WTO Conference in Hong Kong

The on going Hong Kong round of WTO conference has attracted the same kind of protest and anguish that is the fate of most of WTO conferences. The reason being that these WTO conferences are the forums in which the rich countries play moves to maximize their interests at the expenses of the poor countries. In Hong Kong , where the recent WTO conference is being held, hundreds of activists and south Korean farmers have gathered from round the world .These activists and farmers like are putting up protest shows to grab the attention of media to the issues which WTO can’t. The rich countries even having zeroed on trade barriers are continuing to give heavy agricultural subsidies to their farmers. These subsidies give an unfair advantage to these farmers as compared to the farmers in the developing world .It should be noted that most of countries had earlier promised to cut down on subsidies but took no action or instead did the opposite as in case of US. US has increased its subsidies to the farmers over the past few periods.


Another issue which I see as a very important issue is that of barriers on flow of labour . The developing countries have lot of cheaper, competitive labour to export but there are too many barriers for them. If the flow of capital should be free of barriers, then so should be flow of labour .Countries like US and UK have legislations to block the entry of immigrants with skills which are very common .These legislations have been meant to protect the jobs of their citizens and protect their own manpower against the manpower from developing countries which is can be recruited at relatively lower wages making these countries own work force less competitive. But isn’t this the same reason developing countries are afraid of free trade. The free trade facilitates the entry of better quality products from developed nations into developing nations making the products produced in developing countries less competitive. So the developed countries are getting the countries are enjoying the benefits of free trade of goods and denying the benefit of free flow of labour to developing countries.