SINCE 1996, the United States has resorted to massive farm subsidies. Not surprisingly, the international cotton prices have crashed ever since. Could there be a worse indictment of the American agricultural policy, rendered more scandalous by the new $180 billion farm bill signed by the President Bush?

Actually, there is a worse indictment. By inflating farm subsidies even more, the US Congress and the Bush administration are impoverishing and occasionally hurting developing countries that they claim to be trying to help.

The US, the Europe and Japan spend $350 billion each year on agricultural subsidies (seven times as much as global aid to poor countries), and this money creates gluts that lower commodity prices and erode the living standard of the world’s poorest. “These subsidies are crippling Africa’s chance to export its way out of poverty,” said James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president.

Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Programme, estimates that these farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports. By coincidence, that’s about the same as the total of rich countries’ aid to poor countries, so they take back with their left hand every cent they give with their right hand.

“It’s holding down the prosperity of very poor people in Africa and elsewhere for very narrow, selfish interests of their own,” says Mr Malloch Brown of the rich world’s agricultural policy adding, “it also seems a tad hypocritical of us to complain about governance in third-world countries when we allow tiny groups of farmers to hijack billions of dollars out of our taxes.”

The US has only 25,000 cotton growers, but they are prosperous (with an average net worth of $800,000) and thus influential. So, the US spends $2 billion a year subsidizing them, and the American cotton production has almost doubled over the last 20 years — even though the US is an inefficient, high-cost producer. The result is a glut that costs African countries $250 million each year, according to a World Bank study published in February.

And when a poor cotton farmer in West Africa goes bust because of cotton subsidies, he has no savings to fall back on. Rather, he starves. He cannot afford medicine for his sick baby, and the child dies. He cannot afford a midwife when his wife is pregnant, and so she is crippled in childbirth. He cannot afford worming medication for his children, and so they grow anaemic and do poorly in school — and cannot concentrate when Americans lecture them about their poor governance.

A Pakistani cotton grower, Qadir Bux, hitched his one-blade plough to two lanky oxen and began turning over the dirt of his fields. Walking bare-foot behind the plough, the 22-year-old farmer would spend the next 14 days tilling and planting 15 acres of cotton. And for what, he wonders? World cotton prices had fallen to the most unprofitable level in three-decades. “We’ll have to reduce what we can buy,” says Qadir Bux, wearing a sweat-soaked brown shirt and tattered green shalwar. “These prices are really going to ruin us.”

On the same day that the rain came to Korokoro, cotton seedlings half a world away in the US pushed up through the thick black soil of Perthshire Farms, a 10,000-acre cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Kenneth B. Hood, the eldest of four brothers who run the farm, climbed into the air-conditioned cab of a $125,000 Case tractor and prepared to give the seedlings a dousing of fertilizer.

The enormous tractor, one of 12 on the farm, is equipped with digital displays, four-wheel drive and an air-cushioned seat. The 61-year-old Mr Hood, wearing a button-down oxford shirt, fiddled with a global positioning satellite system that indicates how much fertilizer to squirt onto the plants. “There are lots of reasons to be optimistic,” says Mr Hood, who is chairman of the powerful industry trade group.

The biggest reason for Hood’s upbeat outlook is also the biggest reason for Qadir Bux’s despair: subsidies. American farmers get them in abundance. Pakistani tillers don’t. In past years, farm subsidies have been criticized for widening the gap between rich and poor. Since Sept 11, such subsidies have generated an even sharper controversy: they work directly against the US effort to combat global poverty as part of a broader campaign against terrorism.

Fearing that misery in the developing world may make it a breeding ground for instability and terrorism, the US government is aiming to promote development aid and open trade. But this strategy is undermined by subsidies to US farmers, which help depress global prices of some vital cash crops that developing countries count on. In developing countries, the US spends massive sum of money on education, health and other programmes. That investment is blunted by sagging prices for agricultural produced.

As a result, the very people who are supposed to be soothed by the anti-poverty offensive are becoming more alienated and angry. Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country, has been largely peaceful since Sept. 11, but frustrations are mounting nonetheless. “This is where America is heading: It wants to dominate the world, economically and militarily,” say most of the growers of the developing countries. Meanwhile, a new US farm bill rich with subsidies means that many US cotton growers will receive half of their income from the government this year. Although a relatively small share of the farm population — just 25,000 of America’s two million farmers actually raise cotton — their affluence is legendary in Washington. The average net worth of a full-time American cotton-farming household, including land and no farm assets, is about $800,000, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

“Our rhetoric doesn’t match our behaviour,” says Allan Gray, an agricultural economist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “It goes to show that when push comes to shove, US domestic policy trumps foreign policy every time.” While subsidies protect growers in America and several other countries from falling world prices, they generally further depress prices by encouraging continued production, and thus cripple growers in less subsidized countries.

At few places these skewed economics are more evident than in the gap between cotton growers in the US’s Mississippi Delta and Africa’s Niger Delta. America is the world’s largest exporter of cotton, and West Africa is the third, leaving both subject to market forces that have slashed prices by 66 per cent since 1995 to 40 cents a pound. World trade in cotton has stagnated, ever since Russia’s textile-making industry, long a big consumer of fibre, collapsed in the 1990s. What’s more, cotton is increasingly competing with polyester, which is becoming more popular in some parts of the world.

Armed with roughly $3.4 billion in subsidy checks, US farmers last year harvested a record crop of 9.74 billion pounds of cotton, aggravating a US glut and pushing prices far below the break-even price of most growers around the world. This year, US cotton farmers are expecting to pocket even more, thanks to the $118 billion, six-year farm bill signed by President Bush in May. The government programme ensures farmers reap about 70 cents a pound of cotton by making up for any shortfall in the market with federal checks. Unlike several past farm bills, the latest one doesn’t require farmers to leave some of their land idle in order to qualify for the aid.

In contrast, Pakistan’s government, hard-pressed to provide even the most basic health care and education to a nation that is one of the least developed in the world, can’t keep up with subsidies of its own. The report estimates that the removal of US subsidies — which account for much of the $5 billion a year in subsidies world-wide — would produce a drop in US production that would lead to a short-term rise in the world price of cotton. In turn, that would increase revenue to West and Central African countries by about $250 million. That is a princely sum in a region where vast numbers of people live on less than one dollar a day. Instead, the opposite is happening. The new farm bill increases the amount of money a US cotton farmer can count on making this year by at least 16 per cent. At the same time, in Mali, where cotton makes up nearly half the nation’s export revenue, the government is telling cotton farmers they will be getting about 10 per cent less this year from the state cotton company.

By widening the wealth gap, the subsidies sow a potentially bitter harvest. Citizens of the cotton countries of West and Central Africa, where Islam is the major religion, are crowding into the cities of Europe. Those, who stay, are seeing more clerics from Pakistan and the Middle East visits their mosques and Quranic schools. For now, the peril isn’t imminent: the government in Pakistan insist that they won’t allow Pakistan to become recruitment camps for terrorist organizations seeking to enlist the world’s disaffected. Yet they warn that frustrations are rising with the persistent poverty.

There is no electricity, no telephone service, and no running water. A crude television antenna wobbles above one of the huts. The TV inside the house is connected to a tractor battery. While most of the children attend school, few of the adults did. The clan does have two tractors, including a 22-year-old French model. But most of the times they sit idle in a shed, because the family lacks harvesting implements. “We just use them for plowing,” says Haq Nawaz, one of the eldest of the family. “Everything else we do by hand. Planting, fertilizing, picking.” The goal this season is to buy more equipment, but the outlook is bleak given the crop price cut. At the same time, the price of fertilizer has gone up about two cents a pound. In Pakistan, every cent counts, because agriculture must pay for everything from school and food to malaria tablets to dowries for the families of prospective wives. The bottom line is that farm subsidies cripple third world countries and go to people who don’t really need them.