It took Gouro Amadou Soumana three days to get from his home in Niger to the WTO meeting in Doha, travelling via Casablanca and Bahrain. An official at Niger's commerce ministry, Mr Soumana looked weary as he waited for accreditation in the Qatari capital's vast exhibition hall.
"It's such a long way to come for a meeting, I only hope it will be worth it," he said.
After the violent protests that accompanied the WTO's meeting in Seattle two years ago and the clashes at international meetings in Prague, Gothenburg and Genoa, Qatar's inaccessibility looked like an advantage. But the attacks in the US on September 11th made the Gulf emirate appear vulnerable to terrorists and some WTO members wanted to move the meeting to Singapore.
The security presence is overwhelming, with heavily armed commandos at almost every street corner and airport-style checks on the way into every public building. Even these measures are not enough for the Americans, who have moved more than 1000 marines onto ships off Doha.
US personnel are protecting the hotel that houses the American delegation and journalists attending US press briefings are subjected to a thorough search.
Despite the heavy security, however, the mood in Doha is unusually cheerful - perhaps because the Qataris have so little to complain about.
One of the richest states in the region, Qatar's future wealth has been secured by the discovery of vast natural gas reserves off its coast.
The emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa, is so confident of his hold on power that he is experimenting with allowing his 650,000 subjects to take part in elections.
The emir tolerates the only independent television network in the Arab world - Al-Jazeera - which is the only foreign network to report from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. For its part, Al-Jazeera is careful to avoid any direct criticism of the emir and his enormously rich, extended family.
When he heard I was Irish, Hassan, a hotel manager, told me that his brother had studied medicine in Dublin.
"I think that life is very hard there," he said, going on to list the virtues of his own country.
His Sudanese colleague, Jafr, was more downbeat about Doha, suggesting that even in Qatar, the downturn in the world economy is beginning to bite. Jafr's brother spent 20 years as a soldier in the Qatari army, but Jafr wants to move to Malta.
"I love Europeans. They are all very nice people," he said.
The Europeans who make up the EU delegation are giving their best impression of being nice, promising to advance the interests of developing countries in any new trade round.
But as negotiations touch on matters dear to the European heart, such as agriculture, poorer countries are likely to discover that European niceness has strict and clearly defined limits.
