Word: mali
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cramped fifth-floor room he shares with two men in a red-brick dormitory building for immigrants near Paris' Left Bank. "My father slept on this same bed, in this same room, for many years," he says. In 1950, his father, Mamadou Diabira, left their tiny village in Mali and caught a steamboat to Europe, where he worked as a street cleaner in Paris for about 25 years, receiving a certificate of thanks signed by then mayor Jacques Chirac. Waly, a 32-year-old building cleaner, only got to know his father when he sneaked into France...
...Paris, Waly keeps a notebook on his bedside table, in which he writes lists of the cash amounts he gives each month to couriers. They fly to Mali - where remittances account for 3.2% of the country's national income - with wads of euros stuffed in their pockets and luggage. With about 300 people from his village of Ambadedi working in Paris - an estimated one-quarter of Ambadedi's entire population - the community has a well-organized network to transfer money, much of which is aimed at avoiding the hefty commissions from banks. "I write careful notes," Waly says. "'Here...
...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. In a bad year such as this one, when Diarra expects to make just 32? per lb., he will lose money...
...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 K?b?, an adviser to that country's Minister of Agriculture...
...from a low of 17% of the world export market in 1998 to 41% in 2003?the world cotton price has dropped by more than half. The International Cotton Advisory Committee, which promotes cooperation among cotton-producing countries, estimates that developing-world cotton growers, including Burkina Faso, Brazil, India, Mali and Pakistan, have lost $23 billion over the past four years to Western subsidies. The irony, says Oxfam, is that annual losses in export earnings in most West African cotton-producing countries are comparable to U.S. aid donations. Burkina Faso, for instance, received $10 million...