Courtesy of the BBC, I bring you Burkina’s white gold fails to deliver wealth:

In a landscape scattered with mud houses, donkeys and carts, under the clearest of clear blue skies, Mr Moussa explains how his seven-hectare cotton farm brings in 500,000 CFA a year, helping him care for his three wives and seven children.

At harvest time, cotton buyers negotiate their trucks on these mud tracks, eager to get the cotton, which the Burkinabe people call white gold, to market.

But earning the money he needs to keep his family fed, clothed and in school is getting harder as cotton prices fall.

Three years ago, he got 210 CFA per kilo of cotton.

In the year ahead, he expects to get 165 CFA per kilo.

Mr Moussa sees only one reason for lower cotton prices, namely America’s subsidies to its own cotton farmers.

These have led to oversupply on the world market, and this extra supply is depressing prices.

“In the US, the state helps them, here the state doesn’t help us,” he says.

It’s true that the United States subsidizes domestic agriculture to the gills. That’s a lovely byproduct of the desire of many of our forefathers (Jefferson, for example) to turn the United States into an agrarian utopia. Of course, our founding fathers didn’t create farm subsidies, but they did create a method of government that disproportionately gives more power to less populous states. This, in turn, leads to politicians buying votes by currying favor with the smaller, more agricultural states, which means farm subsidies.

That said…

I understand that, since there isn’t a whole lot of industry in Burkina Faso, you have to run farms the old-fashioned way - with lots and lots of labor. Consequently, having more children would be beneficial to you; more children means more free labor. That said, could the reason that cotton farmers in Burkina Faso are so poor be that they’re having to support families that are three times the size of ours with less land?

I do find it curious that there are still large swaths of the world that act and live like it’s the Middle Ages, only with a few industrial anachronisms sprinkled in here and there. What is it that keeps Europe so special and keeps Africa living like it’s 1699? Why are Asia’s economies booming and Africa’s stagnant? Very curious.

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