Antitrade activists face tough sell

"We are turning to more appropriate tactics, vigils not protests, phone-banking instead of sit-ins," says Lori Wallach, who handles trade issues for Ralph Nader's Public Citizen movement and who has traveled to Doha.

The issues the anti-globalizers raise - their arguments that rich countries force poor ones to do their economic bidding and open themselves to exploitation by multinational corporations - have also taken on a different aspect in the past two months. The anti-American flavor that tinged the protests in many parts of the world has lost some of its appeal. A fledgling campaign to boycott Esso, for example, in protest at its role in funding George Bush's campaign and supporting his rejection of the Kyoto treaty on global warming, ground to a halt.

"Anti-Bush arguments were perceived as anti-American," says Monbiot.

Despite people's attention being distracted from world trade issues, traffic on Public Citizen's website has "gone through the ceiling" in the past two months, Ms. Wallach says. In France, Attac - the leading anti-globalization movement - says it is recruiting new members at the same rate as before.

"The more things develop, the more people wonder, 'What can we do about this besides bombing Afghanistan?' " says Remi Parmentier, political director for Greenpeace, the international environmental organization. "What happened and what is happening shows even more the need for a new kind of global security that does not give any purchase to terrorism."

For advocates of globalization, real solutions mean increasing trade liberalization, which they say boosts growth and prosperity everywhere. But to launch a new trade round, they need third world support in the WTO.

"America's ability to sustain coalitions against terrorism will depend in part on attention to problems faced by our partners," Zoellick acknowledged in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.

In Doha, says Helwig Schlögl, deputy Secretary General of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "a new realization that you can't go it alone" and an "increased determination for multilateral cooperation" could engender a new spirit of compromise, he suggests.

The obstacles will not be easy to overcome, however.

The US and other industrialized countries opposes demands from third world countries that they be allowed to override drug patents so as to provide affordable medicines to AIDS sufferers and other patients. This dispute could scupper the meeting, WTO director general Mike Moore has warned.

Developing countries are also demanding that the results of the last round of trade negotiations be implemented before embarking on a new round, and resisting pressure from rich countries to open their economies to foreign investment before local firms are strong enough to compete.

At the same time, Japan is demanding that the US drop punitive duties on certain imports, and developing countries are refusing EU demands that labor rights and environmental protection provisions be included in trade pacts.

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