THE ANNUAL subsidy that the U.S. government will pay out to American grain and soybean farms over the next decade will be greater than the entire gross domestic product of all but three nations in sub-Saharan Africa. How can any African farmer compete with that?

The United States has high-cost agriculture, because of the high price of land, labor, equipment and fertilizers, and the only way to make it pay is to produce in volume -- and rake in a concomitant government subsidy, to the tune of $150 billion to $200 billion over the next 10 years. (In Europe the picture is pretty much the same, except there the subsidies are even higher.)

This is good news in the short term for consumers the world over -- but bad news any way you look at it for farmers in developing nations.

It isn't often pointed out, but there is a direct connection between what a farmer can do, in Iowa, and what a farmer must do, to survive, in Africa.

The American Midwest is like a giant engine, running at full throttle and kept going only through healthy doses of lubricant smeared on by Washington. It's always just a step ahead of financial insolvency -- independent family farms in America, for instance, have a real average income of negative $2,800, according to Steven Blank, an economist at the University of California, Davis -- and the answer to that is always the same: Produce more, let the rest of the world take care of the excess.

The consequences are far-reaching.

American and European grain production is helping to drive a shift in the focus of agriculture throughout the less fortunate parts of the globe. If, in the First World, there is a growing emphasis on monoculture -- that is, the harvesting of a single crop, for efficiency's sake -- in the Third World, successful farmers know they can't hope to make a profit from grains and are discovering the safety of diversity instead.

In the West, the land is being pushed to its limits with the aid of expensive fertilizer, pesticides and water. In Africa, Asia and Central America, farmers are learning ways to nurture their soil, through composting and the like, to keep it productive. This is a major innovation for some, away from the traditional but harmful slash-and-burn approach to clearing the land.

All of this is good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. Governments in many countries hurt farmers more than help. The AIDS epidemic strikes directly at productivity. Education is sorely lacking, and in many places there are only Western aid organizations to provide information that in this country would be naturally available to all from the county-level agricultural extension service.

But low-tech innovations can make the difference between subsistence and a cash income. The old ways don't suffice anymore, precisely because of the flood of imported grains.

Solutions? Plant a few hardwood trees, which won't compete with crops and which in 20 years will provide enough expensive lumber to pay for a daughter's dowry. Dig a fish pond -- to store water, produce rich silt for fertilizer, and add protein to the diet. Use legumes where they can do the most good. Put in an orchard.

And this: Groups like Catholic Relief Services, which is based in Baltimore and active on several continents, are encouraging farm families to process their own crops, in one fashion or another, because that's where the profit is. Don't sell milk, sell butter. Don't sell your pig, sell bacon.

There are hundreds of tips like this, based on soil science, economic practice and success elsewhere. Yet what works in one place may falter in another, or be overcome by the force of tradition or made irrelevant by civil war. Millions, unreached, aren't getting any advice at all -- but that needn't be the case, given a commitment by the West to help Third World nations once again feed themselves.

These are little steps, but it is only through little steps, imaginative and sometimes ingenious, that the farmers of Gambia and Honduras and Cambodia can hope to carve out a prospering way of life against the onslaught of American agro-exports.