Heree’s an interesting tale of how our “farm subsidies” hurt other farmers.
n a landscape scattered with mud houses, donkeys and carts, under the clearest of clear blue skies, Mr Moussa explains how his seven-hectare cotton farm brings in 500,000 CFA a year, helping him care for his three wives and seven children.
At harvest time, cotton buyers negotiate their trucks on these mud tracks, eager to get the cotton, which the Burkinabe people call white gold, to market.
But earning the money he needs to keep his family fed, clothed and in school is getting harder as cotton prices fall.
Three years ago, he got 210 CFA per kilo of cotton.
In the year ahead, he expects to get 165 CFA per kilo.
Mr Moussa sees only one reason for lower cotton prices, namely America’s subsidies to its own cotton farmers.
These have led to oversupply on the world market, and this extra supply is depressing prices.
“In the US, the state helps them, here the state doesn’t help us,” he says.
