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.)