Category Archives: Mali

Misery in Mali

An article on BBC NEWS about ‘Misery in Mali’s cotton-picking fields‘ reminds us of the woes of Mali’s farmers. These are not the huge cotton companies one sees in the US South, but family units who co-operate together. The work is hard and for very little return.

A Fairtrade article focuses on the story about the Dougourakoroni co-operative in the south of Mali in Kita Region, although it also has a lot of good information about cotton in Mali and some general information about the country. Many small farmers switched from peanuts to cotton as their cash crop following drought and disease in the early 1980s and now, according to the article, 40% of rural Malians are dependent on cotton production.
Global Envision has an article from 2005 referring to cotton in Mali which argues that Africa needs fair trade not charity and that allowing producers to export to a subsidy-free world market will lift many out of poverty.

‘Journey to the Lands of Cotton: A Brief Manual of Globalisation’ on the Open Democracy site is a rather long extract of an article by Erik Orsenna who has written a sort of field diary of a trip to the cotton producing countries of Mali, the USA and Brazil. Of particular interest is an interview with Amadou Toumani Touré, President of Mali.

‘We are condemned for our deficit. But no one looks at the causes of that deficit. Without the subsidies they get from their state, American farmers would produce dearer cotton than we do. Since independence we’ve increased our production by a factor of twenty. For forty years we’ve fought day after day to better ourselves. We’ve gone all out for competition. Without the slightest chance of winning, because the most powerful player is cheating.’

The argument about the role of US cotton subsidies and fair trade will not go away. Is it really a case of Africa blaming its problems on outsiders as the US Ambassador to Mali claims in the above article? Will the privatisation of the Malian cotton industry bring the results the World Bank and others claim or is it just another part of vested interests protecting themselves? The questions remain whilst Malian farmers struggle.