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CORVALLIS, Ore. - Ivory Coast and other countries in West Africa are becoming caught in a downward spiral of unemployment, rising poverty, illiteracy, national corruption, and inability to compete with other, more developed countries where crop production is subsidized, experts say.

The result is governments and societies that are teetering on the brink of collapse and increasingly unable to reach their goals of agricultural self-sufficiency, even though some of them have millions of farmers and land capable of producing far more than it does.

A geographer at Oregon State University and a visiting scholar from Ivory Coast say these issues are reaching a crisis point, and that ultimately some of the solutions will be as much political and social as they are scientific. A more enlightened view of these complex issues by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and developed nations of the world is necessary, they say.

Similar concerns by developing nations all over the world recently led to the collapse in Cancun, Mexico, of international trade talks in the World Trade Organization, in a dispute that pitted interests of the United States, Europe and other wealthy nations against many poorer countries that largely depend on subsistence agriculture. Talks collapsed abruptly when representatives of dozens of the world's poorest nations walked out.

But these broader issues may be more easily understood by considering the production of rice, a basic food staple, in West Africa's Ivory Coast, says Larry Becker, an assistant professor of geography at OSU, an expert on economic and agricultural issues who has worked with the West Africa Rice Development Association in this region.

"Rice is a primary staple in the diet of people in Ivory Coast, to the point that the government might collapse if enough rice is not available at a reasonable price," Becker said. "But imported rice is about 15 percent cheaper from such nations as the U.S., China, India, and Thailand where production of this crop is usually subsidized. The cheaper rice is very appealing to city dwellers. But that makes it very difficult for the local farmers to produce rice at a reasonable profit and keep workers employed."

In the 1970s the nation tried to support rice production, and during that period Ivory Coast had high quality domestic rice and was self-sufficient in this key crop, Becker said. But in its efforts to enforce "free trade" and open markets - ideas that may have been well-intentioned - the World Bank and other forces put a stop to any crop subsidies in Ivory Coast, and agricultural production of this crop plummeted. Ivory Coast now imports millions of tons of rice a year.

"Beyond this, there are now serious problems with corruption in Ivory Coast, which makes it very difficult to operate businesses in a fair, well-regulated manner," Becker said. "Corruption has grown because so many citizens receive inadequate education and thus do not know their rights."

Similar issues are a concern in nearby Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal, he pointed out. Farms slow down, crops are not produced for the market and able workers drift into unemployment while the developed world fiercely defends crop subsidies for its own farmers that make competition nearly impossible for poorer nations.

"It increasingly looks like these developing nations are going to have to have some forms of crop subsidies, because a truly free market in agriculture does not exist in this world," Becker said. "They also need some educational programs for small farmers such as the Extension concept used in the U.S., and some limited production assistance such as better storage facilities for their crops. But all this may never happen until they find some way to come to grips with the breakdown of civil society and the growth of corruption."

"Too much emphasis has been put on technical solutions to the challenge of African food self-sufficiency," Becker said. "The real obstacles to food production are political and economic."

With slight differences, stories such as this can be told all over Africa and in many other developing nations around the world, the OSU experts say. The trade liberalization that has swept the world in recent years has too often been tilted in favor of the needs of industrialized nations, many say, while basic agricultural production around the world is being stifled by low prices - a direct result of the $300 billion in annual subsidies that developed nations pay to their farmers.

The World Bank itself has estimated that getting rid of farm subsidies in rich countries would cause a 17 percent rise in global agricultural production.