Caribbean

May 31, 2012
Price wars between supermarkets seeking to gain the lowest possible cost of bananas has led to a race to the bottom which has no winners other than the large retailers and multinational corporations. The fundamental need for competitiveness overrides any moral incentive on the parts of the corporations.
May 24, 2012
The banana industry has long been famous for the power and influence multinational corporations yield upon governments. Despite bananas being grown in nearly all tropical regions, 70% of the global banana market is controlled by only three corporations—Del Monte, Dole, and Chiquita. This two-part article looks at the corporate influences behind the demise of the Caribbean banana trade.
April 25, 2012
April 18th marked the public release of the first batch of the secret colonial documents from the British government known as the "migrated archives."Interestingly, UCLA's Professor Robert Hill’s work with the migrated archives is not the first time that he has come across secret or forgotten documents related to his work in the Caribbean.
April 12, 2012
Nearly 50 years after decolonization, the case brought forth by four Kenyan pensioners against the British government has the real potential to be regarded as a “Colonial WikiLeaks,” quite possibly leading to the rewriting of the established narratives of decolonization and independence not only in Africa, but also throughout the Caribbean and all former Commonwealth colonies.
March 15, 2012
Canadian banks operating in the Caribbean are nothing new; the Royal Bank of Canada proudly claims that it had branches in the Caribbean before it had opened any in Western Canada. This pattern of foreign economic domination in the Caribbean has resulted in dangerously high levels of dependency, undermining local attempts to bring forth greater self-sufficiency and control over major industries.
February 15, 2012
The weekend of February 4th and 5th saw the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA) convene their 11th summit in Caracas, Venezuela. The summit contained the standard denunciations of American imperialism and the need for deeper economic integration – but surprisingly ended with St. Lucia and Suriname expressing their desire for full membership in the organization, with Haiti also joining ranks as a permanent observer.
February 1, 2012
Canadian Forces have participated in numerous counter-narcotics missions in the Caribbean basin as part of the wider U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force-South. The missions, in combination with the opening of a Canadian military base in Jamaica, raise serious questions about the wider militarization of Canadian relations with the Caribbean.
January 25, 2012
The fracturing of families and communities by economic restructuring has led to a dramatic increase in domestic violence throughout the Caribbean. What makes matters worse is that domestic violence is often trivialized and left out of context, therefore severely hindering efforts to implement meaningful and lasting reforms.
January 19, 2012
Two thousand and twelve holds both uncertainty and cautious optimism for the Caribbean. The recent election of new governments in Jamaica and St. Lucia, the controversial re-election of an incumbent in Guyana, and the selection of Michel Martelly out of a flawed election in Haiti has sent mixed signals about the overall direction of the region.
August 26, 2011
John Lindsay-Poland

For the last two decades, the dominant narrative justifying the U.S. military’s activities in Latin America has been the war on drugs and the fight against “narco-terrorists.” In the last ten years, however, the U.S. military has undertaken several unrelated activities including low-profile tests of military equipment; humanitarian assistance that the military itself acknowledges has intelligence-gathering purposes; and training to suppress social protest. This article was originally published in the May/June 2011 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.

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