Ending unfair trade is key to helping Africa

Here's another article I found concerning the right way to help Africa move up the development ladder. The most important part is:

"These unfair trade practices are of two main types. First, producers in the rich countries - especially our farmers - receive huge production and export subsidies. These enable us to dump our surpluses on poor country markets at far below production costs and make it difficult for poor country farmers to export certain crops to us. When I lived in Ghana in the early 1980s, farmers there were producing cotton, rice and sugar, largely for the local market. Today, little of any of these crops is grown locally and the Ghanaian farmers have been driven into the slums or on to more marginal and ecologically fragile land. In each case, they have been displaced by subsidised, rich country exports.

Second, the rich countries design their tariff regimes in a way that value-adding, processing activities - turning cotton into shirts, etc - are undertaken here rather than in the countries where the products are grown. Some 70 per cent of the crops grown in the US are processed domestically while only 1 per cent of India's crops are processed in India. This is not because Indians are incapable of making tea-bags, roasted coffee, etc, but because we distort markets to make it more profitable for processors to import raw materials into Europe and the US and to do the processing here.

This is the reason we are not seeing the emergence of an entrepreneurial middle class in Africa..."

You can read the rest of the article here.