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In a mud-walled shed on the edge of Warala in southern Mali, behind a door barred with steel poles and two fat padlocks, sits the product of the whole village's labour this year: cotton, two great drifts of it, like the snowbanks of the longest Ottawa winter.

It's enough cotton, as Omar Diarra, head of the farmers co-operative, demonstrates, for several people to climb up and lie back on. The piles are taller than he is. But for the future of this village? It isn't much at all.

"We are always disappointed at the time of harvest," Mr. Diarra said. "What we're paid, it's nothing. It's less than it cost us to produce."

In Warala, they have a number of problems. The rains were bad this year, so the crop is down by half. Second, they are selling their cotton into a market priced in U.S. dollars, but their currency, the CFA franc, is pegged to the much stronger euro, so here in rural Mali, farmers are taking a beating on the global currency market.

Both rain and currency fluctuation feel like fairly immutable forces in Warala. But there is one more problem for these cotton farmers: subsidies.

"We have heard that in rich countries the government gives the farmers money for everything they grow, and money to help them grow it, more than even enough money to buy a tractor," said Mr. Diarra, a tone in his voice of disbelief at such excess. "So they grow more and more, and it makes the price very low. Of course, it would never happen here."

The farmers of Warala have a limited understanding of agricultural subsidies, but they know three things: They don't get any; rich farmers do; and thus the people of Warala earn less for their cotton. That means their children will eat less this year, they will sell their precious livestock to pay a teacher for their school, and if anyone needs to go to hospital, that could be a disaster.

In the United States, the world's largest cotton producer, farmers receive between $2-billion and $3-billion (U.S.) a year in subsidies, as Mr. Diarra said, both money to produce and money to compensate for the price. It's a huge incentive to produce, and thus U.S. farmers flood the global market with cotton, driving down the price about 14 per cent below where it would otherwise be. The subsidies are paid out to about 12,000 large-scale growers in the southern states, but far off in Mali, the ninth-poorest country in the world, their impact is enormous.

"Subsidies are a catastrophe for us," said Zakariyaou Diawara, who heads the union of Mali's cotton farmers. "Our cotton is of better quality; it's the subsidies that crush us."

Depressing the price by 14 per cent may not sound like a great deal, but the aid agency Oxfam, which works with cotton farmers across West Africa, recently teamed up with U.S. academics to calculate what the subsidies mean for the typical Malian cotton-producing household, which earns about $2,000 a year.

If subsidies were removed, the farmers wouldn't see the whole benefit. Some would go to processors and those in other stages of the industry, but Oxfam says farmers would likely see at least a 6-per-cent rise in household income, about $120 a year. In Warala, that would be enough money to allow a family to provide 20 per cent more food each year for at least five children (in an area where 40 per cent of children under the age of five are malnourished); or to send several additional children to school; or, because health care involves user fees in Mali, to pay for medication and clinic visits for at least a half-dozen family members in a year.

"That 12 or 14 per cent, it would mean a lot here," Mr. Diawara said.

A quarter of Mali's population of 12 million rely on cotton farming to survive, either directly from growing it or by working in related industries such as transport or ginning. (Very little cotton processing happens here, little of the value-added manufacturing that would boost the economy, because the country is short of cheap, reliable energy and investors.)

The United States is not the only country that subsidizes cotton farmers. European growers receive the equivalent of about $700-million a year, and China's about $1-billion a year. But because the United States dominates global production, its farmers are the focus of west African frustration. The subsidies are provided through the Farm Bill and have their origin in the Great Depression, when they were designed to protect small farmers from a collapsing market. But today, a quarter of all subsidies go to the top 1 per cent of producers, who take home more than $500,000 each. And since the big producers earn more for every bale they produce, production keeps climbing.

Brazil, supported by African countries, took the United States to the World Trade Organization in 2003 over the subsidies and, in 2004, the WTO ruled the subsidies illegal; the United States made a few small changes to the program, which Brazil and the Africans complained were largely cosmetic. The WTO agreed, but the United States has taken the issue to the slow appeals process.

Meanwhile, producers in Mali and other west African countries are not, as a condition of the assistance they receive from donor nations and international financial institutions, allowed to subsidize their farmers. "The World Bank won't let us subsidize. How are we supposed to fight poverty like this?" asked Mr. Diawara.

Until 2004, the Malian government was protecting its farmers from the tumbling price of cotton, but the bank forced the government to remove that protection, cutting off all budgetary support to the government until it did so, an unprecedented bit of financial hardball in Mali for a simple agricultural policy.

"That had a hard impact on the farmers who had had some protection; there was a 25 per cent drop in farmers' income," said Sally Baden, who heads Oxfam's cotton project in west Africa from a base in the capital Bamako. "Now many of them are in a heavy debt situation, while the prices of inputs, such as petrol, are rising."

Mali's cotton farmers are caught in a particularly grim predicament. The national agency that buys their harvest provides them with loans for fertilizer and seeds, fertilizer that also helps them grow food for their families. Yet often the selling price is so low that they finish the year in debt.

In Warala this year, for example, they estimate the cost of production at 180 CFA francs a kilo, and they sold at 160 a kilo. The only way to pay off their loans is to consign their future production to the company. "We are not in love with cotton," sighed Mr. Diarra. "We would grow anything else if we could. But we owe them. Now what else can we do?"