Speaking of evil -- and not just for rhetorical effect -- Radley Balko has the goods on true evil:
Asking every American for 53 cents to help fight pictures of AIDS babies isn't bold. It's easy. Bold would be standing up to the politically savvy cotton industry, for example, and saying "no" to the $3.4 billion subsidy it got from the 2002 Farm Bill. The average cotton farmer in the United States is worth $800,000. He can get up to half of his annual income from government subsidies. And thanks to the 2002 Farm Bill, he can expect to earn about 16% more in the years ahead. Meanwhile, in impoverished Mali - where cotton is pretty much the only export - U.S. and European subsidies will drain an additional 10% from what little income Malian cotton farmers managed to bring in last year. Economists estimate that U.S. cotton subsidies take a quarter of a billion dollars from African farmers every year. And that's just cotton. Thanks to subsidies, American corn sells on the international market at just 80% of the cost of production. Wheat sells at just 54%. There's simply no way African farmers can compete with behemoth western corporate farms that, while feeding at the public trough, sell grain on the world market at a fraction of what it costs them to actually grow it. The United Nations estimates that American and European agricultural subsidies cost African farmers $50 billion annually.
If you think about the massive poverty and disease of Africa -- and the massive wealth of fat and happy American agribusiness and its kept politicians -- you can't help but see evil in this. For the language challenged academics out there, we'll call it "structural injustice". But I -- like the President -- like the plain old word evil.
UPDATE 1: From Bloomberg -- "The World Bank estimates that a WTO agreement, including cuts in industrial duties and greater access for banks, telecommunications and insurance companies in worldwide markets, would add $800 billion a year to the $31 trillion global economy. Still, in order to get that accord, the U.S. has said that the 15 members of the EU need to agree to cut their $40 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. The Geneva-based WTO missed a March deadline on how to open trade in farm products."
UPDATE 2: Peter Beinart -- "A year ago, Bush signed the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. The law�crafted to help Democratic and Republican farm-state senators up for reelection �boosted agricultural subsidies by an astonishing 80 percent. And, because the president signed it, many Africans will die. To understand why, consider just one provision of the legislation: the subsidy on cotton, which the 2002 law more than doubled, from 35 to 72 cents per pound. The United States is a highly inefficient cotton producer; in fact, America's production costs are roughly three times those in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. Yet Burkina Faso is losing market share because the United States subsidizes its cotton industry by roughly $2 billion per year (three times as much as the U.S. Agency for International Development spends annually on Africa). According to Oxfam, the United States actually spends more subsidizing the production of cotton than it earns selling it�making the industry a net loss to the U.S. economy. Those subsidies go to America's 25,000 cotton farmers, who boast an average net worth of $800,000; by contrast, the average yearly wage in Burkina Faso is roughly $200. Burkina Faso relies on cotton for 60 percent of its exports. And Oxfam calculates that, as a result of U.S. subsidies, its export earnings have dropped 12 percent. (Neighboring Mali has seen a drop of 8 percent, which translates to more money than it receives annually in U.S. aid.) Before the 2002 farm bill, the cotton industry was bringing real benefits to Burkina Faso's people. Last summer, the Times of London noted that, in the village of Sobara, cotton exports had funded the construction of 21 new schools and a rudimentary health clinic that distributed anti-malaria pills and polio inoculations. Upon hearing of last year's legislation, the treasurer of the town's cottongrowing cooperative told the Times, "This means our schools and our health centres will close down." That means people in Sobara will die."
Posted by Greg Ransom
