WTO kills humans

A South Korean protester killed himself during a clash with riot police protecting ministers meeting earlier this month in the Mexican resort of Cancun to jump-start stalled world trade talks.

The middle-aged farmer, named by friends as Lee Kyung-hae, climbed onto a high security fence during a violent protest against the World Trade Organization and waved a banner that read "WTO Kills Farmers".

He then stabbed himself in the chest and later died in hospital. A friend said his suicide was an "act of sacrifice" to show his disgust at the WTO and its policies.

About 5,000 activists joined the protest and about two dozen broke through eight-foot-high (2.4 metres) metal barriers to attack police on the edge of Cancun's upscale hotel zone.

"We are going in. We are going in," a South African trade unionist screamed through a loudspeaker, urging protesters to storm a long strip of beach hotels and fast food restaurants.

Demonstrators threw chunks of paving stones, sticks, metal bars and bottles at police, who fought back with batons and tear gas. More than a dozen people were inured as police held off the protesters.

Violent protests have become a staple of international trade and finance meetings since rioting at a WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. Italian police shot dead a protester at a summit of industrialized nations in Genoa in 2001.

The 146-nation WTO opened its five-day meeting in Cancun with serious divisions on a host of disputes, topped by agricultural subsidies in the United States and Europe.

British development charity Oxfam called on political leaders at the WTO talks to commit themselves to changing Europe's agricultural subsidy regime, which it said was biased toward helping the bloc's richest producers most.

Oxfam said Europe's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was also preventing poorer nations, which receive much of the cheap, heavily subsidised food, from pulling themselves out of poverty.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had earlier called on the richest nations to scrap those handouts.

"Sadly, the reality of the international trading system today does not match the rhetoric. Instead of open markets, there are too many barriers that stunt, stifle and starve," Annan said in a speech read out on his behalf in Cancun.

Mexican peasants joined foreign activists in the protest against what critics say is an unfair world trade system tilted against developing countries.

Some wore construction hard hats and gas masks for the confrontation with police but others were less menacing: they dressed as foam dolphins.

Across town, WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi said the weak world economy needed a strong message from ministers in favor of freer trade.

The aim of the Cancun WTO meeting was to revive talks that started two years ago in the Qatari capital, Doha, and are supposed to wrap up by the end of 2004.

The World Bank says removing barriers to trade in farm and other goods could add $500 billion a year to world income by 2015, lifting 144 million people out of poverty.

At the heart of the negotiations is agriculture.

Poor countries want rich states to slash the $300 billion in subsidies they give to their farmers each year -- six times more than they provide in development aid.

Because of these handouts and high tariffs, poor countries say they are shut out of rich-country markets and undercut at home by heavily subsidized exports from the European Union and the United States in particular.

A group of 21 developing states, including China, India, Brazil and Cuba, have formed an alliance to demand that rich countries scrap the farm handouts they say condemn millions of their farmers to poverty.

The United States and the European Union reject the demand as impracticable, but are under enormous pressure to improve offers they have already made to reduce farm subsidies. -- Courtesy of Reuters