Sense and Nonsense in Agricultural Credit: Interest Rate Policies in Jamaica

• Author: Courtney Blackman
• Pages: 248-258

THE PRACTICE OF ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT

248

Introduction

Almost 11 years ago, actually on March 14th 1980 I addressed

residents of my old hall — the ‘Gentlemen of Chancellor’ — at

the Mona campus of the UWI. I delivered a vehement attack on

the Marxian and New World schools, which propounded the state-

centred orthodoxy of the day. You can imagine the consternation

when I declared that the self-inflicted economic disasters of the

1970s ‘had their roots in the social science faculties of this

university’.1 Those remarks branded me for many years as a right

wing reactionary and bourgeois economist. Fortunately, the

comprehensive collapse of those two paradigms throughout most

of the world has ended my notoriety.

When I learned that, on the insistence of the IDB and World

Bank, the interest rate structural adjustment loans to the

agricultural sector were tied to the Jamaican treasury bill rate,

currently at 30 per cent per annum, I thought it was time to take

issue with the ‘free market’ school which now holds sway over the

international economy. I have therefore entitled my address,

‘Sense and Nonsense in Agricultural Credit: Interest Rate Policies

in Jamaica’.

12

SENSE AND NONSENSE IN

AGRICULTURAL CREDIT

INTEREST RAT E POLICIES IN JAMAICA