Africa Doesn't Matter by Giles Bolton

Author:Giles Bolton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2012-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

Black Cotton

Mama Idrissou is a cotton farmer in Benin, West Africa. A family man with five children, Idrissou owns only 30 hectares of land, but it is productive and the climate is pretty reliable. Back in 2003, a good year, Idrissou's land yielded about 20 hectares of cotton.

Billy Tiller is a cotton farmer in West Texas. Also a family man, with four children, Tiller farms 2,146 acres of land on the plains that are tough for cotton-growing. There are sandstorms, tornadoes, floods, droughts, frosts, heat waves, and little regular water supply. In 2003 after some particularly bad weather, only 21 of the 1,611 acres Tiller farmed for cotton were left. And he had to work long, hard hours to get even them to yield.

Fortunately, Tiller's tough year had a happy ending. Thanks to the 2002 Farm Bill, American taxpayers paid him a subsidy. The particular mechanism to work out how much is a bit complicated (U.S. cotton farmers got paid the difference between the real-world market price for cotton and a speculative, more generous price for 85 percent of their acres based on a preidentified average yield per acre), but the end result was highly generous. Not only was Tiller paid more for his 21 acres of cotton than the cotton was worth, he was paid for nearly all the acres that went to rot too.

Back in West Africa, Idrissou also had the occasional bad season. When this happened he got little or no such help. Partly thanks to IMF advice, Benin's government wouldn't provide him with subsidies for his crop. This was sensible in that the government could hardly afford it. Idrissou knew that if he couldn't produce or sell his cotton, his family might go hungry or he might even, like some of his neighbors in recent years, go bust and have to sell his precious land.

So far, so unequal. But so what? If America wants to protect its farmers against bad harvests, isn't it entitled to? It's hardly America's fault if Benin is unable to do the same.

The problem is that Tiller and Idrissou are both selling cotton to the same world market. As it happens, it's not when Tiller has a bad year and receives lots of subsidies that Idrissou gets worried; it's when Tiller has a good year, produces lots of cotton, and still receives high subsidies that the anxiety sets in. That's because, even in favorable conditions, Tiller's cotton is considerably more expensive to produce than Idrissou's, leaving it uncompetitive. The subsidies allow Tiller to keep producing cotton and sell it for less than it costs him to farm it. The result is a double whammy for Idrissou: there's more competition for his cotton on the world market, which might mean he can't sell any at all, and the overall price goes down.

There are 25,000 cotton farmers in America like Billy Tiller. There are 10 or 11 million West Africans like Mama Idrissou dependent on the cotton trade, some of whose own ancestors, incidentally,

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