Your Farm Subsidies Are Strangling Us

African cotton is the best and cheapest in the world, maintain Presidents Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali and Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso. Yet cotton farmers in their countries remain impoverished. In a jointly written opinion article for The New York Times, the Presidents of these two African nations solicit Western nations to cut the cotton farm subsidies that lead to overproduction, distort market prices, and cause poverty across Africa. If African nations are to adhere to the free market principles prescribed by Western nations and the World Trade Organization, a free market for their primary products must first exist, they maintain. "Our demand is simple: apply free trade rules not only to those products that are of interest to the rich and powerful, but also to those products where poor countries have a proven comparative advantage." – YaleGlobal