By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia
Cornflakes with warm milk to the blaring soundtrack of the ubiquitous CNN, waiters and staff from supposedly the most violent continent in the world gasp in horror at footage of two hoodlums in the US beating up a 100 year old granny.
A typical African breakfast. At least, it seems, in the hotels that cater for the growing number of Europeans looking for some winter sun and possibly more in the Gambia.
The St George's Tavern is just down the road, right next to the Irish bar. I feel right at home, but it's not the Africa I really want to see. I've already passed on eggs for breakfast.
The words from Paul O'Hagan, Concern Universal's West African Director, still ring in my ears. He says most of the eggs in the Gambia are imported from Holland, thousands of miles away.
And some aren't in great shape by the time they arrive here.
In fact, there's a lot of surprising stuff that's imported here. Rice from all over the world when more could be grown here, cooking oils when there's a huge amount of groundnuts that could be processed into oil, vegetables from Europe that could undercut produce grown on the doorsteps of the hotels importing them.
And the eggs, the eggs all the way from Holland. It strikes me as ironic. The same week that the Farmers Weekly reader rages because her latest Waitrose is stocking sugar from cane, not home-grown beet, I am in Africa where desperately poor, really poor farmers are being undercut by farmers in the EU and US.
But food dumping is just one of the factors making life hard for the Gambia's farmers and most of the smaller farmers don't realise it's happening. To be honest, they don't always make life easier for themselves. Too many people harvest the same vegetable crop at the same time. There's a glut and prices crash.
Livestock farmers forsake cheap vaccine for their cattle to save a few Dalasis, and watch their herds ravaged by disease. The weather isn't helping. Farmers I speak to aren't aware of their carbon footprints but they do know things are getting shorter, more erratic.
And the tourist industry. It provides much needed foreign exchange, but it's drawing people off the land - increasing crop yields is hard when there's not enough labour. Some of the projects I've seen today are trying to rectify this. And it looks like they could be working.
They can't do much about climate change, but encouraging cattle vaccinations has helped to almost wipe out anthrax. Free places at many farming colleges produce role models who can lead change in abilities and show that working in a cheap hotel isn't the only route to prosperity.
They're small things, and not all the schemes succeed but those I talked to today are keen to learn and that must be half the battle won. My day ends, as it starts, with another African irony.
Dinner finishes with pineapple. Not the anticipated fresh juicy slice of mouth-watering fruit but a processed ring from a can.
I'm in tropical Africa and I'm eating pineapple from a tin.