Sunstroke in Cancun: WTO can't take the heat.

• Author: Starr, Amory
• Position: World Trade Organization

The World Trade Organization is the cat's meow for corporations seeking to scoop up the land, labor, natural resources, and markets of third world nations. With 146 member nations and sweeping powers to abridge their constitutions, the monster of multi-lateral trade deals efficiently eliminates pesky labor, environmental, product safety, precautionary principles, and investment regulations. For people who don't stand to profit from liquidating national resources or wanton international trading, the WTO endangers every aspect of life and society.

Opposition to the WTO grew steadily throughout its first decade. Its 1999 third biannual Ministerial foundered on excellent street protests and third world solidarity in Seattle. Two years later, the ministers huddled in Qatar, where civil protest is illegal. Although the first world relaxed its demand for patent payments slightly to mollify African nations' concerns with the HIV/AIDS crisis, concessions granted in Qatar are yet to be implemented.

Facing a burgeoning crisis of legitimacy, the WTO had to come back into the "sunshine" of public discourse. Arriving at the Vegas-esque hotel zone in Cancun, developing countries prepared for what they call "bullying" and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and activists held their breath, hoping beyond hope that bullying and bi-lateral sweet deals would be unsuccessful. While the WTO insulated the conference area with a 2 meter fence and three rows of riot cops to keep the protests well out of sight, 9km down the road, activists built medical clinics, campsites, an independent media center, held extensive educational meetings and conferences on issues ranging from biotechnology to water privatization, and taught each other how to make cardboard body armor, bracing for what they expected to be a particularly violent police response.

Farmers on the Doorstep

The largest of the activist groups present was Via Campesina, the international farmers' organization representing 100 million farmers in 70 countries, which set up a headquarters complete with an eco-village, encampment, and meeting space for thousands of Mexican campesinos.

Smaller delegations of farmers associations came from all over the world, with the largest external delegation coming from Korea. Here were the supposed beneficiaries, camped on the WTO's doorstep, saying that free trade in agriculture devastates farmers around the world.

WTO opponents staged two major marches and a number of...