The suicide on Wednesday of a South Korean protester during violent clashes at the barricades protecting the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Cancun cast a long shadow over the start of five days of trade talks.
In what friends called a ceremonial act, Lee Kyung-Hae, a farmer in his 50s, stabbed himself in the chest to show his anger at the trade liberalisation policies of the WTO.
His death dashed the hopes of the Mexican organisers that the heavily defended security zone around the conference centre in the Caribbean resort town would prevent a repetition of the angry clashes between police and demonstrators that marked the Seattle WTO meeting in December 1999.
Inside the conference centre, talks also got off to a slow start with disagreements on virtually every issue on the agenda. In the key area of agriculture, developing countries laid down a challenge to the European Union and the United States, who favour only modest changes to their lavish system of farm subsidies.
Supachai Panitchpakdi, the WTO’s director general, was hopeful last night that a deal to help cotton growers in four impoverished West African countries — Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin and Chad — would show the developing world that the talks could provide real benefits for poor farmers.
But with the developing countries taking a tough line on agriculture and the EU warning that the lack of a global agreement on investment and competition was a ”potential deal-breaker”, Supachai warned negotiators that they could not afford to leave Cancun empty-handed.
”We should learn from the past and face the reality that we cannot keep postponing decisions,” he said.
The WTO is keen to see real discussions begin on Thursday in all five of the areas covered by the round of talks launched almost two years ago in Doha. These are agriculture, market access for industrial products, special and differential treatment for poor countries, new negotiations on global investment and competition rules, and a group of miscellaneous issues.
In reality, most of the 146 countries represented in Cancun will still be jockeying for position on Wednesday, with negotiators only likely to get down to the nitty-gritty in a last flurry over the weekend. Privately, some delegates are already preparing for the talks to overrun their deadline for completion on January 1 2005, with some talk of another ministerial meeting in six months’ time.
Little progress has been made in the talks since Doha in November 2001, and with developing countries in a militant mood, prospects of a significant breakthrough this week are thought to be slim. Britain’s delegation in Mexico said on Wednesday night that Cancun would be a success if it established a framework for talks back at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters over the next 15 months.
An added complication, however, is the prospect next year of elections in the US and India, which will almost certainly limit the room for concessions by both the world’s biggest economy and one of the leading countries in the developing world. — Guardian Unlimited Â