NEWS - French demonstrators Demand

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Subject: NEWS - French demonstrators Demand WTO With A Human Face

Title: French demonstrators Demand WTO With A Human Face
Date: 27-NOV-99
Author: Matthew Green
Source: Reuters
Style: News
Reference: None

Thousands of demonstrators marched through the heart of Paris on
Saturday to
demand the World Trade Organisation put people before profits at its
meeting
to promote free trade next week in Seattle.

Fear that freer trade will lead to greater exploitation of the
environment
and less respect for human rights mingled with concerns closer to
wallets as
demonstrators said unfettered global capitalism would destroy French
jobs.

"We don't want to demonise money, but it must be used to promote
humanity's
happiness," said Jacques Bezard, a 50-year-old Communist party member,
over
a cacophony of saxophones and drums.

Brandishing banners that said "the world is not for sale," marchers
headed
for the site of the Bastille, hoping to recapture the idealistic zeal
that
led to the storming of the fortress in the 1789 French revolution.

Equally rich in symbolism was the starting point of the march - before
the
colonnades of the Paris Bourse, a focal point for fears that increased
free
trade will force job cuts among French companies competing to enrich
their
shareholders.

As the march began, the daily Le Monde appeared on newsstands with a
front-page article by WTO chief Mike Moore saying that the organisation
which governs free trade would defend poor countries' interests.

"I am launching a call to ministers to announce in Seattle their
intention
of suppressing all the obstacles to imports from the least developed
countries," he wrote.

But concerns closer to the kitchen table ranked high on the protesters'
agenda, from fears that the WTO will force France to allow imports of
unsafe
genetically modified food to worries that major food exporters will
force
cuts in farmers' subsidies.

"What worries me, because I'm French, is that the WTO could say we can
only
have sterilised milk, then what will happen to French cheese?,"said
Johann
Chemin, a 28-year-old computer programmer.

Farmers, political parties and environmentalists demonstrated across
France,
and police said there were 5,000 protesters in Paris, where the debate
on
globalisation was particularly lively.

"I like business but we need rules to govern globalisation," said
commercial
manager Pierre Ygre, waving a cigar to emphasise his point as a student
40
years his junior struggled to get a word in edgeways.

"The logic of capitalism means that even if you are a sympathetic boss,
you
will be forced to sack people anyway," student Guillaume Latil cut in,
as he
proferred a wad of socialist pamphlets to passersby.