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Environmentalists in Zambia are concerned that a new free trade agreement will open the floodgates for dangerous imported products and industrial wastes.

Thousands of farmers marched through the Mexican capital Wednesday demanding subsidies and a halt to free trade -- posing the most direct challenge yet to President Vicente Fox's 8-month-old administration.

In the vast acreage of published analysis about the splendid victory over the World Trade Organization last November 29-December 3, it is almost impossible to find anyone wondering why the 40-50,000 demonstrators were overwhelmingly Anglo.

There are watershed moments in which world events and popular perceptions of them are changed. The week of protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last year was indisputably such a moment.

The failure of the WTO Ministerial meeting in Seattle was a historic watershed, in more than one way. Firstly, it has demonstrated that globalisation is not an inevitable phenomena which must be accepted at all costs but a political project which can be responded to politically.

Some 700 representatives of the central trade unions of the members of South America's leading trade bloc, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay - called on their governments to submit an eventual continent-wide free trade treaty to national plebiscites.

He may not be comfortable discussing unrest in East Timor, or pronouncing the name of the leaders of Turkmenistan, but President-elect George W. Bush considers the rest of the Western Hemisphere "our backyard" and will have several opportunities in his first year in office to make Latin America a trade and foreign policy priority.

In a major boost for the forces of economic globalisation, US President Bill Clinton has decided to back multinational corporations in a key court challenge to a Massachusetts law designed to promote democracy in Burma.

Tearing a page from the anti-apartheid movement, the two drew up legislation that penalized companies with ties to Burma when those firms competed for Massachusetts state contracts. Using the draft of an anti-apartheid bill, they crossed out South Africa and inserted Burma. Two years later, the measure became law.

China won't sacrifice income support for farmers in talks this week to join the World Trade Organization, officials and analysts said yesterday.