Rebenson and Reah go to Tokyo and Korea

I'll be travelling with Leah for for the next couple of weeks to Tokyo, Hakone, Seoul, and...Pyongyang? Busan? I'm not quite sure yet, but I'll figure it out soon enough. I'll be back in Hiroshima on January 11th. That means Chanukah in Korea and New Years in Tokyo.

WTO meeting commences in Hong Kong

According to police estimates, 4500 protesters clashed with police today in the third biannual session of the Doha development round of the World Trade Organization talks (compared with the organizers' estimate of roughly 10,000). (After 1999's infamous Seattle meeting, the Doha round began in Doha, Qatar, followed by a 2003 meeting in Cancun and this year's meeting in Hong Kong.) One hundred South Korean protesters were reported to have "leapt into Hong Kong harbor"--Victoria Harbor near Wanchai--in protest, pictured above. (A map is available here). A group of 200 nonviolent demonstrators is pepper foamed by riot police, left.




European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson wrote a lukewarm op/ed in today's New York Times arguing that not only has "the European Union ... made significant concessions on agriculture on several occasions," but further that "Brazil, for example, should offer to reduce import tariffs on industrial goods." While it is easy for Mandelson to make sweeping generalizations about so-called "free" trade, he ignores all relevant data. In 2003 for example, Brazil imported four times from the US what the US imported from Brazil. In terms of Mandelson's own EU, Germany led the pack with a tenth of imports, followed by France's one-twentieth and Great Britain's one-fortieth. (All data from the WTO's own International Trade Centre.) Before Mandelson criticizes Brazilian trade policy, he would be apt to focus on current EU intentions. Just today the French Trade Minister told the New York Times, "The European Union will not make a new offer."

According to a World Bank study of comparative world tariffs, exceedingly high US tariffs remain in all classified sectors, and the large majority of European countries maintain higher non-industrial tariffs (read: agricultural sector) than almost any developing country.

Even the Washington Post's generally abominable Robert Samuelson sees the light.

Target: WTO

Tomorrow, December 13, marks the first of the six-day Hong Kong venue of the World Trade Organization's Doha round. Following a 15,000-strong demonstration at last month's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Busan, including an insurgency of hundreds of South Korean farmers who met riot police with steel pipes (left), roughly 10,000 demonstrators are expected to arrive in Hong Kong for tomorrow's actions. Economic information, rationale, strategy and tactics, and daily reportage can be found at Target:WTO, an excellent compilation site with the apt slogan, "Derail, Dismantle, Destroy!"

This year's talks mark three years since South Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae (right) publicly committed suicide at the Cancun WTO talks in September 2003. Lee was an active opponent of the WTO's protection of American agrobusiness and forced importation of American rice and soy beans into the largely agricultural economy of South Korea. James Brooke wrote in the New York Times in 2003:

To protect farmers, South Korea has tariffs of over 100 percent on 142 farm products — consumers here pay about four times American prices for rice — helping support six million farmers in a nation of 47 million people.

But South Korea's real money is made selling cars, ships and cellphones around the world. To keep markets open for its economy, the world's 12th largest, South Korea has recently made concessions on food imports, in bilateral talks and in preliminary negotiations in the W.T.O. With each concession, life gets a little harder for the farmers.

"It is not hard to guess why he chose to terminate his life," said La Jung Han, an official in Seoul at the the Korean Advanced Farmers Federation, a group Mr. Lee headed for many years. "Probably, the main motivation was despair." It was "a despair deeply imbedded in the conditions of the farmers, the agriculture industry and the rural communities."

The Hong Kong police, as well as Interpol and Hong Kong immigration, have already compiled lists of over 300 alleged troublemakers (who have yet to commit illegal acts) to deny visas, as well as raided the union headquarters of local migrant workers who might publicize their poor working conditions during the conference. (For more on the plight of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong, check out this study conducted by the Asian Migrant Centre based in Hong Kong.)