Poverty and cotton in the Doha Development Agenda

The singular most important recommendation to the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) that will help alleviate poverty among some of the poorest farming communities in a sustainable way is that developed country cotton subsidization, which in recent years has topped $6 billion annually, must be removed expeditiously. Numerous studies have demonstrated the direct link between these developed country subsidies and income poverty in the West and Central African farming communities; ¹ it is estimated that subsidies provided by the US Congress and the European Commission reduce the annual income of francophone African cotton farmers by around $150 million, thus directly decreasing the earning power of some 40 percent of the cotton farmers of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali (hereafter referred to as the “Cotton Four”). ² The fact that domestic cotton subsidies primarily used by the US Congress and the European Commission have not already been removed despite the mounting evidence of their negative impact on the livelihood of some 10 million African farmers is evidence of the huge political influence of powerful cotton lobbies in Washington and Brussels, and the limitations of the influence of African countries in the DDA, as well as the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) ability to regulate cotton trade policy. That said, given the weight of moral suasion in the cotton issue, the small step changes to US policy brought about by the WTO’s judicial process, ³ and the reductions in European Union (EU) levels as a result of agreements reached in an intra-regional African-EU process, ⁴ there is some room for hope that the level of American and European subsidies will continue to decline with or without the completion of the DDA.