With Subsidies, Cotton Grows But African Communities Wither

Posted: 8 March 2007

For Malian farmer Soloba Mady Keita, cotton represents life--its hard work and its rewards.

But lately, those bolls, bursting with soft, white tufts, have come to represent something else, too: a terrible imbalance in the world trade order that has left cotton farmers across West Africa barely able to eke out a living.

"If the situation does not change, African cotton farmers will be forced to abandon cotton production," said Keita. "We don't have any other source of revenue if it's not cotton."

Keita knows well of what he speaks. He is the mayor of a small rural town, Kita West, and together with his four brothers he works a 12.5-acre cotton field, the income from which supports an extended family of 27 people.

But because of a glut of cotton on world markets--dumped there by large American farm operations the US government subsidizes to overproduce--its price has plummeted. Keita and his brothers can't even sell their cotton for enough to cover what it costs them to grow it.

What does that mean for Mali's rural regions? It means hardship and a slow withering of their communities. Already, said Keita, the next generation is moving away from the villages to search for more opportunity in wealthier countries.

"Cotton is the engine for development," he said. "We can only access credit through cotton. We can only help our children by earning revenue from cotton."

That revenue is earned bit by bit, often without the benefit of labor-saving technology. For many farmers, muscles replace machines in the fields. They hoe by hand and pick by hand. And the basic services that sweat and hard labor buy are critical to the health of any community--schools, medical care, clean drinking water.

But villages like Kita West can't wait forever for the price of cotton to go back up. They need help now, particularly from US lawmakers who control the fate of the cotton subsidies American farmers bank on.

"It is because of the US subsidies that we can't get a good price for our cotton," said Keita, who feeds his seven children with the corn, sorghum, and peanuts he also grows. Though the US has proposed some reforms to its subsidy program, they're not enough to make a difference for farmers like Keita. He needs the kind of reforms that allow him to make a profit off his work.

"What is going to happen to us in 10 years when they finally decide to reform subsidies?" he asks. "We will have disappeared by then."