As the Uruguay Round of trade talks began, before GATT began the WTO, peanuts were being loaded at Banjul bound for England. In reply to an obvious question the Trade Minister told me that Gambia was not allowed to process and package the peanuts to give them added value as this would invoke punitive tariffs. Of course, there was no imaginable way in which the Government and business could have organised a flow of peanuts and the processing machinery to match the European Union or the United States but that was beside the point; these were the economics of the fat bully stealing the last square of chocolate from a scrawny schoolfellow. Value added in Gambia would have gone unnoticed in Georgia.

Will it be any different at the end of the WTO Seattle trade round? Let us review the major elements. The United States, and to a much lesser extent the European Union, believes, it says, in absolutely, unrestricted free trade. This means that there should be absolutely unlimited access by every country to every other country's market on a reciprocally liberal basis. This, of course, is utter nonsense.

In the first place, the history of trade, so succinctly and comprehensively (not a paradox) described by Paul Kennedy in his Rise and Fall of the Great Powersshows conclusively that only the strongest power is ever in favour of absolute free trade and that, as soon as power shifts, as it inevitably will, the waning power calls for new protections whilst the waxing power calls for the abolition of old ones. It cannot be expected that United States trade negotiators will bear this in mind when taking their positions; what will happen when it is surpassed some time in the next Century is too far ahead for them to contemplate.

Secondly, and this goes for the European Union too, this simple free trade proposition does not apply to agriculture, an area of the economy which centrally affects the future of the developing world and particularly those parts of it with high unemployment, widespread starvation and planet-shaming infant mortality. It is - using the word in its proper sense - hypocritical for extreme liberal market Republicans to praise their God, ignore their starving fellow human beings and then go on to blame them for their own terrible plight when it is the same free market extremists who make the rules that at least in part cause the starvation....

Over the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States, I was lectured by a friend of mine about our having a responsibility to revel in the American Dream of consumption. According to Friend, we owe it to our ancestors, indentured servants, slaves, massacred indigenous people and immigrants, to consume the blessings of their labor and aspirations. It is our duty, quothe he, to

• throw shrimp and steaks on the backyard barbie;
• drive fast, gas-guzzling cars;
• spend more on sports stadiums than the gross domestic products of some small southern hemispheric nations;
• spend mass quantities at Nordstrom's or Walgreen --- depending on our rung of the food chain.

According to Friend, I myself am too much of a bleeding-heart nattering nabob of negavitism. An effete intellectual Do-gooder who spends too much time bemoaning the sins of the world am I, says he.

Guilty as charged.

Friend's lecture only served to reinforce my sense of disconnect with my own society. I was again forced to ask myself at what point I lost the impulse to be another Conehead and consume mass quantities like everyone else... Maybe, I reckon, it has something to do with having suffered and continuing to identify and sympathize with the suffering of others.

Maybe it has to do with my agreement with the protesters in Seattle at last week's World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting that globalization has damaged many more people than it has benefitted.

What happened last week in Seattle was no accident. Nor was it unforeseen. Sure, Mayor Schell of Seattle was clueless, but that was because he has probably never booted up a PC and logged onto anything more challenging than AOL. There was EVERY INDICATION on the Internet that the WTO protests would be a singularly large event. From the N30 sites to Michael Moore's organizing letter published here only last weekend, the Internet organizing for this event was intense and widespread...