Smarter farming helps developing countries to compete

Related pages: Trade Matters homepage | Millennium Development Goal 8: Aid, trade, growth and global partnership

Instead of being priced out of the market, some farmers are improving techniques to compete with imported produce.

"The challenge,” says Kofi Ampah, a Ghanaian tomato producer facing competition from cheap imports, “is for our farmers to produce a high yield per acre so that we can sell them at a price to compete with imported tomatoes.”

Kofi is one of 500 farmers being trained in efficient techniques to produce good quality tomatoes. Since the project, funded by DFID, began, harvests have tripled and are still rising.

The tomatoes are now canned for sale in local supermarkets. It’s true that there are risks for poorer countries when they open their markets too rapidly to foreign goods. Sometimes, industries may collapse, leaving people without an income and forced into poverty.

But this does not mean that poorer countries shouldn’t take part in trade. Instead, it means countries need to manage any opening of markets they undertake very carefully – making sure that the process encourages national development and the prosperity of the population – especially the poor.

The goal of both the UK Government and the EU is that all countries will have the freedom and flexibility to do this.

This case study is part of Trade Matters.