II. Reading.

1. Read the article through and try to grasp the main idea without using a dictionary. The battle in seatle.

Time, December 6, 1999, p.48 -52.

The Geneva - based WTO boasts a membership of more than 115 countries (1999 data). It's a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade formed in 1947. Once limited to goods, the WTO's purview has been extended to include intellectual property and trade in services. The organization's task is to administer and enforce the trade agreements made by member nations, ensuring freer flow of goods and services. Its rulings are law among members.

In China’s admission, the organization seems set to extend its gospel of no-pain, no-gain capitalism across the planet. The WTO's 36,000 pages of regulations reach into far-flung crannies of human existence.

In the abstract, free trade is feel-good fellowship. Trash the tariffs and, globally, consumers profit from lower prices. In the half-century since the WTO's predecessor, the GATT, was founded with 21 members, worldwide trade has expanded some 15-fold, to $6.5 trillion. As the world's largest exporter and importer, the U.S. owes nearly a third of its economic growth in the past decade to trade. Exports now make: around 18% of E.U. countries' combined GDP. Trade is indispensable to survival.

Ours is a world full of conflicts. Developing countries grouse that they are opening their markets but with little benefit. They want more time to comply with rules on financial services and intellectual property, the latter jealously guarded by U.S. multinationals. Third World ministers also argue that richer countries have an obligation to import more, particularly in the wake of the Asian crisis of 1997, which devastated countries from Thailand to Peru.

The Europeans are mounting an all-out defense of their agricultural markets, currently protected by the E. U’s complicated, reform-resistant $44 billion in farm supports. And they will fight to maintain their moratorium on the import of genetically modified crops in the face of the U.S. and Canadian opposition. E.U. trade commissioner Pascal Lamy is also standing up for what he calls "specific traits of European civilization - the insistence on high-quality foodstuffs, cultural identity in a world without barriers and a reluctance to see some activities reduced to a commercial footing". In other words, protection against too many Disney movies, Pizza Huts and American bankers.

The U.S. agenda has something to annoy everyone. Particularly irksome to Asians is American insistence on reducing tariffs on e-commerce, biotechnology and financial services-industries in which the U.S. clearly leads — and at thу same time enforcing antidumping legislation on steel imports from Russia, e.g. Says Chau Takhay, Hong Kong's Secretary for Trade and Industry: "The U.S. is single-mindedly pursuing its own narrow agenda while showing little interest in other's needs."

The antiglobalist message resonates across a broad swath of ideology from right to left-wing groups. Police have a lot to fear from "radical jeerleaders". Four Molotov cocktails were thrown into an empty Gap store in downtown Seattle in November, Gap being a focus of antisweatshop protests. No wonder the city has budgeted $6 million for police overtime and is stockpiling tear gas. Although the U.S. wields a big stick, the WTO operates by consensus. The largest block, made of 77 developing countries, stands virtually united against efforts by wealthier countries to influence environmental and labour laws in developing countries.

For years, the cold war afforded political cover for free trade, clearing pathway for democracy. But as the threat of communism receded, the public began to focus on market globalization as the root of many evils. The underlying principle of the global economy is that each country should manufacture and freely export the goods it can make at a comparative advantage — read more cheaply-over other countries. If this means paying slave wages and leveling the rainforests, so be it.

Despite the economic upturn, this ethic of survival of the fittest has spawned widespread anxiety in rich and poor countries, alike.