The World Bank Group working paper on "Reforming the cotton sector in sub-Saharan Africa' notes that sub-Saharan African countries "have a strong comparative advantage in cotton production' and that their share of world production has risen in the past decade from 3% to 5%. It review the reforms which have been undertaken in the cotton sectors of six sub-Saharan African countries and seeks to draw lessons form this experience. Four main critical areas were identified:

• the need for an efficient credit system for small farmers to enable them to acquire quality inputs in a timely manner;
• the importance of giving more power to cotton growers in the management of the sector;
• the need for private-sector inputs into research and extension service provision;
• investigating how seed-cotton marketing is best undertaken in a regulated framework agreed upon by inter-professional organisations.

The report notes that in recent years the economics of world cotton production and trade have been "strongly distorted by the heavy subsidies paid by OECD countries ( USA and EU) to their cotton farmers'. These subsidies "have pernicious economic effects, since they promote production in countries with high production costs at the expense of countries with lower production costs' and describes the negative effects of these subsidies on poverty as "quite dramatic "by increasing artificially production and exports and depressing world prices, the subsidies reduce the export earnings of African countries, thus curtailing the revenues of several millions of Africans living on under one dollar a day'.