WHEN CONGRESS last year caved in to special interests in agribusiness and passed a farm bill laden with subsidies for commodity crops like cotton, corn, wheat, and soybeans, there was little discussion of its foreign policy impact. But the subsidies encourage US farmers to produce far more than the nation needs and to dump the rest on world markets, undercutting farmers in the Third World.

Western Europe does much the same, but it at least does not preach to the rest of the world quite as loudly as Washington does the merits of a free market and unbridled trade. The US failure to walk the walk while talking the talk was especially evident recently when President Bush criticized Europeans for refusing to approve imports of some genetically modified foods. This action, Bush said, caused Africans to reject such foods from the United States and contributed to famine in Africa.

Whatever the merits of the European position, the United States should not blame others for contributing to African poverty. US cotton subsidies, inflated by the 2002 law, are a major reason world prices for that crop are at a 30-year low and falling. Cotton is the main cash crop of West Africa, and low prices are harmful to farmers there.

This contrast between US rhetoric and US action is a theme of a book recently published by Clyde Prestowitz, a Commerce Department official under President Reagan. Prestowitz mentions the plight of African cotton farmers, who are actually lower-cost growers than their highly mechanized US counterparts, in ''Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.''

To the question ''Why do they hate us?'' Prestowitz has an interesting answer. It isn't our freedom they hate, he writes; it is our failure to live up to our own preachments. Prestowitz cites other examples of how the United States loads the dice in world trade. Under the NAFTA accord, for example, Mexico is soon going to have to open its borders to highly subsidized US corn, which will hurt many Mexican farmers.

Many of them, Prestowitz writes, could be driven ''into the dangerously hot trucks of the smugglers who ship immigrants across the US border.'' Instead of being reassured by America's mythic appeal to desperate immigrants, Americans should be more aware of the US role in creating the desperation.

Congress's practice of passing a farm bill without a nod to its international impact is of a piece with the go-it-alone policies of the Bush administration on issues like global warming, the land mines treaty, and the International Criminal Court. In an increasingly interdependent world, unilateralism cannot be the best policy.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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