A few years ago I went with a camera crew to a frightening little drugs town in north-eastern Peru, where the farmers mostly grew coca. I assumed they would be violent and aggressive. Not at all: they were the ones who were scared. Every week or so gangs of armed, drugged-out tracateros, or buyers, would erupt into the town, forcing the growers to sell their coca paste to them at rock-bottom prices."So," I asked, "Why don't you simply grow something that won't get you into trouble? Maize, or wheat, or something?"
As it happened, we were close to a little shop. The chief spokesmen of the coca growers took me by the arm and led me inside. There were all sorts of foods and vegetables for sale, mostly imported from the United States or the EU. He told me how much each item cost; it was clear that every one of them had been dumped on the market at a fraction of its real value.
"We're just poor peasants," he said. "We can't compete. We can't afford to grow these things so cheaply." The only commodity they could grow which wasn't fiercely undercut by the artificially cheap produce of Europe and America was coca.
Americans and Europeans have got themselves into the ludicrous position where they pay their farmers huge amounts to dump their surplus produce on the rest of the world.
They then spend even larger amounts trying to deal with the social problems which are created by drugs - the only thing the deprived farmers of the developing world can grow without competition from the north.
This story is one more example of the absurd system of farm subsidies screwing up the developing world's chances to compete on a level playing field. For all those people who want to push FTAA and other free trade agreements (and I include myself in that), it's important to remember that free and fair trade begins at home. Until we're willing to reform our system, we have little authority to call on other countries to open up their own markets.
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