The Marmot’s Hole

Kevin at IA points out this Asia Times piece by Gary LaMoshi that really hits the nail on the head concerning the suicide of Lee Kyung-hae, South Korea’s obnoxious trade barriers to agricultural imports and its laughable attempts to pass itself off as a developing nation during recent WTO talks in Cancun. My favorite parts:

Agence France Presse reported that Lee “took his life to protest what he and other militants contend is the damage being done to peasant farmers the world over by the WTO’s corporation-friendly policies”.
That may be true, but it obscures a key fact: Lee and his fellow South Korean farmers are on the opposite side of the debate from the poor countries advocating an end to agricultural subsidies in the developed world. Lee and company may be peasants, but South Korea is a developed country and a heavy subsidizer of its uncompetitive farmers.
South Korea is self-sufficient in rice production, thanks to heavy subsidies that it has repeatedly promised to cut without following through. Current subsidies to farmers like Lee total 480 billion won (US$411 million), $75 per ton. That helps explain why South Korean consumers pay about five times the world price for their rice.

And:

Make no mistake about Lee’s intentions and interests. He did not spill his blood for the sake of impoverished cotton growers in arid Mali or the peasants of the muddy Mekong delta; he committed suicide to protect Korean farmers from those rivals.

I’ve said it before (here, here, and here), so I’ll say it again - Korean trade barriers kill Chinese farmers (and Vietnamese farmers, and Thai farmers, and Indonesian farmers…).

Lee might be a martyr, but he’s a martyr to a criminal cause.