WTO MEET ADMONISHED

South Korean farmers clashed with riot police in Hong Kong today at the start of a World Trade Organization meeting likely to be dominated by rifts over agriculture.

The farmers, estimated by local media to number between 2,000 to 4,000, marched through the city to protest against the opening their domestic market to international competition - a move they claim would leave them unable to compete with cheap imports.

A few blocks from the conference site, a small number of farmers wielding bamboo sticks tried to break through a roadblock and clashed with riot police who responded with pepper spray.

The protesters, who also included Japanese, Indian, Filipino and Brazilian farmers, burned a coffin that was used as a protest prop during a street march that police said drew 4,500 people. The farmers fear that if their domestic agricultural markets are opened up under an eventual WTO treaty, they won't be able to compete - and possibly could lose their livelihoods or land.

"The WTO wants to impose other country's rice and food on South Korea," said Tae-sook Lee, the head of a South Korean farmers' association. "If the WTO allows imports of foreign rice and food into Korea, 100 percent of 3.5 million Korean farmers will die."

After today’s demonstration by farmers, fisherfolk from Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia plan to sail several boats into Victoria Harbor on the opening day to voice their demands to WTO delegates inside the Convention Centre, which is surrounded on three sides by water.

In addition, more than 5,000 organizations, movements and groups have joined in a People's Caravan for Justice and Sovereignty, which will end its two-month journey in Hong Kong this week. They are demanding trade justice, and an end to unjust free trade.

The Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) collected close to 280,000 e-mail petitions in just three weeks from people around the world who are asking the WTO to stand firm on commitments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were established at the United Nations in 2000, especially to tackle extreme poverty.

Campaigners are demanding that trade ministers at the WTO stop pushing countries to open up their economies; allow poor nations the space to determine their own trade policies; protect their public services; and end "dumping" (selling below cost) by rich countries.

On the eve of the WTO Ministerial meet, Nelson Mandela came out strongly on the side of the world's poor. In an e-mail to GCAP's supporters, he wrote: "In Hong Kong there is a chance to make decisions that will lift billions of people out of poverty."

Women's groups, trade unions, youth organizations, international NGOs, grassroots movements and numerous other civil society groups gathered in Hong Kong will want to see a substantial shift in national and international policies that will eliminate poverty.

Concerns are not just being voiced by those in the streets.

"The voice of the majority of countries in the WTO is not being heard," said a statement issued by farm groups from South Korea, India, Japan, Europe and 10 African countries, including Burkina-Faso and Benin.

"Developing countries with a vulnerable and defenseless agriculture sector ... must be able to take account of their rural development, food security and/or livelihood security needs," it said.

"Trade rules must allow for policy measures which promote food sovereignty and stability of food supplies and prices, including supply management and safeguard measures," the statement said.

"Free trade will make it impossible for farmers to meet their society's legitimate expectations concerning food security and safety as well as environmental, animal welfare and rural issues," it said.

Those who planned to demonstrate in the streets were met by police methods almost as soon as they arrived in Hong Kong.

Among those taken aside for interrogation were French farmer and activist Jose Bove, three Thai campaigners and four prominent Filipinos - - including leaders of the country's left-wing political movement, its largest feminist organization and a prominent trade union leader.

"They started to ransack and go through my luggage," says Elisa Dita Lupi of the Filipino Gabriella women's party. "They started separating and listing down anti-WTO materials like leaflets and streamers and stickers and for a while I thought they were going to confiscate them, but eventually they relented and I got to gather my things."

Norma Binas, a leader of the Philippines May 1st Movement Labor Center, said she was flagged for interrogation at passport control and then escorted by 10 police officers with machine-guns to a special solitary interrogation room.

According to Binas, the interrogators almost immediately turned their attention to her group's political activities. "I told them that I have come for the workers workshops," she said. "So the police asked me if I had an invitation and I told them that it's on the internet. Everyone is invited maybe you can look for it."

Binas said she was interrogated for six hours: "They had a two-page questionnaire, asking whether we are involved in anti-globalization activities in our own country. So I told them the situation of the workers in the Philippines -- protesting is the least they can do when they're losing their livelihoods."

Eventually, all the activists detained at the airport were released.

Once they made it into the city, they found a gauntlet of security measures. A force of 9,000 police has been deployed on round- the-clock foot patrol around the convention centre where the week-long WTO ministerial will be held.

There have also been raids at places where the activists are camping according to IPS.

The Indonesian Migrant Workers' Association, which helped organize a peaceful demonstration of thousands of domestic workers against the WTO on Dec 11, is being visited several times each day by Hong Kong police.

"They say they're looking for illegals, but this is never something that concerned them before," says one organizer who refused to give her name for fear of deportation. "Everybody is worried right now. They're afraid. What we're doing is not wrong, so why are the police doing things like that?"

The organizer says a van with five officers has been stationed nearly permanently outside their office door.

"This is not reasonable," she told IPS. "They say they just wanted to check. But everything is peaceful so how come they came so many times. It has been four or five times in a day. They don't have any reason."

The concerns of the protesters about WTO farm policies are well placed.

Recent estimates show that developing countries lose more than 24 billion dollars a year because of the protection that rich countries provide their farmers.

India’s trade minister, Kamal Nath told J.B. Penn, United States under secretary for agriculture when he visited India last month that for India, like any other mainly farming country, importing food was as good as importing unemployment. ‘'We can do so (open up markets as requested by Penn), provided the U.S. is willing to provide a visa to every farmer displaced as a consequence of the import of cheaper and highly subsidized food.”

According to an article in IPS, if the WTO has its way, and the developing countries fail to understand the politics that drives the agriculture trade agenda, the world will soon have two kinds of agriculture systems -- the rich countries producing staple foods for the world's 6 billion plus people, and developing countries growing grow cash crops like tomato, cut flowers, peas, sunflower, strawberries and vegetables.

This is what happened in many of the Latin American countries that were forced to dismantle food security and diversify to cash crops as part of the conditionality that came along with structural adjustment loans. The same strategy is now being legitimized for the rest of the world under the legal framework of the WTO. Sources: Guardian, IPS, IMC (Hong Kong), IMQ7.net, Forbes