From the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times:
The White House and Congress are trumpeting their determination to bring economic opportunity to the people of Africa. But first, a few million sub-Saharan farmers will have to suffer.
The Bush administration has been busy extending special trade status to African exporters, designing a $10-billion aid package for poor countries and dispatching Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill and other top officials to confer with African leaders. There has even been talk of a “Marshall Plan” for Africa. But all of those initiatives added together may not be enough to offset the damage inflicted on Africa’s small farmers by the $190-billion agriculture bill that President Bush just signed into law.
“This farm bill, I think it’s fair to say, will put millions of small farmers out of business in Africa,” said Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. “They will have to move to cities and become part of unemployed labor pools.”
Government officials and independent economists say the big subsidies doled out to U.S. farmers will contribute to global overproduction of wheat, corn, cotton and other basic crops. That, in turn, will drive down world commodity prices, making it more difficult for small, unsubsidized Third World farmers to compete.
The headline over the story is quite appropriate: U.S. Exports Misery to Africa With Farm Bill.
