Rock-star economics is not helping poor Africans

By Alex Singleton | 18 April 2005

Franklin Cudjoe, director of Imani, a think tank in Ghana, writes in today's London Daily Telegraph:

Have you purchased your obligatory white band? Did Sir Bob Geldof send you an e-mail recently, reminding you to ogle his celebrity colleagues "clicking" away on television? Did you join the all-night vigil at Westminster Abbey to shiver in the cold and "wake up the government" about the need to "make poverty history"?

This year, the UK's "development" charities have joined hands for a high profile campaign which claims that politicians have an unprecedented opportunity to eliminate poverty in the run-up to the G-8 meeting in July...

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has said that Ghana's rice, tomato and poultry farmers need to be protected from cheap imports. Yet the problems of Ghana's farmers lie elsewhere: they and other entrepreneurs are stifled by punitive tax regimes and the high cost of capital, not to mention our disarrayed land tenure systems which lead to low crop production...

If we did ban rice and tomato imports, just how would we feed ourselves? Ghanaians depend on rice as a major staple in our diets, yet local production caters for only 30pc of the rice we consume.