BYLINE: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF; E-mail:
nicholas@nytimes.com
BODY: 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.
It also seems a tad hypocritical of us to complain about governance in
third-world countries when we allow tiny groups of farmers to hijack billion of
dollars out of our taxes.
For example, the U.S. has
only 25,000 cotton growers, but they are prosperous (with an average net worth
of $800,000) and thus influential. So the U.S. spends $2 billion a year
subsidizing them, and American production of cotton has almost doubled over the
last 20 years -- even though the U.S. is an inefficient, high-cost producer. The
result is a glut that costs African countries $250 million each year, according
to a World Bank study published in February.
And when a
poor cotton farmer in West Africa goes bust because of our cotton subsidies, he
has no savings to fall back on. Rather, he starves. He cannot afford medicine
for his sick baby, and the child dies. He cannot afford a midwife when his wife
is pregnant, and so she is crippled in childbirth. He cannot afford worming
medication for his children, and so they grow anemic and do poorly in school --
and cannot concentrate when Americans lecture them about their poor
governance.
Back to the freeloading journalist, whom
I'll rat on in a moment. He defends himself by saying that his plot of farmland
was put into a federal subsidy program by a previous owner. So he gets $588 each
year for what rural America calls "farming the government, rather than farming
the land."
Such absurdities -- and particularly the
latest farm bill, a transparent political payoff -- accomplish
nothing. I grew up in rural America, and if the farm bill
revived small towns like Wapato, Ore., a hamlet that once flourished near my
family's farm and has now completely disappeared, then I would be sympathetic.
But the fact is that 60 percent of American farmers get no subsidies at all, and
47 percent of commodity payments go to large farms with average household
incomes of $135,000.
The subsidies go overwhelmingly to
farmers tilling the ground, not those raising livestock. When I was a kid, we
raised sheep -- a lousy idea, since fewer and fewer Americans eat lamb or wear
wool. So in the absence of a good sheep subsidy, we bowed to market forces, and
now the only sheep left on my parents' farm are a few family friends. That's the
way a market economy is supposed to work.
The bottom
line is that farm subsidies cripple Africa and go to people who don't really
need them -- like that grasping journalist who gets $588 a year for not growing
wheat. Who is that person? Er, it's me.
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