BRAZIL: Participants at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, yesterday cheered a delegation of small farmers from the US, as they protested at the Free Trade Area of the Americas, (FTAA), a planned trade pact stretching from Alaska to Argentina.
"This accord will destroy small farmers in Latin America and spread the power of multinationals in the region," said Ms Dena Hoff, of the Washington-based National Family Farm Coalition.
Mexico's experience inside the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement has proved bittersweet, as three million farmers have suffered as they struggle to compete with cheap, subsidised US food imports. "What sort of free trade is that?" a Mexican farmer asked.
"With the FTAA, we'll end up in the streets of the cities, abandoning our plots and building shacks," added one Bolivian farmer, summing up the dilemma at the heart of a globalisation process led by powerful nations.
The Brazil forum has drawn about 100,000 participants, offering 1,700 panel sessions and workshops on topics ranging from corporate misdeeds to Third World debt.
The Bush administration was denounced repeatedly as "a war-mongering tyrant planning a war of conquest to secure control of Iraqi oilfields".
"I came here to find out more about the concrete alternatives to corporate globalisation," explained Frank Rynne, a plumber from Glasgow.
Long-term issues like democracy and the media are invariably displaced by the urgent issue of imminent war.
A discussion panel on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, "Fundamentalism and Intolerance", grew heated to the point of aggression on Saturday as crowds cheered in unconditional solidarity rather than pressing ahead with serious debate. The incident highlights the difficulty of holding meaningful debates in a large forum dominated by one viewpoint.
A report by European NGO Social Watch revealed that subsidies worth $2 a day were spent on cows, while half the world's population survives on half that amount.