Today, I consumed rice for the first time in three weeks. I consider myself a fairly good cook, and I can work wonders with rice. But every time I leave Ghana, I have to go through a period of ‘rice drought’ because I am so sick of eating the stuff.
My aversion of rice develops usually about one week into my trip. This does not bode well for me because in Ghana, an unwillingness to eat rice is practically sin. So I plug on, sitting there, meal after meal, eating chicken or fish with jollof rice, plain rice, fried rice, egg fried rice – the list goes on. You crave greens after a while, and I find that some two months into my stay, my appetite immediately dissipates at the sight of rice. By this point, rice can only be consumed with the assistance of water.
I think my hatred of rice goes beyond the edibility issue: it is mainly psychological. I find myself thinking whilst eating it – thinking too much, in fact. I mainly think about the locations from where it is sourced: Thailand, Japan and America. Why is Ghana and its neighbours importing rice from these countries when it actually grows the stuff, or has the ability to do so? Throughout the country, there are signs pleading for the consumer to buy Ghanaian-produced rice. You go down the streets of Akwatia, where I was about a month ago, and you see bowls of rice being sold, brought in fresh from Accra: not fresh from a Ghanaian farmer’s field but rather fresh off of a boat or a plane.
The answer is simple and obvious: in the global village, countries like Ghana simply do not have a chance when it comes to producing crops like rice. Liberalized markets have flooded the streets of Accra with cheap imported rice. According to OXFAM, the US, Japan and EU provide something like 16 billion US dollars in subsidies to their rice farmers. What, then, happens in Ghana as a result? An inevitable cycle of deterioration: the government gives up on promoting rice farming, rice farmers receive little support in the way of fertilizers and machinery, and the country stops producing rice beyond a subsistence level. I know they are protecting their citizens but why continue to promote a loss industry, when better quality goods can be produced elsewhere and more cheaply? A note to African governments: if developed nations insist on continuing down this path, do not even show up at future ministerial meetings of the Doha Development Round.
I am trying to make sense of world trade. After all, Ghana imports its toothpicks…
