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Ghana pays price for west's rice subsidies
Oxfam says livelihoods of farm workers being destroyed
Charlotte Moore in Accra
Monday April 11, 2005
The Guardian
Rachia Salifu finds the rice-growing season the most difficult time of year.
During the day she works the fields with her baby on her back in
temperatures that can reach 43C. In the evening there is not enough food for
her five children so she listens to them cry with hunger, unable to help.
Ms Salifu farms rice on one acre in the dusty village of Nyarigu near the
northern border of Ghana and her story is typical of local rice farmers.
Over the past three decades, Ghana's rice industry has collapsed. Farmers
struggle to make a living and unemployed villagers flock to the cities.
Article continues
Oxfam today highlights the plight of rice farmers in Ghana in the latest
salvo of the Make Poverty History campaign. "The plight of rice farmers in
Ghana shows how western policies and unfair agricultural subsidises in the
US and the EU are destroying the livelihoods of farmers in developing
nations," said Harriet Binet, a spokeswoman for Oxfam.
In the early 1980s conditions attached to loans given to Ghana by the IMF
and the World Bank resulted in the country liberalising its markets and
cheap imported rice flooding the market. The IMF and World Bank now admit
that such conditions do not help the world's poor but reversing the damage
of such policies is difficult.
The World Bank continues to support a policy of lifting subsidies but this
has to be done by the west as well as developing nations. The bank condemns
the heavy subsidises given by the EU and US to their farmers.
Between them, the US, Japan and the EU subsidised their rice production by
$16bn (£8.48bn) in 2002, the latest year for which full data are available.
The US policy is particularly harmful for the rice-growers of Ghana. In
2003, the US paid $1.3bn in rice subsidises to its farmers and sold the crop
for $1.7bn, effectively footing the bill for 72% of the crop.
Most of these subsidies go to big Arkansas rice farms. One company alone,
Ricelands of Arkansas, was the recipient of US agricultural subsidies
totalling $490m between 1995 and 2003.
In Accra's bustling market the effect of US imported rice is easy to see.
Huge billboard ads for Chicago Star Rice stare down on hawkers.
Bags of imported rice reach to the ceiling of Charles Yeboah's long, narrow
shop. He does not stock Ghanaian rice. "I can't sell it. The quality of the
imported rice is so much better that even though it costs more, people buy
it," he says.
He also says that Ghanaian rice is only available for six months of the
year. The poor quality of Ghanaian rice is no secret. Lack of government
subsidies mean the farmers cannot afford to invest in any machinery to help
with harvesting the rice. "We do not have a combine harvester. It is all
done by hand," Ms Salifu said.
Neither does the village have a mill. Sometimes the farmers lay the rice out
on the road and let the cars run over the crop to separate the husk from the
grain. Or they beat the crop in the fields with heavy sticks. Either way,
the crop ends up broken and with stones in it.
Oxfam has set up a project near Nyarigu that it hopes will help resolve the
local problems of milling rice. In a dark concrete room sits a small blue
milling machine that cost £1,500. It has yet to be connected to the
electricity but has been tested and produces clean, white rice of similar
quality to the imported rice.
Many people come to Accra looking for work as the dwindling rice crop has
resulted in high unemployment in the north. In the middle of a windy
roundabout, a stone's throw from the market, a group of women and children
have made the hard concrete their home. Fusheina Alhassan says the women try
to sleep in the nearby railway station.
"But if it rains we cannot sleep. Often the men come and steal our clothes
and money while we sleep. Sometimes they rape us," she says.
Up in Nyarigu, Ms Salifu says government subsidies would help the farmers to
pay for plots, chemicals and water which would allow them to grow more rice
for their families and to sell on the market, thus enabling the women to
come back to jobs in the north.
But Mats Karlsson, the World Bank's country director in Ghana, says the
government is better off spending its limited resources on improving Ghana's
infrastructure. "If we could reduce the cost of transport, we would increase
the earnings of farmers by much more than any internal policy could
achieve," he said.
"Let us be clear. The biggest problem facing farmers in the developing world
are the subsidies the west provides to its own farmers. These are deeply
unfair," he added.
Oxfam agrees. "If the west is truly serious about making poverty history,
then agricultural subsidises must be abolished," said Ms Binet.
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