i hear this argument of subsidies directly impoverishing the third world very often in africa....but to me, for various reasons, the argument is fundamentally flawed as it makes the problem one dimensional....
-poor farming practices (no crop rotation, slash and burn, cash crop farming, rather than subsistence farming....) -bad infrastructure (the worldbank sponsored a massive sugarcane project, but forgot about the roads or a sugarcane processing plant.... at harvest time, it was too expensive to transport and process the sugarcane 1000 kms away....that year everyone in the tana delta region had dental problems and diabetes) -cultural attitudes (300 metres from lake victoria i met a farmer who complained no one was providing water to his farms...when, if he wanted to, he could have dug a small irrigation canal) -multiple harvests - in the tropics its possible to have in some cases three harvests a year for certain crops (long summers, short winters...) - the same cannot be said of europe where you are limited to a single harvest in many instances.... (3 vs 1 you should be winning despite subsidies....) most probably subsisidies make an impact, but not on such a scale as some of these movements make them out to be....
