When Too Much Cottons Floods the Market, African Farmers Pay the Price

Posted: 8 March 2007

Seydou Coulibaly, a cotton farmer in the Koulikoro region of Mali, explains how his family has worked their farm for the past six years yet struggle just to cover basic needs of food and clothing.

Imagine having 42 people depend on the income you squeeze out of a 55-acre farm. There are your uncles and sisters, your wife and six children to support. You hope that the rain is regular, since you don't have irrigation. And you try to remain healthy, because every row of cotton--your cash crop that pays for food, education, clothing, health care--gets planted and harvested by hand.

Now, think what it would be like for your family to labor on that farm and for every year of the past six to struggle just to cover basic needs of food and clothing.

So it has been for Seydou Coulibaly, a cotton farmer in the Koulikoro region of Mali.

"It's not because of drought or war," said Coulibaly. "It's because of the price of cotton on the world market. Cotton prices have dropped sharply recently. It was caused by the dumping of subsidized, surplus American cotton."

Coulibaly is the general secretary for the Koulikoro branch of the Association of the Professional Peasants' Organization (AOPP) and represents the concerns of local cotton farmers at government meetings. Recently, he came to the United States to share some of those same concerns with farmers and journalists here. The tour was sponsored by Oxfam.

"They were stunned to hear that my village has no doctor or nurse," said Coulibaly. "Or that we don't have a single tractor for the entire community. Or that many of us live on less than a dollar a day. Most of them seemed shocked to find out that certain US agricultural policies developed for farmers here in the US actually hurt us on the other side of the globe."

Agriculture subsidies encourage American farmers to grow more and more cotton, even if there's not enough demand for it. And what happens to all that cotton? It floods the world markets, driving down the prices farmers like Coulibaly can get for harvests they reap with backbreaking labor. Without a steady stream of revenue from cotton, Coulibaly's village can't afford many of the services every community needs.

"We used to have six teachers in the village but we could no longer pay for them, so we had to let three of them go," said Coulibaly. "There are five water pumps but three of them are broken and we do not have the means to fix them. So we are left to share two in the whole village--people and animals."

But Coulibaly and his fellow Malian farmers aren't the only ones grappling with the consequences of US farm subsidies. The program is also squeezing some American farmers--the very ones it was originally intended to help.

"I met with a sheep farmer in the Harrisonburg (Virginia) area and I was surprised to hear that he is struggling too," said Coulibaly. "He told me that commodity subsidies are also hurting small farmers like him. He told me there are better ways to help farmers here in the US, like conservation programs, not by rewarding overproduction."

What's the solution? Reform the subsidy program, said Coulibaly, so that farmers on both sides of the world can continue to live off the land and offer cotton at a fair price.

"Me, my wife, my children, and my extended family work hard all year long growing cotton--we work hard and we still can't make a decent living because of policies that are created in a nation far away," said Coulibaly. "Help us to fight to keep family farms in business."