BANGKOK, Aug 20 (IPS) - Asian activists have set their sights on converting next month's World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting into a battlefield with a single aim in mind: destroying the relevance of this multilateral trade body.

For weapons, they will bring their newly sharpened ideas and razor-edged messages on why the Geneva-based WTO “should be got rid of” or “pushed back”.

This rage about the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference to be held in the Mexican resort city of Cancun from Sep. 10-14 is being felt across activists' and critics' circles across East Asia, and reflected during a two-day meeting here.

Those representing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Asia's industrial powerhouse, Japan, are as livid about the debilitating impact that the WTO's free trade agenda is having on people across the region as are activists from poverty-stricken Cambodia.

“It would be a victory on our side if this ministerial meeting gets nowhere and creates a retreat of the WTO,” Walden Bello, head of the Bangkok-based regional think tank Focus on the Global South, told the assembled activists on Wednesday.

“The WTO cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed by the people's movement,” added Choi Yung-Chan of All Together, a Seoul-based NGO that is championing an anti-capitalist and anti-war movement in South Korea. “We will be sending 206 people to Cancun to achieve a victory for the people.”

As the activists see it, there is little that Asia's developing countries stand to gain from the four main issues that are expected to dominate the discussions among trade ministers from the WTO's 146 member countries, aimed at negotiating to further liberalise global trade.

Among these four contentious issues are the setting of international trading rules for agriculture products, an agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and its impact on easy access to cheap medicines in the developing world and discussions on enforcing cuts in industrial tariffs.

The activists are also not falling for rosy accounts of the WTO's significance to improving trade across Asia being advanced by the eight-year-old multilateral body's first Asian chief, Supachai Panitchpakdi, former deputy prime minister of Thailand.

Last week, the WTO director-general talked up the potential his organisation offered countries in the developing world to accompany the release of the 'World Trade Report', which stated that Asia's volume of international trade towered over trade figures from other regions in the South.

“A lot of developing countries who supported Supachai get the top post are disappointed by him, “ Kingkorn Navintarakul, advisor to the Chiang Mai-based Northern Peasants Federation of Thailand, told IPS. “ He has been unable to affect real change and to make the WTO a place where developing countries can get a fair deal for trade.”

Such pessimism about the forthcoming round of international trade negotiations is not misplaced, says Aileen Kwa, author of the book 'Power Politics and the WTO'. “There is no reason to have illusions that things will get better.”

On agriculture issues, for instance, most Asian countries are troubled by the way the U.S. and European Union farm sectors will stand to make significant gains if the Cancun meeting endorses an agriculture agreement promoting the liberalisation of farm trade.

“It will not help the farmers in Asia's developing countries, thus affecting their livelihoods and their country's food security,” Kwa, who has been following the trade negotiations at the WTO's headquarters, told IPS.

“Cheap farm products from the EU and the U.S. will be dumped in Asia, where countries will have to drop any protective barriers for their farmers. Meanwhile, the EU and the U.S. will be able to get away protecting their own farmers,” she said.

In the Philippines, activists have gathered evidence in agricultural sectors such as rice, corn and animal farming to amplify Kwa's view that a grim harvest awaits more Asian countries if the agriculture agreement, which they say is weighted heavily in favour of the United States and the EU, is endorsed in Cancun.

The distortions and inequity created by the agricultural subsidies given by industrialised countries have been singled out in reports like United Nations Development Programme's 'Human Development Report 2003'.

“Rich countries, to varying degrees, pay large subsidies to their domestic food producers. These subsides are so large - totalling 311 billion U.S. dollars a year - that they affect world market prices of agriculture goods, causing direct harm to poor countries,” states the U.N. report.

There have been attempts by both European and U.S. governments to show plans to reduce the subsidies.

Still, critics say, these subsidies stand in direct contrast to what the industrialised nations promised developing nations at the last WTO ministerial meeting, held in Dohar, Qatar, in 2001 - to eliminate subsidies for farm products as a way of making the global trade rules fairer to the developing world.

Asia's poor, who were promised access to cheaper drugs at the Doha meeting, are also suspicious about the WTO, says Heather Grady, regional director of the East Asia office of the humanitarian agency Oxfam.

“The Doha agreement was to increase people's access to cheaper medicines, but there has been a rollback since then,” she said.

She was referring to how all the big talk in Doha about public health being a reason to override intellectual property and patent concerns - a key plank of the WTO regime — has not led to concrete agreement among governments despite several rounds of mini-summits on this issue.

Most worrying, she said in an interview, are the conditions that the WTO has placed on Cambodia in its bid to become a member. This South-east Asian country's admission into the trade body at the Cancun meeting would make it the first Least Developed Country (LDC) to become a member after the WTO was formed.

“It is a country that needs cheap, generic anti-AIDS drugs to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. But Cambodia will have to give up depending on generic drugs almost immediately it becomes a WTO member, due to new conditions being imposed about TRIPS,” adds Grady.

“This is outrageous,” she says. “The case of Cambodia exemplifies an institution that favours the powerful.”

According to Bello, these clear contradictions lend weight to activists' efforts to nail down the WTO as a failure. “We need to push back this form of false multilateralism advocated by U.S. capital, and create a new open space for an alternative multilateralism.”