UN General Assembly
2003

$1 billion a day in various subsidies for their own agricultural sectors. This ruinous practice leads to the freefall of the prices of our peasants' agricultural 13 commodities and threatens millions of jobs and the lives of over 2 billion human beings. The hypothetical mechanism of limiting the perverse effects of subsidies can in no way be a credible solution to the enormous damage done to the developing countries. I believe that the time has come radically to rethink the mechanisms of international trade in order to break away from this implacable logic of injustice and inequity. In that context, I have taken the initiative of proposing to convene, every two years in Senegal, an agricultural Davos' an agricultural Dakar, rather to encourage thinking on a credible alternative to the current system. It is indeed in no one's interest for the present imbalances to persist, because they promote poverty, favour unemployment and destitution, and fuel the feelings of exclusion and despair that lead to extremism of all types. Once again, for us it is a