Title    "The WTO Kills Farmers:" In Memory of Lee Kyung Hae
  Name YungSeob, Jung Date 2003-09-13 02:12:43 Hit 2886

September 11, 2003
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"The WTO Kills Farmers:" In Memory of Lee Kyung Hae
http://www.americaspolicy.org/wto/index.html
By Laura Carlsen

On September 10, opening day of the Fifth Ministerial of the World Trade
Organization, Lee Kyung Hae, leader of the Korean Federation of Advanced
Farmers Association, climbed the fence that separates the excluded from the
included and took his life with a knife to the heart.

"I am 56 years old, a farmer from South Korea who has strived to solve our
problems with the great hope in the ways to organize farmers' unions," Lee
read from a statement minutes before his death. "But I have mostly failed, as
many other farm leaders elsewhere have failed." 

Earlier this year, Lee staged a one-man hunger strike in front of WTO
headquarters in Geneva. He was ignored. Here in Cancun he marched with more
than 15,000 farmers, indigenous people, and youth wearing a sandwich board
that read "The WTO Kills Farmers." When the protesters reached the point
where they could go no farther, he plunged a knife into his heart. He was
pronounced dead in a Cancun hospital just miles from where WTO Ministers
deliberated on how to promote the same agricultural trade that drove Lee, and
hundreds more farmers in Korea, India, and other developing countries, to
such a drastic end.

Laura Carlsen laura@irc-online.org is director of the IRC's Americas
Program (www.americaspolicy.org). She wrote this commentary from the WTO
meeting in Cancun, Mexico.

See complete new IRC's Americas Program statement online at:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/columns/amprog/2003/0309lee.html



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Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
http://www.irc-online.org/
Siri D. Khalsa
Outreach Coordinator
Email: communications@irc-online.org


solidarity statement
Solidarity letter for Korean Movement
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