Word: cottons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...easy farming cotton in Africa. Just ask Bafing Diarra, 47, who owns slightly less than 25 acres near the village of Korokoro in Mali in West Africa. His headaches are endless: low- yielding seeds from Mali's government-controlled cotton company, boll weevils that this season resisted five applications of pesticides; capricious weather; a lack of equipment, which forces him to pick his cotton by hand in the scorching heat; even monkeys, which occasionally get into the fields and pry open the bolls to get at the sweet water trapped inside...
...biggest problem Diarra faces, though, isn't environmental or even in Africa. It is 5,000 miles away: the $3 billion or more the U.S. pays its 25,000 cotton farmers in subsidies every year. Washington uses taxpayer money to guarantee American farmers a price--currently about 72˘ per lb.--whether it rains or bakes and no matter what happens on the world market. By contrast, in 2003, when Mali's cotton farmers earned 42˘ per lb., Diarra says he made a profit of $480, which he used to buy four cows and send his children to school...
That sinking price makes a huge difference in West Africa, where more than 10 million people depend directly on cotton to pay for food, school fees and housing. The crop provides Burkina Faso and Mali with half of all their export earnings; in Benin it accounts for 75%. "If there is no cotton growing in Mali, Mali doesn't work," says Demba Kébé, an adviser to that country's Minister of Agriculture...
Raymond D. Cotton, vice president for higher education at MLStrategies, a law firm in Washington, said that universities must use economic incentives to attract the best and the brightest individuals to lead their schools...
...state universities are now falling behind the private universities,” said Cotton, the university compensation expert. “That concerns me because two-thirds of college students are in state universities, not private. State universities need to start paying more in order to be competitive...