Global Policy Forum

Hubert Duez, a successful French farmer, has the English Navy to thank for his good fortune. In response to an English blockade two centuries ago, Napoleon pushed French farmers to replace imported cane sugar with beet sugar. And to this day, a passion for this homegrown, temperate root crop remains a cornerstone of the European Union's protectionist agricultural policy, much to the detriment of farmers in the developing world.

Mr. Duez, who farms in the Picardy region near the Belgian border, acknowledges that the arrangement today is hard to justify on economic grounds. "It is more a political choice for Europe," he said in a recent interview on his tidy farm, a patchwork of ruffled green (those would be Napoleon's beets) and gold, punctuated every so often by islands of poplars. In a fully liberalized global marketplace, Mr. Duez knows that Europe would produce no sugar whatsoever. It would be far cheaper to import the sweetener from tropical climates that Europeans once colonized precisely because they were rich in things like sugar cane. Poor countries where sugar is one of the few crops capable of bringing in money on the international market would be deliriously happy if that occurred. But in a perverse reversal of traditional trade patterns, Europe ranks among the world's leading sugar exporters. To protect its sugar growers, the European Union mandates that farmers like Mr. Duez get paid 50 euros per ton of harvested sugar beets, or five times the world market price, up to an allotted quota. Mr. Duez runs a well-diversified farm, but the 1,600 tons of sugar beets he sells every year at an inflated price is by far his most profitable crop.

The European Union's extravagant contortions to remain in the sugar business may be the hardest of all its farm policies to defend, much like the United States' irrational protection of its cotton growers. (An official at the French Agriculture Ministry, the most zealous champion of the protectionist status quo within Europe, candidly referred to sugar as "Europe's cotton" when discussing farm policy.) Yet so powerful is the sugar lobby in Brussels — representing not just farmers, but also monopolistic processing companies — that the crop was excluded from the European Union's recent modest reform of its $50-billion-a-year common agricultural policy.

European trade and agriculture officials are sensitive to powerful criticism by the likes of Oxfam and the World Bank, on behalf of farmers in the developing world. They are quick to note that in an effort to even things out, the E.U. does import some cane sugar at its own inflated internal price from developing nations. That is a bit disingenuous. Not all poor countries get this special access and those that do are subject to strict quotas.

Meanwhile, European farmers, eager to profit from the inflated price, produce far more sugar than European consumers can use. The rest is dumped on the international market, depressing commodity prices for farmers elsewhere. (The United States, which has its own politically connected sugar producers, is Europe's co-conspirator in this indefensible system.)

Mr. Duez's good fortune, in other words, comes at the expense of farmers in countries like Mozambique, Brazil and Guatemala, who are being denied their chance to reap the benefits of globalization. Europeans' sympathy for the travails of farmers in poor countries creates a kind of split political personality when coupled with the desire to see their historic — and picturesque — rural communities stay just the way they are now. Mr. Duez himself has traveled to Burkina Faso to teach farmers in that poor West African nation how to build wells. But he believes that Europe needs to protect its agriculture from unfettered free trade. In his view, a prevalent one in France, agricultural trade should be managed between regional blocs, with an eye toward promoting self-reliance .

This view is at odds with free-trade orthodoxy, not to mention proven development strategies in which countries benefit when they focus on what they do best. It also creates an impossible situation for countries that have little to sell but farm products, and a desperate need to keep rural residents from migrating en masse to the cities.

Fixing, or at least mitigating, the worst effects of rich nations' farm subsidies is supposed to be the central effort of the ongoing "development round" of World Trade Organization talks. In advance of next month's critical W.T.O. gathering in Cancún, European and Japanese resistance to an aggressive easing of agricultural protectionism is threatening to derail this effort. (Although Congress might ultimately have something to say on the matter, right now American negotiators are pushing for serious subsidy reductions that would prove painful to American farmers.)

Europeans should not allow their farm lobbies to hijack the union's policymaking and obstruct a new trade deal that could bring hope to poor countries living in despair and strengthen the credibility of a global trading system that has helped Europe prosper. Lifting farm subsidies will surely be a gradual process, but Europe must start reining them in and stop dumping its surplus harvests below cost on world markets. Kicking the sugar habit, Napoleon's bequest, would be a good place to start.

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