Lucky Ali campaigns for Make Trade Fair

A farmer adds her little voice to the Big Noise

A farmers’ mission to seek a trade balance

Rural protestors adopt a global view

Drum and Ravana symbolise evils of Global trade

Kishan Bai, a farmer from Rajasthan, was in Delhi to participate in an activity she has never been part of before-a protest demonstration demanding rigged trade practices be abolished.
She was one of 100 farmers from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra who travelled hundreds of kilometres to raise slogans and bear placards. These farmers were on the most important mission of their lives.
They wanted to convince visiting WTO head Pascal Lamy to put their grievances on farming on the global trade agenda that Mr Lamy was aiming to get India to endorse. Their slogan-raising was accompanied to the tune of the beats of huge drums played by musician and Make Trade Fair envoy Lucky Ali. Together, they made a big noise, which signified the cries of millions of small and marginal producers, left to fend for themselves. The ten-headed puppet of demon king Ravana that they carried with them, symbolised a G-8 nation each. The 9th and 10th puppet heads stood for WTO and Pascal Lamy.
Kishan Bai and the activist-farmers protested publicly outside Pragati Madian, the venue where Mr Lamy was attending a seminar on ‘WTO and the Doha Round: The Way Forward’. Mr Lamy was in Delhi to address the India chapter of the ongoing global trade talks.
While Pascal Lamy and the Commerce & Industry Minister Kamal Nath, argued over how what constitutes balanced trade for developing nations like India, the agitators were demanding that this very anomaly be addressed.
Representing the Make Trade Fair campaign Lucky Ali met Pascal Lamy and urged the WTO to be sensitive towards the plight of the millions of Indian farmers. He said that the "human face" mustn't be lost in these WTO talks and Lamy, as the head of WTO, should take into account the worsening conditions of Indian men and women who have a 7000-year old dependence on
agriculture.
Responding to Lucky Ali, Lamy said, “Farmers need to negotiate better and strengthen their voices so that trade is fairer. How do you do that? You sit around the table and talk. The WTO is that platform. If you like what you are being offered you take it and if you don't, you reject it."

Why, Kishan Bai wanted to know, was that she and her farmer-friends, were not inside the seminar hall to add their inputs to a topic that so obviously concerns their livelihood. She said, “From the big players, at the nation-to-nation level, to the small, at the level of marginalised farmers, this campaign seeks to bind all farmers in a network where everyone can make their presence felt.” Kishan Bai was happy that on April 6 Mr Lamy heard her.