Julie Beth is half of Friday Chick Blogging. You can read more of her at It's an Outrage.

Do you ever think about where the cotton you're wearing came from? A bit of it might have come from West Africa, where a lot of cotton is grown by impoverished farmers and sold at dirt cheap prices because enormous American cotton subsidies keep world cotton prices artificially low.

In fact, American cotton subsides cost many poor, cotton-growing countries more than the United States gives them in aid. And yet the Bush administration has steadfastly fought to retain the subsidies and has only recently begun to buckle under World Trade Organization pressure and mandates.

Oxfam says:

The economic losses inflicted by the US cotton subsidy program far outweigh the benefits of its aid. Mali received $37m in aid in 2001 but lost $43m as a result of lower export earnings...The financial damage inflicted by US cotton subsidies has grave implications for poverty. Cotton growers in the US can shift relatively easily to other crops, but the scope for substitution is much more limited in the Sahel. Grown alongside maize and other cereals, cotton is the main cash crop for a large section of the rural population.

The problem, of course, is that kidnapped West Africans were enslaved so American southern plantations owners could grow and process cotton with little overhead and keep prices low. Even though those farmers can't do that anymore, they continue to enslave West Africans from afar by accepting astronomical subsidies that prop up American cotton prices and keep West African farmers from breaking even.

Cotton farmer sleeping at the market day in Gorom Gorom, Burkina Faso.

The American South can no longer produce cotton as well or as cheaply as other areas of the world can. That means the long legacy of the United States as a cotton-growing (and picking) nation is in its last days. Families that have grown cotton for generations and hundreds of years will now have to grow something else, or get out of the growing business entirely.

It's sad when traditions like that die, but it's not tragic. It's a tragedy when American calls for free and open markets fall on deaf ears all over the world because they know what we really mean is, "Free markets for us, but not for you."

And it's a tragedy when millions of West African children go hungry during growing season so that an American farmer can get rich on tax dollars and still be able to say that he grows cotton just like his daddy did, and his daddy before him.