ABSTRACT
When a Korean farmer killed himself in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) power, during a conference in Cancun, Mexico on 10 September 2003, the world gained a glimpse into the agony of thousands of South Korean rice farmers. Lee Kyung-Hae was fifty-six years old when he died of selfinflicted stab wounds. The banner he carried during the demonstrations read ‘The WTO Kills Farmers!’ He avowed his death against WTO rule, but also in protest of what he saw as a betrayal by the South Korean government (henceforth Korea) seeking nothing but the opening of overseas markets for the country’s powerful finance and manufacturing sectors. His desperation resulted from the disruption of farm life based on the old rice cycle surrounding the rice paddy, from what he saw as an irreversible decline of the Korean landscape, and from his own and his fellow farmers’ confusion over lost meanings in their lives. These disturbances, as he had repeatedly alleged, came from the hubs of global finance and commerce. The Cancun conference failed largely for the same reasons that farmer Lee wanted to brandish with his suicide. A coalition of developing countries refused to negotiate new WTO rules until the United States and European Union would discontinue their heavy farm subsidies that effectively excluded developing-world farmers from fair market participation for so long.
