This week's episode of Life comes from Ghana, where trading is a way of life - yet the country still relies on foreign aid for most of its national budget. Augustine Adongo's the chief executive of the Federation of Associations of Ghanaian Exporters. It's his job to help Ghana's manufacturers gain a bigger share of the international trade market - and so, the economists insist, make all Ghanaians better off. But if this is so, Augustine wants to know, why does it always appear that the cards stacked against him?

At Ejura Farms, five hours' drive north of the capital Accra, Augustine finds that even this huge farm can't sell maize to local customers - it can't compete with maize from countries like the United States that subsidise their farmers. The local poultry industry can buy imported maize more cheaply, because Ejura has to pay more for fertilizer and pesticides and it uses outdated processing equipment. All Ejura can do is stockpile its stock until the price of imported maize goes up...

At Darko Poultry Farms, Kumasi, Jonathan Darko tells a similar story. Incredibly, imported chickens sell more cheaply than he can sell at: "With the higher cost of production, you can't really compete with the imported chicken." That's because overseas suppliers are heavily subsidized.

Volta River Estates export bananas to the EU - to Europe. To do so they have to meet various EU health and preservation requirements. That's not a problem for them. What is a problem is the EU requirements relating to length and size. Manager Alex Yeboah Atai explains: "to make your bananas grow big in size and in length all that you have to do is to dump a lot of chemical fertiliser and in the next couple of months you have your big sizes and then your length. But we talk about fair trade, and fair trade has to deal with the environment and therefore natural growing things is what comes into mind... So as a fair trade company, we believe that we have to grow our bananas in a more sustainable way."

The EU says it is removing its trade barriers, but then it turns out there are 'non-tariff' barriers as well. Says Alex "They're opening the doors with one hand, saying: we are doing away with quotas, we are removing or reducing taxes, import duties, tariffs and so on. Meanwhile with the other hand they are closing the door by bringing in quality requirements that are far beyond the capacity of local producers, especially the small-scale producers. Here I wouldn't buy a banana using a tape measure."

Another problem for Ghanaian producers is the fickleness of the global market. Thomas Adjel, a pineapple farmer belonging to an organic cooperative at Tema, explains: "Sometimes they will ask you to bring maybe 40 tonnes of pineapple. Then at the last moment they will tell you: I will need only 20 tonnes. You see, meanwhile you have already made allocation for all these things, so this way you will be left out. And you will pay for it."

The trade issue is central to development, says World Bank President James Wolfensohn. But he admits that farming subsidies in the rich countries upset the equation. "In trade, for example, the developed countries spend on subsidies for agriculture 350 billion dollars a year - that's a billion dollars a day - and the amount of money put into overseas development assistance is 50 billion dollars a year. So you've got seven times the amount of money that is going for development going into just one aspect of inhibition of trade."

EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy defends the EU's agricultural subsidies as a necessary social measure. " The real point is not about the amount of subsidies, the real point is about whether what we do is trade distorting for developing countries."

And are the EU's food standards too strict? The fish smokers of Lake Volta think so. They set up a smoking facility to produce a standardized export grade product, with minimum hygiene conditions, says Augustine. "Then the EU raised the standards even far above what they had set out to achieve and therefore they had to abandon the whole exercise."

Realistically, Augustine says they are committed to solving the problem: "What we need to do is to find ways to build alliances between us here, and whoever has an interest, our interest, in mind at the other end, to be able to take these issues up. So we find a way to meet the requirements half way, then we can appeal to other people to also meet us half way." That's where his Federation comes in. "Where the world is moving to, generally, now is towards 'smart' work. So it's not just a matter of pushing and pushing and pushing, and digging deeper and deeper into the same hole, but finding a smarter way to be able to do things."

Princeton's 'trade guru' Paul Krugman is on the whole pro-globalisation. "The reason I'm pro globalisation is I remember the utter hopelessness that we used to feel about developing countries. I mean, we used to say that developing countries was - you know, that was a joke 'cause developing countries meant that countries that don't develop... But we've had some successes and all of the successes are associated with freer trade, with growing exports."

Augustine believes that, given help, the fish-smokers of Lake Volta - and many other agricultural producers in the developing world - can compete in the globalised market.

TRANSCRIPT Read the full transcript of The Trade Trap