The Great African Scandal
Rice
Robert Beckford starts his investigation in Tamale, capital of the agricultural north of Ghana. By working with rice farmers and trying to survive on Ghana’s average national income of 60p a day, he finds out how western policies have affected local people. In the early 1970s, Ghana supplied nearly 50% of its own needs in rice. Arriving at the village where he is to start his investigation, Robert finds that hard to imagine.
The people are very poor. The nearest source of water, a mile from the village, is a pond infested with Guinea worm. Robert struggles to keep up with the women and children carrying home buckets of water on their heads. If he sold his bucket of water in the village, he would earn 5p.
Subsistence farming
He goes to work as a rice farmer. After some haggling, he is offered a wage of £1 a day – nearly double the average national daily income in Ghana – and starts work clearing rock-hard ground with a heavy axe to prepare land for a new rice field.
The farmers explain that, until the 1980s, the Ghanaian government handed out grants for fertilizer and machinery. Then the World Bank moved in and put a stop to state subsidies. The new mantra was the free market and privatisation. The farmers were back to square one.
At the end of the day, Robert has not managed anything like a full day’s work; he has earned only 25p. Adding 5p for the bucket of water, his day’s wages come to a total of 30p.
‘I think they’ve been fair,’ says Robert. ‘I could only last an hour out there in the heat.’ What he doesn’t think is fair is that these farmers have been put in this position in the first place. He says: ‘I can't see how in this modern day and age we would subject people to this kind of livelihood just to make our part of the world richer. … It's not something they've brought on themselves or willed, or concocted, or an act of God or some kind of misfortune. It's a calculated political process.’
Market forces
He then heads for nearby Botanga, where the Government and the World Bank have set up an irrigation project. The dam has enabled farmers to grow enough rice to sell commercially but here the wages are only 50p a day – less than the subsistence farmers paid him.
What Robert discovers here leaves him gobsmacked: ‘In the 1980s, as part of their strategy to open up the Ghanaian market, the American government supplied rice as food aid. It was like sending snow to the Eskimos. … Along with the sweetener of the food aid, the IMF, World Bank and the Americans told the Ghanaian government to cut subsidies to farmers and open up its markets to foreign imports. The food aid tailed off. Cheap foreign rice flooded in and Ghana’s rice production stagnated.’
While the IMF and the World Bank told Ghana to axe its subsidies to rice farmers, the American government pays as much as 72% of their own farmers’ costs. Robert finds local producers struggling to sell their rice in the market because people prefer the heavily subsidised, imported American rice.
She’s leaving home
Here, hundreds of villages have been reduced to abject poverty. One chilling side effect is that many of the girls, some as young as 12, are leaving their homes and families to try and earn some money in the city. Going in search of them, he discovers them living in squalid conditions in the town of Kumasi.
It’s shameful,’ says Robert. ‘The story of my packet of supermarket rice ends here in the awful slums of Kumasi.
‘Next time you buy subsidised American rice, think what it’s done to Ghana.’
