The West's bitter harvest
Chris Martin

Our inhuman trade rules are devastating the lives of millions of farmers in the Third World.

This year I visited the Weiga rice valleys in Ghana, which turned out not to be valleys at all but three vast natural basins some 50 miles across. In January a wind blows over northern Ghana from the Sahara, bringing with it a fine dust that shrouds everything in grey.

This, and the fact that the ground was blackened where the stalks left from previous years' crops had been burnt, made it hard for me to imagine that the land I was standing on was fertile. But when the rains come, so do the farmers, and by now those valleys will be covered in a green carpet of rice shoots as far as the eye can see.

I was in Ghana with Oxfam, to renew Coldplay's commitment to the campaign to Make Trade Fair and to learn more about how the trade rules are skewed against the world's poorest people. The farmers I met in these valleys weren’t passive victims. They were educated, articulate — and angry. They didn't want to be dependent on the rains, and they knew exactly what was needed to make this land work all year round. The valleys needed to be properly irrigated (they'd costed this at around £600,000 — pocket change when you consider what Ghana pays in interest to the West on loans), they needed a combine harvester, and perhaps some tractors. With this they could offer employment to many, and more importantly they could produce enough rice to feed the whole of the country.

But no-one from the Government had been to see them about such an important proposal because when Ghana took a World Bank loan in 1983, it was told it could no longer subsidise or help its farmers in any way. So, instead of growing its own rice, Ghana is flooded with cheap grain from overseas. In the markets you’ll find sacks of perfumed rice from Thailand and Vietnam, but mainly polished, heavily processed white rice from America: part of the surplus produced by heavily subsidised US farmers. Unwanted at home, it is dumped cheaply in the developing world along with frozen EU poultry pieces, cans of Italian tomato paste and other food we pay our farmers to produce, even though we don't need it.

Ghana has tried to protect its people. Only last year a law was passed imposing tariffs on imported rice and poultry to level the playing field for local producers. But the tariffs were never implemented. Most people seemed to feel that the World Bank had once more intervened.

In a country where 60 per cent of the population earn a living from the land, all of this has been devastating. Local farmers cannot compete with our cheap leftovers, and often end up selling their crops for less than they cost to produce. Another of the loan conditions was that all state-run enterprises be sold off, and many government agricultural projects in the poor rural north failed to find buyers. This means that local rice is often brown and gritty because it has to be washed and de-husked by hand, rather than machine-processed; it means that a tomato-canning plant that once gave farmers a fair price for their crops has been replaced by middle-men who wait till the fruit is near-rotting on the vine in order to force farmers to sell it at knock-down prices.

By 'farmers', let me make it clear that I mean people such as Nyaba Atampugre, an 18-year-old in a ragged Adidas tracksuit whose sole source of income was a small patch of land he tended with a primitive stone and wood hoe to produce tomatoes. Or Ayishiatu Ademu, whom I met in the fields early one morning tending her crop with her youngest child strapped to her back and her toddler working alongside her. It's probably worth pointing out, too, that if the children I saw working alongside their parents make it past the age of 5 (and one in five doesn't), they are highly unlikely to finish school because their parents can’t afford to pay for them to learn to read and write. School fees were another World Bank idea: education in northern Ghana was free before the 1983 loan.

How on earth could anybody stand somewhere such as in the rice valleys, talk to the people there and then say that it’s the right thing to do to dump their excess produce cheaply on a Third World country? It's beyond me. But the truth is, the people that are responsible haven't talked to these farmers in the areas affected. It's all about numbers, and the World Bank economists have done a fine job of making Ghana's books balance. But the human cost has been devastating, and it is time we now pressed our politicians to rein in the World Bank and change the trade rules.

A few years ago, no one really talked about it, no one knew there was a problem. But that's changed and now people know about the trade and market problems of countries such as Haiti and Ghana. That's the first step towards change. It is often said that ordinary people don't care about issues such as Africa, but I don't think this is true. Look at the £37 million raised by Comic Relief this year. Look at the 6.5 million people who have signed the Big Noise petition to make trade fair.

At the launch of the Commission for Africa report last month, Tony Blair said he feared how future generations would judge us. "I fear them asking: but how could wealthy people, so aware of such suffering, so capable of acting, simply turn away to busy themselves with other things? Did they really know and yet do nothing?" Like him, I feel that we have the means to solve this problem, without compromising our own lifestyles in any great way. This is my big issue for this election. And it’s time to act on it. As Mr Blair said: "If we fail to act, we will betray the future not just of hundreds of millions of children in Africa but that of our own children as well. It is unthinkable that we should do so."

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