Asymmetrical Information

Leave it to the Brits...all that was missing from that picture was a very large foot.

its sad,
the new republic has an interesting piece that suggests that the us was very happy to scuttle the round--cotton it seems, is still king...

"For years, the United States has told West African nations--struggling to survive against disease, famine, desertification, and debt crises--that their pleas for foreign assistance are misplaced. All they really need is "trade, not aid." The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, at the behest of American policymakers, have in effect advised Burkina Faso not to worry so much that two of every ten children there die before the age of five. After all, policymakers said, if Burkina Faso just followed the hallowed free-market path, it would find prosperity. On its face, the advice was cruel and misplaced, as it left millions of Africans to die needlessly in recent years.

But the cruelty is even worse than that. Farmers in West Africa who literally staked their lives on trade--buying fertilizers and farm implements to compete on world markets--now find that they actually have neither trade nor aid. In a farce worthy of Monty Python, America's trade negotiators in Cancun last week walked away from a global trade deal that might have given Third World farmers a free market for their exports. The reason: The Bush administration wanted to protect roughly 25,000 cotton growers in the South, whose main harvest is billions of dollars in government subsidies. This harvest is a big boy's business, with the overwhelming proportion of benefits received by farms larger than 100 acres; truly poor American cotton farmers could be helped at a fraction of the cost. Yet, just as George W. Bush opposed action on climate change to avoid upsetting coal miners in the swing state of West Virginia, he has also decided he can't alienate Big Agriculture--major campaign contributors--in the Southern states that he will need to carry in 2004. Instead, he'll force American consumers to pay higher prices and condemn more Africans to poverty--or worse.

.... The situation was so unbalanced that the 2001 trade negotiations launched in Doha, Qatar, were dubbed the Doha Development Round, a recognition that it was clearly the turn of the poorest countries to reap more benefits of the international trading system. Then, in May, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Benin called for a phasing out the protectionism holding them in their poverty trap, pitting the ten million impoverished farmers in these nations--and the American consumers who would buy their high-quality and inexpensive cotton--against the few thousand well-heeled and well-organized American cotton growers. The Africans noted that the $3.7 billion in subsidies American cotton producers are expected to receive in 2003 is greater than the national income of each of their countries. They hoped to make headway on this massive disparity at last week's Cancun meeting, which brought together the world's trade ministers to advance the talks begun in Doha.

Instead, U.S. special interests won the day, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick played the heavy. Deflecting the call for an end to protectionism, he said that, rather than selling cotton, impoverished farmers in the developing world should consider selling cotton shirts instead. Marie Antoinette's response to hungry French peasants, "Let them eat cake," cost Marie her head. Zoellick's equivalent, "Let them make shirts," brought him the fulsome praise of America's cotton lobby: National Cotton Council Chairman Robert Greene noted, "Robert Zoellick provided extraordinary leadership to the U.S. negotiating team."

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030929&s=sachs092903

i will say that the idea of making shirts makes sense, but it does no justice to the legitimate issues raised by these nations, re subsidies offered to wealthier farmers in advanced countries.

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