On the 1999 Seattle WTO and the farmer issue:

And then-at the very end of the twentieth century-came an opportunity for people around the world to think again about the role of the state in their own and their nations' futures. In December I 999, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Geneva-based multinational association that regulates trade and promotes economic growth, held a weeklong meeting in Seattle. For eighteen months prior to the meeting, activist groups prepared for protests and tried to spread their view that what was essentially a private association of corporate executives with only a veneer of public accountability had no business determining important national and international policy. The confrontation that ensued shocked millions out of the complacency that prosperity had engendered. While police outfitted in riot gear shot tear gas, pepper spray and rubber pellets at protesters, the meeting's activities ground to a halt. At a time when Americans were said to hate politics, the "battle in Seattle" opened a distinctly public debate about the future of citizenship in the global village. If the alternative was an economy run by unelected rich elites, "several removes from popular sovereignty," then active engagement with the democratic state might be worth pursuing after all.

Rural people were among the leaders of this new movement to reconsider and reconceptualize the role of the state in world affairs. Indeed, rural folk from the United States and elsewhere went to Seattle-and then to other protests in Washington, D.C., and at the summer's presidential nominating conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles-to make it clear that a fully globalized, privatized, and politics-free rural trade zone was not what they envisioned for their children's futures. To do so, they built alliances with unlikely partners-including environmentalists and labor activiststo protest the WTO's plan to remove government funding from agriculture worldwide. According to the WTO, government subsidies of small-scale farming substantially raise the cost of living for consumers. The expense of subsidizing just dairy cows, proclaimed the organization, would pay for those same cows-4I million of them-to fly first class around the world. But, according to WTO critics, the ending of farm subsidies worldwide would bring about the final industrialization of the countryside, the end of regional agricultural diversity, and the unrestrained development of genetically engineered foods. Most of all, by pitting farmers from one country against those from other countries, it would assure that all farmers would receive the lowest possible price for their crops-prices that would make the crisis prices of the last three years of the twentieth century seem generous by comparison.

Stock and Johnston 2001:2-3

Stock, Catherine McN. and Robert D. Johnston (2001) Introduction. In The Countryside in the Age of the Modern
State, edited by Catherine McN. Stock and Robert D. Johnston, pp 1-12. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca.