That sliding dollar
“HEY BOSS, five bills can only buy one food”! That was Trevor’s complaint last week. “Nothing in tin. Just likkle rice, sugar and one soap,” he continued. “Food raise, everyting raise.”
Trevor is probably bipolar, goes to Bellevue for an injection when he remembers, and cleans my car for five ‘bills’ twice a week. It is the only steady gig he has. When the census people came around last time, they classified him as self-employed!
Five hundred dollars used to have to keep him for two days. Consequent on the dollar now brushing 155:1 and shopkeepers, wholesalers and importers pricing at 160:1 and even higher, the money can’t stretch for more than one meal and likkle leave over.
A church nearby used to provide the money every fortnight for some food for Trevor’s mother, who is bed-ridden. In 2018, $2,500 could buy a few of the basic items to maintain her life and dignity. Now the same things are running us $3,500, which can only be afforded every three weeks. Hunger is her most constant companion of late.
And don’t talk about things like diapers, light bill, or taxi fare when she has to be taken to the doctor, or medicine when the DrugServ doesn’t have what the doctor wrote on the paper.
This is the reality that needs to be seen by those who buy up the US dollars, hold them and then sell them back at a premium, and afterwards proudly report billions of profits largely attributed to “exchange rate gains,” while causing the rest of us to suck salt every time we go to the shop.
“All very lawful Ronnie. Any sensible investor has to hedge against the local currency nowadays. I’m really sorry to hear about Trevor and his mother, but stopping my speculation isn’t going to help them. And remember, it’s a market system and I have demanding shareholders, and we give to Food For The Poor sometimes. Didn’t you see the picture in the paper recently? Tell them to try PATH, or isn’t there still a generous Constituency Development Fund that you guys can use.” (DWL!)
Tess doesn’t play. She declares that she is tired of this “bruk-pocket life,” and so it is taxi and minibus she deals with. “Is my ‘front’ I tek and work to buy the first taxi. Is a nasty life, yes. Can’t tek it to Church, but is so ghetto gyal have to make it.”
COVERING EXPENSES
Now she wants advice on how to get a minibus, but the price quoted to her is increasing by the month according to how the dollar fluctuates. She calculates that to cover all expenses of purchase, operation and to put something down for the police, the repairman and the guy at the depot, the driver will have to run-jostle the JUTC out of business and get a loader-man who can pack the bus as if COVID never keep.
So the Net International Reserves are big enough to afford months and months of imports. The financial houses are now at liberty to pay out dividends ripe for repatriation, and the Bank of Jamaica is independent and untouchable in its interaction with the foreign exchange ‘market’. What constitutes financial rape?
Meanwhile, the CAPRI study on the efficiency of COVID-19 relief and even the dated, pre-pandemic Survey of Living Conditions for 2018, unmask the growing inequality of Jamaican society and the unfair outcomes of our economic policy choices.
Henley Morgan says the food supplies which he warehouses for distribution are running out in a fraction of the time they used to last. The Rockhouse Foundation in the west is distributing tons and tons of relief supplies to desperate people whose situation is becoming increasingly worse due to the decline of the dollar’s value. How does ‘inflation targeting’ relate to this reality?
What, then, lies ahead? One banker told me yesterday that he is predicting further devaluation unless and until bigger financial institutions let go some of their big bucks to halt the slide – albeit temporarily. What cruel irony. The sources of much of our woes are the same ones to whom we have to turn to bail us out! And the political culture tells us that these things can’t change! I want to know. If all of us don’t thrive, who is going to buy your goods and services?
I listened to the earnest minister of agriculture outline some of his plans for the sector recently. They are commendable but insufficient to ease the US$700-million-plus demand for imported food – including the ‘things in tin’ which Trevor’s cash can’t manage. Everything being planned needs to be scaled up.
THANK GOD FOR REMITTANCES
And the agro-based exports are still anaemic. So, in all this context, where is the foreign exchange going to come from while tourism and mining continue to sputter? Thank God for the remittances; but the country can’t fly on that one wing.
The likelihood, then, is that we will experience further exchange-rate slippage, higher food prices and more hunger, distress and lawlessness for people like Trevor, his mother and Tess, too.
My advise to Trevor and his kind is to plant up every paint pan or old tyre he can find with callaloo, string beans and whatever else can grow there. And raise two ‘yard fowl’, too. For his mother and people like her, pray for generous benefactors who, because of Jesus or otherwise, embrace the common good and see intentional and avoidable oppression of the poor as a reproach to their humanity and divinity.
Don’t bother with the minibus now, Tess. Too much stress. Just hold the taxi and preserve your dignity. There is joy in modesty, although you would not think so the way high-ups profile. Stop trus’ car for now and plant ground or raise animals on your family land in the country.
The purpose of writing all this is to add true flesh-and-blood stories to the dry, daily narrative of the dollar slide and to entreat those with power and authority to engage all of us in a crucial and wrenching discourse of how to break out from this impoverishing system. We can change things.
Just for a start, how about a plan to quickly plant up available, irrigated arable lands with enough affordable food to ensure, mostly from our own labour, reasonable nutritional balance for all our people. The bush and wild cane thriving idly on the thrown-up estates and on either side of the East-West Highway are a moral and economic scandal. As are the mostly empty AMC facilities on Spanish Town Road. A truly independent country must treat food security as a priority.
Then that sliding dollar would not be such a daily peril to most of us.