BY EVA CHENG
More than 150 farmers and students dumped onions, soybeans, garlic and other products on the doorstep of a secretive regional meeting of the World Trade Organisation held in the northern city of Chiang Mai on March 27-28.
The move was in protest at falling crop prices which have hit Thai farmers badly — in stark contrast to promises made by the WTO when it lured reluctant Third World members to open their markets and slash import duties. Many other WTO members in the Third World have shared Thailand's experiences.
The protesters carried placards denouncing the lies of the "World Trash Organisation".
The WTO meeting was called at very short notice and kept tightly under wraps — precisely to avoid protests. If word had leaked out earlier, the protests would undoubtedly have been much bigger.
One of the protesters' biggest worries was that the meeting, a "technical workshop" on trade and environment, would be the venue for attempted arm-twisting by rich countries of the WTO's 22 Asian members present.
Led by the US and Europe, the rich countries are increasingly desperate to ensure Third World support for a new round of trade talks, which they want to launch at the WTO's Qatar conference in November.
A new round of trade talks would, the rich countries hope, allow them to add many "new issues" to the agenda, most especially on investment, competition, government procurement, labour standards and environmental standards.
Despite WTO director-general Mike Moore's latest effort to mystify the true nature of the new round — calling it a "Development Round" — many Third World countries are rightly suspicious that these are merely covers to tip the balance against them.
Speaking on these new issues, Chakkrit Khuanphote, a law expert at Sukhothai University, remarked "All will lead in one direction — putting the burden on developing countries".
"We will not be participating in the regional dialogue because we oppose a new WTO trade round", said the Asia-Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development in a statement to greet the protesters.
In a March 27 article in Thailand's main English newspaper, the Bangkok Post, Walden Bello, head of the research organisation Focus on the Global South, proposed that instead of working on a new round, the WTO should spend the next few years repairing the previous Uruguay Round of trade rules sealed in 1994 so that it does less harm to the Third World.
"They should work to significantly dilute the impact of a bad agreement, as part of a strategy to ultimately reduce the power of the WTO", Bello said.