Tom Turner, Earthjustice

Tom Turner is senior editor at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm based in Oakland, Calif. He edited daily newspapers at the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. He is the author of many books and articles on environmental subjects, most recently Justice on Earth: Earthjustice and the People It Has Served.

The conference has begun. We heard the big wheels -- the director general of the WTO, the foreign minister of Mexico, the chairman of the WTO, and Mexican President Vicente Fox -- all welcome the delegates and solemnly insist that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seize the moment and grab the nettle and move the world forward toward a tariff-free trading regime that will lift all boats and eradicate poverty and, probably, make everybody comfortable, if not quite as rich as Bill Gates.

OK, we exaggerate. But not too much.

The predictions were rosy, as such predictions always are. The nascent revolution mentioned yesterday -- much of the world challenging Europe and the U.S. on reforming trade in agriculture -- was the subtext to most everything else today, and the buzz seems to indicate that this meeting could produce more rebellion than progress, depending on how one defines progress.

When asked if the agriculture proposal put forward by the new developing-country coalition would be considered on an equal footing with the proposal put forward by the U.S. and the European Union (and more or less adopted by WTO General Council chairperson Carlos Perez del Castillo), the secretary general retreated into abstractions: We should concentrate on substance rather than procedure, he said, which sounded like "yes," with wiggle room. We shall see.

Today's papers carry reports of the suicide of Kyung Hae Lee, a Korean farmer and magazine editor, who stabbed himself to death yesterday at the fence that divides the rest of the world from the WTO. He was carrying a sign reading "WTO Kills Farmers" just before plunging a knife into his chest. A friend of the farmer told reporters it was "an act of sacrifice." The tragedy came at the end of a mostly peaceful demonstration attended by somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 people (these numbers are always slippery), some of whom pushed the fence down at one point and threw hunks of concrete at the police, who, by and large, showed admirable restraint.

Yesterday we hinted that there might be an "action" during the opening ceremony. We were not in the auditorium as promised (not enough spaces), but we watched on a TV monitor and heard chanting during the first two or three speeches. Then, just as President Fox began his remarks, a group of speakers from Tuesday's teach-in, whose event had been damaged by overzealous security, boiled up in the press working area holding signs reading "WTO IS UNDEMOCRATIC," "WTO IS OBSOLETE," "WTO IS ANTI-DEVELOPMENT" and offering their comments on the whole affair. It is a given at this kind of event that there will be journalists looking for stories, and the antis were instantly mobbed by reporters and cameras and finally given a sound-bite-length opportunity to speak to the world. About time.