Farm Subsidies That Kill
New York Times July 5, 2002
By Nicholas D. Kristof
nytimes.com
J'accuse! I hate to condemn a colleague this way, but our tax dollars are going to pay an indolent New York journalist for not growing wheat on the West Coast.
Could there be a worse indictment of American agricultural policy, rendered even more scandalous by the new $180 billion farm bill signed by President Bush?
Actually, there is a worse indictment. By inflating farm subsidies even more, Congress and the Bush administration are impoverishing and occasionally killing Africans whom we claim to be trying to help.
Last week at the G-8 summit conference in Canada, Mr. Bush and other world leaders spoke piously about their desire to help Africa help itself. Earlier, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill traveled around Africa with Bono complaining about African governance (but in a compassionate sort of way).
Our compassion may be well meant, but it is also hypocritical. The U.S., Europe and Japan spend $350 billion each year on agricultural subsidies (seven times as much as global aid to poor countries), and this money creates gluts that lower commodity prices and erode the living standard of the world's poorest people.
"These subsidies are crippling Africa's chance to export its way out of poverty," said James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, in a speech last month.
Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Program, estimates that these farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports. By coincidence, that's about the same as the total of rich countries' aid to poor countries, so we take back with our left hand every cent we give with our right.
"It's holding down the prosperity of very poor people in Africa and elsewhere for very narrow, selfish interests of their own," Mr. Malloch Brown says of the rich world's agricultural policy. ... |
