Week 3 Unfair trade and cotton

First read the text to get a sense of what issues ‘sustainable development’ seeks to address. Write down your initial thoughts on what causes people and nations in the Global South to be poor. Then check out these animations. 

Then, read the article/listen to video on cotton production in Mali. This article covers agricultural subsidies, fair trade, development institutions, over-consumption and disposable fashion. Agricultural subsidies are payments that a nation (the US for instance) makes to its cotton farmers to lower their cost of production. Say you (the farmer) grow cotton and I (the US) give you money to buy fertilizer. Now you can sell your cotton for less on the world market because you don’t need to recover those fertilizer costs. That means all the cotton cloth producers will buy your cotton and t-shirt makers will buy that cheaper material so they can sell their t-shirts for less. And you can produce more because I've helped you with fertilizer costs.  Sounds great right?

Inequalities that exist between the Global North and South are not natural. They were created.

Assignment: From the article on cotton, explain how inequalities between Malian cotton farmers and global north cotton farmers have been created and maintained.  Then after you learn about Oxfam's work on trade, explain what might be changed. Be sure to discuss the article and the Oxfam links.  Answer the three questions.


Optional: Mali's Human Development Index indicators are here in case you're interested. This is a country in West Africa previously colonized by the French. Most of the population lives in the South while the North is largely desert. You may have heard of this country because of recent fighting in the North between various factions of Islamic fundamentalists on one side and the French, the Malian army and the people of the area. A musician you might have heard of from Mali is the late Ali Farka Toure.