Green Party WTO meeting/protests report

I hate writers block. I have plunged myself into news from the Cancun WTO meetings, yet I still don't know where to start. So I figured I could take the lazy way out and let somebody else do the work for me. Here are some excerpts from a Green Party report by their representatives on location:

"Outside of the official meeting zone, 20 kilometers away, over 10,000 protestors are being completely barred from entering. Tempers are flaring between the activists and military, mostly because the activists are not being allowed any chance, in any way, to make their concerns known to the officials. But, for the most part the demonstrations have remained calm and peaceful. A sad exception to this occurred September 10th,2003, during the Massive Peasant and Farmers March, when a South Korean farmer named Kyung Hae Lee committed ritual suicide by stabbing himself in the chest with a knife while standing atop of a barrier erected by the military. His suicide was a last act of desperation to bring to the attention of the world the urgent plight he and other small farmers face under the current rules being negotiated on agriculture at the WTO."

"Whenever a protest or activist group has gotten through, they have been swamped and surrounded by military police and restricted by moveable barricades."

"From the inside, our Green experts say that the reality of what is going on in the negotiations is that the WTO is falling apart. There are four areas of primary discussions which are major sticking points for the group. Those are agriculture, non-agricultural products, development and the Singapore issues. For instance, under the agricultural agreements, the USA and the EU have a joint position that is being blocked by the G-21, made up of mostly developing countries. They have a position that is not compatible at all to the US/EU. The United States and the EU refuse to stop or reduce their subsidies on agricultural exports. An example of this is subsidies provided for cotton. Four western African nations: Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin, and Chad, have economies that are being destroyed by these subsidies, because local growers cannot compete with the low market prices US/EU countries can provide. This leads to tens of thousands of people losing their jobs, and facing severe poverty and starvation, which is contrary to one of the basic tenants of the negotiations of the WTO, which is supposedly very concerned with helping developing nations thrive, not destroy them, which is what is happening. These four African nations are demanding a resolution for this problem so that they can survive."

It's a great overview of what has happened at the meetings and the protests. Worth a read.