead the “revolution”, the quest for fundamental changes to head off the coming social upheavals, of which the UN speaks? From whence will the organisation and organisers emerge? Where are the thinkers? The new ideas? Or even the old ones which were never given a chance? From the corrupt, captured politicians?

Not likely, as the two oligarchic parties are populated with capitalist roaders, corporate capitalists, investment bankers, property developers, land grabbers and small-time hustlers. The gelded, toady unions? The praise singers from the academy? The money-grubbing, prosperity preaching churches? The owned, sycophantic media? The cyaan badda civil society? Oppressed, alienated, violent, self-destructive, escapist youth? The Lost Boys (and Girls) of Neverland who sell off everything to foreigners and are happy to collect rent? The margin-gathering, arbitrage-peddling, extortionist, anti-development bankers?

There is a great deal of anger at the way things are but because courage is either lacking or misdirected, there is little hope for progressive change, with apologies to St Augustine. Those who are angry, destroy themselves and others within easy reach. Those who are even more violent are protected by armed guards, high walls and gates. There are many escape routes – weed, alcohol, gambling, religion, dancehall, the sale and purchase of combos, remittances and therapeutic, self-destructive violence.

Fortunately, there is a separate moral political economy of self-help (pardna, round robin, morning sport) with its own ideology of egalitarianism, where justice is swift, if not always fair. Some solace may be had there; a safety valve provided. It sometimes prey on and is sustained by the formal political economy. A symbiotic relationship, a kind of, what economists call, “equilibrium” is being sustained; a form of stasis in which the role of Babylon (SOE, ZOSO, a little something extrajudicial now and again) is critical. But there may yet be a spark.

What should be considered as a matter of urgency is a suspension of the fiscal responsibility framework, a slowing down of public debt repayment, household debt relief, moratoria and possible write-offs, a wealth tax, reduced taxes on the poor and increased social spending, including the provision of food and fuel subsidies.

Monetary policy should be designed to discourage speculative non-productive borrowing (on luxury housing, cars and stocks) and to encourage growth-enhancing lending to agriculture, manufacturing and MSMEs. A decent state-funded affordable public transportation system is important for economic efficiency and productivity and vital to social peace.

Russian adage: What is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist thinks things cannot possibly get worst and an optimist knows they can.

Audley Rodriques served as Jamaica’s ambassador to Venezuela, Kuwait, and South Africa.