Coldplay's Chris Martin misses the big picture on fighting poverty

By Alex Singleton | 21 April 2005

Coldplay's Chris Martin had an article in The Times last week:

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.

So Mr Martin suggests that the World Bank is responsible for actions of the Ghanan government. If true, the World Bank deserves praise. In the past twenty years, poverty in Ghana has been in decline, and the country has been growing faster than any other West African country. Rice growers might not like open borders, but imported rice has meant cheaper food, helping millions of poor people to eat more. Mr Martin's protectionism might seem a way of fighting poverty: in practice it would cause the poorest to starve.