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Is Globalisation helping or hindering? Douglas Wheatley asks
According to Roosevelt, every man or woman should be able to earn enough to raise a family; Earn enough to build a modest savings; Should be able to earn enough to own their own home; Should be able to earn enough to secure something for his/her retirement. He had also said that if as a mass of people they were not in a position to do that something was wrong in the country.
Now host of the January 24, 2012 edition of the radio programme “Speak out BVI” Douglas Wheatley is of the opinion that persons here in the Virgin Islands are having a hard time meeting those minimum requirements and that globalisation has a part to play in that.
According to Wheatley, in many parts of the world, including in the Caribbean and the Virgin Islands, the term is used that the middle class is under a lot of pressure and that the working class has always been under a lot of pressure but persons have been able to move from the working class to the middle class but because of what the world situation is now people are having difficulties in being able to maintain those minimum standards.
He added that globalisation has not helped the situation because people look for the cheapest sources of goods “and we have heard of cases very recently where many countries go to various places where wages are very low to get their products manufactured or they buy the original commodities there and pay very little to the persons there and then they are brought somewhere else where value is added and then the product is sold for a lot of money and then poor people hardly have enough money to live or educate their children.”
“Here in the Caribbean I think we ought to look very carefully at the whole aspect of globalisation to see whether it is helping us or hindering us. If the emphasis is always on the cheaper goods then your own industries may never get a chance to develop because if you can go somewhere else and get those cheap goods then you will do that and your indigenous manufacturers or producers may not be able to compete and so they will go out of business,” Wheatley said.
The talk show host further said that it is not enough to say that “the BVI is a tremendous place and that we have fantastic salaries here but a number of our people are below wages and bordering on poverty.” He also opined that Government should come up with more strategies to improve the standard of living for their people including approaching the banks to see what further help they can give.
He also lamented the high cost for land in the Virgin Islands and noted that young people are finding it very difficult to purchase.
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