Colin Firth, Minnie Driver and the Finn Brothers

Some stars get filthy in fighting subsidies 

MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2005

NEW YORK Late last year, in hotel rooms and photo studios in Los Angeles, New York and London, a group of celebrities agreed to get doused with buckets of coffee, milk, cocoa and sugar. It was messy, sticky and sometimes smelly, but it was all in the name of easing world poverty.

The photo shoots were organized by the nonprofit advocacy group Oxfam America as part of an ad campaign to raise awareness of what they say is the unfair nature of agricultural subsidies. The campaign urges wealthy nations like the United States and European countries to stop dumping cheap agricultural products on world markets which, Oxfam argues, makes it impossible for farmers in poor countries to compete.

The celebrities who agreed to be dumped on - the actress and singer Minnie Driver; the actor Colin Firth; U2's lead singer, Bono; Coldplay's lead singer, Chris Martin; R.E.M.'s lead singer, Michael Stipe; the singer Alanis Morrissette; the actor Antonio Banderas, and Radiohead's lead singer, Thom Yorke - say they donated their time because it is important to level the playing field for developing nations.

"People think more aid will help, but it won't," said Driver, an actress who is working on her second music CD. "Trade is the surest way of decreasing the savage amount of poverty in our world. These countries have got to be able to trade fairly."

Driver, whose ad features cotton, said she was inspired to participate in the Oxfam campaign after traveling with the group to Cambodia and Thailand last year. She toured clothing factories where women, some in obvious poor health, worked in substandard conditions for menial wages. Cambodia and Thailand are not cotton-producing nations, but Driver said she chose that product because she was in the middle of a press tour for a London play and needed to remain relatively clean after the photo.

The ads, shot for free by the celebrity photographer Greg Williams, will run this autumn in U.S. magazines. The campaign is being produced by Benenson Janson Advertising, a small agency in Los Angeles whose recent work has included a series of ads for the American Civil Liberties Union and a voter registration campaign for a group started by the film producer Norman Lear.

Oxfam's efforts come amid increasing criticism of the some $190 billion in annual crop subsidies that governments in places like the United States, the European Union and Japan hand out to their farmers, according to estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This year the United States will spend $14 billion on subsidies to cotton, rice, corn, wheat and soybean farmers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In the United States, Oxfam is primarily focused on the impact that cotton and rice subsidies have on global markets. The group is an affiliate of Oxfam International, which is headquartered in Oxford, England.

Oxfam contends that multibillion-dollar subsidies, which it says go primarily to big companies rather than small family farmers, encourage overproduction and lower the price U.S. producers charge on the global market.

"A cotton producer in the U.S. might produce a pound of cotton for 70 cents, whereas a West African farmer produces it for 45 cents," said Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. "The West African farmer should have an advantage, but our subsidies allow the U.S. farmer to undersell the African farmer. He's selling it way under his production costs."

Originally introduced in the United States during the Depression to help farmers survive and to promote the stable growth of American agriculture, subsidy programs have continued in part because of strong lobbying by farm groups. These groups argue that, in addition to helping farmers, subsidies serve consumers by keeping the prices of manufactured goods low. Oxfam, however, says the impact of subsidy reduction on consumer prices would be miniscule.

U.S. trade officials and cotton producers suffered a blow in June 2004 when the World Trade Organization ruled that American cotton subsidies violated international trade rules by depressing world prices and harming farmers in Brazil and elsewhere. A trade appeals court affirmed the ruling in March, but the subsidies have continued.

Last August, during the World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva, wealthy nations showed signs of willingness to make changes to their practice of supporting generous subsidies.