I carelessley left the following text in my message in such a way as to lead the reader to believe it might be I and not Michael Pollak writing:
>
> The Cancun negotiations seem to offer a pretty stark refutation of the
> idea of the productivity of high-tech agriculture. If it's so productive,
> why do American cotton farmers -- the most highly technologized in the
> world -- need massive subsidies to keep dirt poor Malian peasants on small
> plots from eating their lunch?
>
> Michael
>
Indeed, as Kevin Robert Dean points out, the point of agricultural subsidies is to make up for the fact that 1st world farmers - particularly small farmers - are endlessly over-producing in order to try and make up for lean years.
The point on cotton is that cotton farmers need every bit of help they can to keep the economic OVER-abundance of cotton from destroying their profit margins. Thus Malian cotton producers are a threat simply because they produce cotton. In terms of the relative productivity figures between American and Malian cotton producers, I don't know them. I don't know what American cotton producers could produce and at what price if they could go back to the days of hand-picked cotton for sub-subsistence wages. Frankly, it's a bit too horrible to contemplate, as are the conditions of most third-world agricultural workers.
Being a cash-crop farmer on an unsubsidized basis is just a bad job in first-world terms unless the farms are truly huge. However it's not such a bad job in third-world terms so long as plots steadily become bigger, farmers steadily become fewer and methods steadily become modern.