Film Analysis: Life And Debt

I, personally, found those facts about Jamaica are portrayed in “Life and Debt” are quite astonishing. As a non-Jamaican university student, the real Jamaica which hides behind the beautiful scene and terrific beach never came across my mind. This whole documentary is combined with two sections which intervenes with each other. One part is primarily portrayed that how beautiful Jamaica is, and how many tourists come to Jamaica every year to take a vacation based on the good reputation of the fantastic scene and warm weather. The establishment of tourism is all attribute to globalization. On the other side of the documentary, however, the problems caused by globalization are explained in detail. In my opinion, “Life and Debt” is decent documentary

At the same time, it especially mentions that tourists go to Montego Bay instead of Jamaican capital Kingston. It releases a signal that the real Jamaica is not what those foreign tourists think like. What tourists do is to spend money and enjoy the terrific scene and the excellent service provided by the local people, just like people in the documentary said: tourists would not care about those commodities they are using from where and where it will go when tourists stopped using them. According to CIA’s The World Factbook, in 2014 Jamaica’s GDP compositions are: 6.9% agricultural, 21.2% industry and 72% services (2016). Although this documentary was shot about 15 years ago, still we can tell that services area contributes the most to Jamaican GDP. Jamaica now is what we called “post-industrial” country. In post-industrial country, for those workers in service job instead of high-tech and high-wage job would find it is hard to paying their bills and feel marginalized by the mainstream of the society economically (Kendall et al. 2011). In regardless how, this documentary does not put much effort on emphasizing how industry and services contribute to Jamaican economy. This documentary puts too much efforts in agricultural aspect, which is suspecting to try to lead audiences pay attention only one aspect instead of all of three

Why would Jamaican import basically all the food from the US instead of planting their own food? This documentary gives the best answer. Since the Jamaican government wants to reboot economy, the government asked for financial help from multiple world-wide financial institutions. There is no such a thing as a free lunch. Based on the information provided by the documentary, the condition for Jamaica getting financial aid is to withdraw the right to control import. Thus, this is directly causing imported food is much cheaper than local food. Importing more than exporting tremendously hurts the local farmer. There is one more reason that can cause the price of imported food is lower than local food, which is in the US, farmers commonly use machine to harvest. By this way, it reduces the cost to the lowest level. In Jamaica, mostly harvesting is through labour. Even the farm owner trying to cut the wages of those labours, it is still impossible for local food price lower than imported food. So far. It is the best part of this