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: www.americaspolicy.org/columns/amprog/2003/0309lee.html