The rains have arrived late in Kenya this year but that is the least of Peter Makokha's worries.

Peter is a farmer in Mumias which is in Western Kenya close to the border with Uganda.

I visited Peter a few weeks ago. He has a wife and seven children – five of school age. They farm 10 acres of land. Most of the produce is for their own use. Their income comes from the sugar cane which they grow. This is their cash crop. The money they get from sugar is used to buy second hand clothes and pay for their children to go to school.

Peter is a worried man – not because of crop failure – but because he is pushed out of his own domestic market in Kenya by cheap imports from the European Union and the United States.

Yet how can this be when in Kenya it costs around 280 euros to produce one tonne of white sugar compared to 670 euros in the European Union (E.U.)?

The answer lies with the Common Agricultural Policy (C.A.P.)

The C.A.P. keeps the E.U. sugar industry in business – at the expense of European taxpayers, consumers and farmers in developing countries.

It does so by first guaranteeing E.U. farmers high prices for selling their sugar beet to E.U. processors. It then guarantees the processors a high price for selling their refined sugar. All these guarantees are underwritten by the taxpayer.

The result is that in Europe sugar costs more than three times the world market price – a cost which is paid by the shopper.

In these circumstances the obvious course of action for sugar farmers like Peter would be to export their sugar into the E.U. in order to take advantage of the high price. This doesn't happen because trade barriers have been erected. Tariffs reaching 140 per cent are in place to protect E.U. sugar farmers.

To add insult to injury E.U. sugar farmers are using the subsidy they get from the C.A.P. to dump sugar in developing countries at below market price. In the first six months of this year Kenya has imported 90,000 tonnes of sugar. Denying a market to farmers like Peter. As a consequence his children are no longer going to school.

But sugar is just one example. There are many others. Perhaps the most obscene result of the C.A.P. is that in the dairy sector the 21 million cows in Europe each receive a subsidy of 2 dollars a day while 100 million people in Africa live on less than 2 dollars a day.

The E.U. spends around 40 billion dollars a year on agricultural subsidies. This benefits rich farmers in rich countries.

And it is rich farmers. Don't be taken in by the line that the C.A.P. is essential to keep small farmers going. 80 per cent of the total subsidies paid go to the top 20 per cent of farmers.

While we create C.A.P. millionaires with taxpayers money they then flood developing countries with their produce forcing farmers like Peter into greater destitution and poverty.

The World Bank estimates that reform of international trade rules could lift 300 million people out of poverty.

So while we must continue our campaign to increase aid and to secure debt write off we musn't lose sight of the fact that opening up markets and increasing the level of trade from developing countries will bring benefits that will dwarf aid increases and debt write off.

Just take Africa. If it were to increase its share of world exports by just 1 per cent it would generate 70 billion dollars. That's around five times more than it receives in aid.

So the C.A.P. has to change. The status quo is not an option. It will not be easy but for the sake of taxpayers, consumers and most importantly the Peters of this world it has to happen.