Pomp and protest at the WTO

By Steve Schifferes
BBC News economics reporter at the WTO trade talks in Hong Kong

The police riot shields were neatly piled around a side entrance on Lockhart Road.

Protesters from South Korea have been among the most vocal

They hadn't been needed - but the normally bustling centre of Hong Kong was deserted, the restaurants with their bright neon signs were empty in the face of blockaded streets and a heavy police presence.

From the seventh floor of glittering conference centre overlooking Hong Kong harbour, delegates and the press could watch the demonstrators approach, some with concern and others with bemusement.

They could see the orange-coloured figures bobbing in the water as some 100 Korean farmers hurled themselves into Victoria Bay in a desperate attempt to reach the conference - only to be met by a phalanx of black police patrol boats.

On shore, meanwhile , khaki-coloured riot squads were engaged in a confrontation lasting over an hour, using pepper spray as tension mounted near the front of the crowd just a few hundred metres from the conference centre.

But the few thousand demonstrators were outnumbered - not only by the police, but by the thousands of delegates, NGO representatives, and journalists attending the meeting.

And from that perspective, the cries of the protesters sounded faint against the sweep of the skyscrapers in the background and the bustle of one of the world's busiest ports.

As the demonstrators gathered, the opening ceremony of the sixth ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation was beamed on giant screens to the journalists in their vast press hall after a fanfare of music and a video impression of Hong Kong.

Sound and fury

But inside the conference there were early signs that things were not going so well.

The WTO - the crowds in and certainly outside this building will remind you with sound and sometimes fury - is not the most popular international organization around Pascal Lamy, WTO director-general

Several dozen protesters from accredited organisations shouted slogans during the opening speech, and later unfurled a banner saying "No deal is better than a bad deal" - in 10 languages - to delegates as they left the hall.

And even the elegance of Pascal Lamy, the WTO's new director-general (who had previously led the EU in trade talks) could not conceal the fact that this round of trade talks was not going altogether to plan.

He told delegates that tough negotiations lay ahead, and "what we really need are negotiators that are bold, open-minded and prepared to take some risks".

"The many people who benefit from open trade are usually politically silent, whereas those fewer who are affected by it can be politically very loud," he said.

And he added: "There is also a lot of room for improvement in public acceptance of the WTO, as there is in its marketing activities. The WTO - the crowds in and certainly outside this building will remind you with sound and sometimes fury - is not the most popular international organization around."

Change of tack

In fact, at his first press conference Mr Lamy said the Hong Kong meeting was not going to focus on finalising a deal on the liberalisation of trade in services, which encompasses everything from insurance to telecoms to transport.

Instead, it would concentrate on trying to agree a package of measures to help the very poorest countries so they would be able to take advantage of the gains of trade, as well as tackling the intractable issue of agriculture and the opening of markets mainly in developing countries.

HAVE YOUR SAY I don't think a fair trade system will ever be developed as there will always be complaints Rachel Fong, Hong Kong Send us your comments

The WTO hopes that if it makes progress in these others, then a services deal will come later - but there is a risk that services may not emerge from the back-burner.

Access to the financial services sector in developing countries has always been seen as one of the main gains of the trade round by its supporters - and one of the biggest dangers by the anti-globalisation critics.

Farm fight

But in Hong Kong it was opposition to any deal on agriculture, the subject being pushed by developing countries, that was the centre of the anti-globalisation protests.

At a rally in Victoria Park before the march, coloured banners fluttered in the wind with signs reading "WTO kills farmers" and "WTO out of agriculture" among the tents spread out across the basketball courts.

Some protesters took to the water

Jose Bove, the French farming activist who was held at Hong Kong airport for six hours before being let into the country, told the BBC that countries should aim for self-sufficiency in agriculture, and a complete renegotiation of CAP and the WTO was needed to ensure it did not benefit agri-business.

Many of the protesters are small farmers from Asia who are worried that free trade will ruin their livelihood.

Henry Saragih, one of leaders of the Via Campesina international peasant movement which played a key role in the protests, told the BBC he grows rice, tropical fruits and rubber on his 2 hectare farm in Sumatra. He says that since Indonesia opened its markets after its economic crisis, prices for farmers' goods have fallen sharply due to competition from the US, China, and Australia.

Roaring tiger

The largest group of protesters were South Korean rice farmers, who among the most heavily subsidised in the world - and the most militant.

Over 1,000 - dressed in white peasant clothes - chanted "Down with WTO", listening to the Internationale, the Communist anthem sung in Cantonese, while their own drummers hammered and clanged their cymbals.

They fear that new agreements Korea says it is prepared to sign will lead to the disappearance of the 3.5 million farming jobs and an end to food security for the country.

It is not that the protesters, militant as some of them are, have the power to stop the WTO moving forward on its free trade agenda.

But it is the fact that the fears of the losers in any global trade round are outweighing the hopes of the potential winners that is paralysing the talks.

South Korea itself has been an enormous beneficiary of free trade - on its own terms - and has transformed its standard of living in a generation by becoming an export powerhouse.

But unless the world trading system finds a better way to compensate the losers in any trade deals, especially in developing countries, it could find further trade liberalisation an uphill struggle.