Sugar's Political By-Product: The Caribbean Basin Initiative

Abstract

American agricultural and foreign aid policies have frequently been portrayed as inconsistent with each other. What United States officials give with the right hand of foreign aid, the critics argue, they take away with the left hand of agricultural protection and subsidies that distort world food markets, undermine developing country agricultural exports, and render US policy toward the Global South incoherent at best. This paper takes issue with the conventional wisdom, however, by arguing that foreign aid is more product than victim of US agricultural policy. Using the case of American aid to the Caribbean Basin, which grew in tandem with the protection of the domestic sugar and sweetener market in the 1980s, this paper argues that US officials use foreign aid to compensate the victims of their agricultural policies—and in so doing unearth the hidden logic of US policy toward the developing world. A Chinese version of this article's abstract is available online at: www.informaworld.com/rglo