Our blog of the week goes to the Guardian newspaper. Their KickAAS blog (Kick All Agricultural Subsidies) has been running since the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun in 2003. Written by Victor Keegan, it's a voice of sanity.

Instead of subsidising farmers in poor countries like Afghanistan, Keegan says:

Wouldn’t it be simpler for the US, Japan and Europe to abolish their own subsidies (thereby returning money to taxpayers) rather than pricing Afghanistan's agriculture out of the market?

He's not a fan of Chriac's words about fighting poverty:

The President of France has started chiracing again. To chirac, according to KickAAS’s private dictionary, is to make high-sounding plans that have no chance of being carried out in order to distract from what is happening at home. President Chirac's latest pan-planetary initiative (are you listening Mr Bush?) is to tax all weapons sales and corporate profits to help the Third World.

There is a much easier way M Chirac because it's happening under your watch. Get rid of agriculture subsidies. That would save the West over $1 billion a DAY while giving poor countries a dramatic opportunity to develop crops like sugar and cotton that they can do efficiently but from which they are priced out of world markets at the moment because of immoral and uneconomic Western subsidies.

And on Africa he says:

The good news is that global poverty has been cut in half during the past 20 years (mainly because of fantastic progress in Asia). The bad news is that Africa has been passed by. The World Bank reckons that by 2015, half of the world's poorest people - those living on less than $1 a day - will live in Africa compared with 10% in the early 1980s.

What's the solution? The Bank says we need economic growth assisted by low trade barriers and aid. It reminds us that 70% of the poor in developing countries subsist on agriculture. In other words it is not really a case of the solution being economic growth "assisted by" low trade barriers. Abolition of agriculture subsidies would itself be a primary engine of growth for Africa. And it would not only cost rich countries nothing, they would gain substantially from not having to shell out $300bn a year bribing farmers to grow crops that can more profitably be grown elsewhere.