Chirac campaigned at the conference to win backing for his government’s stance against a U.S.-dominated invasion of Iraq and in favor of giving the UN "inspectors" more time to carry out "disarmament." He claimed that all 52 government representatives supported the French position.

The French president used the summit to promote his government’s imposed settlement of the civil war in the Ivory Coast. He also tried to score points against Paris’s imperialist rivals, particularly Washington, which has mounted a major push to increase its trade and influence in Africa and has used its military weight to deal blows to French interests in the Middle East.

U.S. corporations have been among the heaviest investors in the growing African oil industry, while U.S. exports to sub-Saharan Africa grew by 17.5 percent in 2001, reaching a record high of nearly $7 billion. Oil and gas field equipment and aircraft were at the forefront of this surge.

U.S. president Bush’s so-called AIDS initiative, announced in his State of the Union speech, represented another push to increase U.S. influence among African countries.

France’s minister of agriculture, Hervé Gaymard, contrasted his government’s self-proclaimed defense of African farmers with the stance of Washington and London. "Our Anglo-Saxon friends...have a purely commercial vision of agriculture," he said, while Paris believes that "rural areas should be inhabited by human beings."

That was how Chirac couched his call to the governments in the European Union (EU) and Group of Eight countries--which include the imperialist governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States --to suspend subsidies on agricultural goods exported to Africa. He said the move would raise the artificially low prices of such goods, allowing African producers to better compete in their home market.

Chirac’s insistence that food aid and export credits be included in his proposals was designed to put the U.S. government--the biggest user and defender of such policies--on the spot.

If implemented, such a move would have a minimal impact on the world markets for agricultural goods, given the scale of the subsidies paid out to agribusiness in the imperialist countries.  
 
Imperialist’s use of subsidies
The governments in Europe, Japan, and the United States pay out some $350 billion each year for farm subsidies, the New York Times reported in December 2002. UN officials estimate that farmers in semicolonial countries lose about $50 billion in annual agricultural exports because of such subsidies.

According to the Financial Times, "Though the EU is by far the biggest exporter to Africa, the continent takes only about 3 percent of total EU farm exports." Only a fraction of nearly $3 billion EU "export refunds" are used to subsidize exports to Africa.

Describing Chirac’s announcement as an "about-turn," the Financial Times stated that French officials have "until now strenuously denied that export subsidies harmed farmers in poor countries."

The French rulers direct substantial "aid" and investment toward their former colonies in Africa and throughout the continent. French bilateral economic agreements worldwide have surpassed those of the United States for the last eight years, and currently stand at $8.4 billion--placing Paris second behind Tokyo. The majority of the money Paris spends on programs in the colonial world is tied to contracts with specific French corporations.

Before the movements for independence following World War II, France was rivaled only by the United Kingdom as the largest colonial power in Africa. The French authorities acquired a reputation for brutality beyond even most of their European rivals--a record they augmented in their attempts to crush the independence movements in Algeria and elsewhere.

Today French imperialism retains major investments in agriculture and the extraction of minerals on the continent; in defense of those interests and its world position, it fosters close paternal ties with a number of governments of its former possessions.  
 
 
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