Cotton: The Great Depression for African Farmers
By Christi Boyd, PC(USA) Mission Personnel

At the age of 39, Abdullaye Djara is the father of 12 children. Like most of the rural poor in northern Cameroon, his family subsists by farming millet, beans and peanuts and by growing cotton as a supplementary cash crop to pay for health and educational expenses.

The elected representative of 200 organized grassroots groups of Cameroonian cotton farmers, Abdullaye is one of my companions while I visit the South Maroua region. It is selling time for the cotton farmers of Mowo-Nokong. The sound of singing children rises up above a modified shipping container, where they dance to pack the cotton. A girl weaves together a simple framework to hold a bale that will be carried to the scale by a group of youngsters. In a makeshift office of leaves and reeds a committee finishes registering the weight and earnings of a farmer’s harvest. It has yielded him 45,000 CFA [at the time $70].

The community explains that each member contributes part of these earnings to the group for communal needs. In this way they have built a granary to ensure the availability of food throughout the difficult months of August and September, when millet becomes scarce and prices soar. The villagers also dug two wells and are paying for extra teachers at the understaffed elementary school. They want to organize simple boarding facilities at a far away secondary school to ensure their youth’s continued education. But the wells still need pumps, the number of teachers is insufficient, and school boarding remains a dream.

Abdullaye says that only a portion of the cotton is processed in Cameroon and Nigeria for local textile industries, with the bulk being put on the world market. He wants to see farmers involved at decision-making levels for the global trade of their produce, and he attends meetings with representatives of cotton farmers in other West African countries. They have formed a platform to exchange their experiences, to discuss policies of their global competitors and to better organize for making their case with the World Trade Organization against the US agricultural policies that underpin their chances.

Distorted Competition

Cultivated in West and Central Africa on small plots of 1-2 hectares with cheap manual labor and under favorable climatic conditions, cotton is grown against low production costs. According to free market mechanisms that are to regulate global trade following the very model propagated by the US government, African cotton should earn a competitive position on the world markets. It provides one of the rare opportunities for to participate in the global economy.

But the current US Farm Bill allows their American competitors to grow as much cotton as they want against a guaranteed minimum price. The artificial boost of supply depresses world market prices, in fact annulling production for this crop as competitive factor on the global scene. The legislation put poor African farmers who produce cotton the hard and honest way out of business and deprives them from the little possibility they have to improve their families’ marginal living standards.

In May 2003 African cotton producing countries joined Brazil in an official complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO), challenging both the direct farm subsidies and the Step 2 payments of the so-called “cotton competitiveness program.” The program permitted the US government to pay US companies for buying the crop from American farmers, as unfair trading practices. They won a landmark victory as the WTO ruled against the United States, stating that American cotton subsidies contravene WTO rules and are therefore illegal. African cotton farmers like Abdullaye are still waiting for the US to comply.

I return from Mowo with vivid images of poverty and globalization next to each other, like puzzle pieces of our disconnected world. On one side are the farmers confronted with pressing local needs, on the other side, they anonymously stand at the base of a larger economic picture where they are cheated out of their place in the global economy by wealthy competitors.

Advocating reform of the current Farm Bill is not as tangible as writing a check for a drinking water site or food distribution program. But changes in US agricultural policies are no less needed to provide the basics for poor people here and abroad. As a church we should help amplify the call of the African farmers to change this legislation.

Contact PHP Farm Bill Organizer Fritz Gutwein or Andrew Kang Bartlett to get involved

Farm Bill Home

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