IF NOT for the careful watch of his security men, Gordon Brown might have been squashed to death by dozens of pairs of heaving, angry bosoms.

The Chancellor encountered the women in a thicket of sugar cane in Mozambique during his trip to Africa last month, and asked them: “How much do you get paid?”

They had just received their wages, and surged upon him, waving in the air their weekly pay slips worth £8. “Not enough!” they shouted. The reason why it is not enough is the same reason why the sugar in your tea is many times more expensive than it should be: the European Union.

As you breakfast on your Frosties or jam and toast, remember that our involvement in this EU sugar scandal is causing the children of a man such as Luke Simbine to go hungry.

I chatted to him as we watched Mr Brown almost entirely disappear under the revolutionary throng. Mr Simbine was not the worst off, he was the women’s field manager, and so earned about £40 a month to provide for ten children.

Although people in Britain may not realise the damage that the EU causes to the poorest people in the world, Mr Simbine was all too familiar with the smug brutality of Brussels.

“We are the least developed country, but Europe closes its gates to us, it won’t let us sell our sugar, it dumps its sugar on us. All we want is what is fair,” he told me. “Otherwise we are doomed, and what then can I do for my children?”

Every year a bureaucrat in Brussels sets the price of sugar for European farmers — at four times the market price. No wonder they produce five million tonnes too much of it, preventing other sugar-growing countries from competing.

Put this another way: for every £3 the EU gives to Mozambique in aid, it takes back £1 in the damage it does to its sugar industry. The women whom Mr Brown met do not want aid. They want their business to thrive.

So I had Mr Simbine in mind as Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, spoke on the issue in London this week. But the EU reforms on sugar that he is ushering through in the next few months will end up hurting Mozambique far more than a fat cat farmer in Norfolk.

You see, while Mr Brown was in Africa, Mr Mandelson was on a trip to the Caribbean. This is where, nearly 200 years ago, the problem started. And where do most EU problems start? That’s right — with the French.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson blockaded sugar exports from the West Indies. This was a disaster for Napoleon — the French literally could not eat cake, as sugar cane does not grow in cold European climes. So Napoleon offered a cash prize to anyone who could crystallize sugar from beets, which was then used as animal feed. It was won by a German chemist, but the process is still laborious and costly compared to sugar cane, which is why Napoleon had to subsidise his farmers. To this day the EU has to spend €3.30 in subsidies to export sugar worth €1. If trade barriers were lifted tomorrow, European sugar farmers would go out of business.

Does this sound crazy to you? That you as a British consumer pay extra (in taxes and the high price of sugar) to prop up a crop that Europe does not grow very well, but is so oversubsidised it is destroying the industries in countries where it grows so abundantly? And all because a short Frenchman’s ambitions got out of control?

Well, it does not seem to sound that crazy to Mr Mandelson. He seems to be more concerned about that quirk of sugar history, the Caribbean. Because of Britain’s colonial past, it gets preferential access to EU markets, and Mr Mandelson is worried that if the Common Agricultural Policy is reformed, withdrawal of subsidies will devastate the islands in an “economic tsunami”.

It is very laudable to worry about Caribbean farmers, but he fails to mention many of the poorest countries in the world. All the EU offers these 49, mainly African countries, at the moment is a bitter little taste of its exclusive prices.

As Oxfam says, what they, as a group, are allowed to sell to the EU, adds up to the equivalent of the sugar beet grown in 15 farms in Norfolk every year, while of course being priced out of the market in their own country by dumped EU sugar.

Surely the EU would want its reforms to help these countries? Well, no. The current plan is to reduce the Brussels-set price of sugar within the EU, while not doing enough about the subsidisies and quotas that encourage over-production. The big European farmers will still be OK, but this will hurt Mr Simbine.

That is a shame because if Mozambique, with Ethiopia, Zambia and many other countries, were given a chance, sugar would give them the decent living that they are entitled to, and we could all stop feeling guilty about them over the breakfast news.

And if the United Kingdom Independence Party or Robert Kilroy-Silk were really smart, this is where their anti-EU campaign would focus. EU trade barriers are not just about absurd bendy bananas, they are about the death of African children.

Napoleon’s sugar-beet technology may have led to harrowing injustice for African nations, but something good did come out of it. When colonial plantation owners abandoned the sugar trade, their African slaves were freed. Can Mr Mandelson now free African nations from a slavery of an economic kind?

Helen Rumbelow is political correspondent of The Times

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