Protest and dissent took on many faces at World Trade Organization talks here last week, most of them far removed from the scenes of violence that frequently dominated coverage of the meeting.
Inside the conference centre, for example, a disparate group of protesters dressed in Santa hats regularly surfaced to sing anti-WTO songs to the tune Jingle Bells, occasionally disrupting speeches and news conferences.
Maude Barlow, chair of the left-leaning interest group Council of Canadians, was front and centre in the theatrics, days after receiving an award from the Swedish government for her activism.
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On another front, at a news conference organized by Europe’s umbrella farm organization COPA, a coalition of farm groups that included Canada’s supply management agencies and Quebec’s Union des Producteurs Agricoles, joined the dissent against WTO momentum by issuing a demand that WTO rules not interfere with the right of countries to protect their farmers in order to maintain “food sovereignty.”
Nova Scotia producer and former Dairy Farmers of Canada president Barron Blois said in a later interview it was a farm position challenging the underlying WTO premise that liberalizing international trade rules is the way to make agriculture prosper.
“I’d have to say that in the area of food sovereignty, there is little attention paid to it here and food is very much considered just another commodity,” he said. “You’d have to have been asleep here not to have noticed that. Of course, we believe in the principle that in some sectors, countries can choose to be self-sufficient in a product and that is the basis on which we operate in dairy.”
Meanwhile, National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells and women’s president Colleen Ross spent the week lobbying with like-minded groups in favour of a view that if WTO rules threaten such Canadian farm policies as supply management, the Canadian Wheat Board and the government ability to support producers, then Canada should pull out of the talks.
Even on the streets, most of the protesters who marched every day were peacefully protesting what they consider is an organization that creates rules to help the rich and the corporations rather than the poor.
Just a few confronted police.
Inside the meeting halls, officials said they take account of the opinions of the non-governmental organizations at the meeting.
“Definitely, we all are very conscious of what happens outside and what views are out there,” a senior European Union official told a background briefing Dec. 16. “Definitely they have impact and that’s one of the ways the trade policy process is better now than it was in earlier years, even though it obviously complicates things.”
He was less positive about the South Korean rice farmers who were the most aggressive protesters on the street, leading daily confrontations with police.
“What are they protesting about?” he asked. “They are protesting in their own interests, to preserve their own protected position. They are not protesting on behalf of poor farmers around the world.”
