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DISPATCH FROM CANCÚN
Farmers of the world unite
BY MICHAEL BLANDING

CANCÚN, MEXICO — As talks collapsed at the Fifth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) this past week, an unlikely new political power emerged from the ashes: farmers. Just as the WTO meeting in Seattle four years ago will be remembered for its mix of "turtles and Teamsters," Cancún will be remembered for its peasant farmers and campesinos, who seized the stage from the conference’s start, opening up space for developing countries to resist the dubious agricultural policies of their richer neighbors.

It started with Kyung Hae Lee, a 55-year-old South Korean farmer who dramatically killed himself on the police barricades during a farmers’ march held on the first day of the conference. The 180-member South Korean delegation was at the forefront of some 7000 Mexican campesinos, who had come to Cancún from all over the country, camped in the baseball stadium, and marched to the barricades under giant puppets of angry Aztec gods. Wearing a yellow-and-white-checkered shirt and carrying a placard reading WTO KILLS FARMERS, Lee climbed to the top of the eight-foot fence police had erected to block the street. Then, according to witnesses, he screamed in Korean, "The WTO is killing agriculture and farmers around the world!", plunged a knife into his left breast, and tumbled onto the pavement.

At a hastily convened press conference outside the hospital a few hours later, his compatriots were quick to say that Lee’s death was not an accident, but an act of defiance intended to show "the strong will of the Korean delegation against the WTO." Anticipating criticism, the WTO released a statement of sympathy, denying any responsibility for Lee’s death. But the damage had already been done. As Americans mourned the second anniversary of September 11 at Ground Zero, activists set up a vigil at the place where Lee fell, the so-called kilómetro cero of Cancún’s posh-hotel zone, denouncing the agricultural policies that hurt poor farmers.

Standing outside the hospital the night of Lee’s death, Rafael Alegría, president of the worldwide farmers’ group Via Campesino, declared a new front in the war against globalization. "We give a solemn promise," he said, "to give struggle against the financial institutions who are the real ones responsible for the murder of Mr. Lee and thousands of farmers around the world." After being pushed off the world’s stage for two years by terrorism and war, globalization appears suddenly to have re-emerged as an issue worth fighting, and even dying, for.

Farmers should be at the forefront of this resistance. Agriculture negotiations were at the top of the agenda for the 146-member trade-group meeting in the hotel zone, which is flooded by partying college kids every spring break. The US and Europe have been working overtime to pry open developing countries’ markets by compelling them to lower tariffs and thus allow more imports. At the same time, developing countries have criticized the subsidies rich countries pay their own farmers, which allow them to drive down crop prices to such a level that poor farmers can’t compete.

The results of the talks were of immediate concern to rural populations around the world. South Korean agriculture was particularly hard hit by the last round of WTO negotiations, which opened up its market to cheap imports from the US and China. The farm population has declined by almost half in the past 10 years, as farmers have abandoned their fields and communities for menial jobs in the cities. Rural areas in South Korea and other Asian countries have seen a documented rise in suicides. If the current round of negotiations opens up South Korea’s protected rice market, conditions could worsen. Said one member of the delegation during the march for Kyung Hae Lee: "We believe that if these negotiations pass, the agricultural market in Korea would be dead, like him."

Meanwhile, in Mexico, NAFTA has opened markets to an influx of cheap corn and other crops from the US, forcing many farmers to take cruel jobs in maquiladoras — foreign-owned low-wage factories — or to cross the border to pick US crops as migrant laborers. "We don’t have any gains from our work," laments Servando Olivarría Seavedra, a 59-year-old corn farmer from Sinaloa who says current corn prices barely cover the costs of production. When he realized he couldn’t afford to educate his son and daughter, he abandoned his leadership post at a farmers’ union and left his farm in the temporary care of others to find work in the US. "It’s such a shame that I can’t prepare my children for life."

Emboldened by the media attention given to protesters like these, delegates from developing countries ultimately rejected a compromise offering only tepid promises to reduce farm subsidies. Some delegates walked out of the talks early. Others held fast, even as US trade representatives placed a flurry of last-minute phone calls to persuade them to break ranks. The Brazilian delegate took the unusual step of calling a meeting with members of anti-WTO advocacy groups, thanking them for keeping the heat on the issue and promising to hold out for a deal that benefits Brazil’s rural population.

While the collapse of talks in Cancún is a setback to the neoliberal trade agenda, it doesn’t spell the end of the WTO’s attempts to open agricultural markets. Developed countries still cling to the hope that they will be able to complete this round of talks by their 2005 deadline. Based on the resistance shown by the world’s farmers in Cancún last week, however, that won’t happen easily.


Issue Date: September 19 - 25, 2003
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