JORGE RODRIGUES SIMAO

For an apparently small organization dealing with abstruse trade matters in Geneva, the World Trade Organization (WTO) arouses surprising levels of popular interest, emotions, and high drama. At the last high-level meeting of the WTO at Cancun in 2003, nongovernmental organizations staged massive anti-WTO demonstrations, participating countries threatened to walk out of the conference, and a South Korean farmer committed suicide to show just what he thought of the WTO’s rules on agriculture. Nor was Cancun unusual in any way; most ministerial-level meetings of the organization have come to be associated with impassioned protests and angry mobs.