Protesters converge on Seattle for trade summit

Thousands of delegates, officials and journalists converging on Seattle for the opening of the world trade summit tomorrow are being joined by even larger numbers of protesters, who are threatening to create chaos in the streets.

Several arrests were made on Saturday including two women who rappelled down a wall supporting a highway to unfurl a protest banner. The Direct Action Network, an umbrella group for protesters, said: "We need to shut down the WTO. It is threatening all of our lives and our kids' futures."

President Clinton is due to arrive in Seattle tomorrow and will meet non-governmental organisations before addressing the main forum. Speculation continues that President Fidel Castro of Cuba may also attend the summit.

The ministers from the 135-member-countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will have to agree on an agenda for the next round of trade negotiations before they leave Seattle at the end of this week.

Hopes that a draft agenda would have been agreed last week at WTO headquarters in Geneva were not realised.

Differences remain between the US and the EU and between industrialised countries and the least developed countries under a number of headings, which include agriculture, anti-dumping rules, labour standards, the environment and electronic commerce.

Mr Tom Parlon, president of the IFA, said yesterday in a statement from Seattle that any WTO concessions could "pose a major threat to our two most important sectors, beef and dairying." The concessions being demanded of the US, Australia, New Zealand and other exporting countries "would decimate the Irish industry, including up to £500 million off the value of Irish agricultural output."

Mr Parlon said he was "very concerned" that Ireland's fate at Seattle "was being left in the hands of junior minister Tom Kitt" and that neither the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, as Minister for Trade, nor the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, would be present.

Mr Parlon said that the US position at the summit was "hypocritical in the extreme". .On the one hand the US was seeking "to dismantle the EU Common Agricultural Policy, which would destroy our family farm structure" and at the same time "the Americans paid $15 billion to American ranchers and agribusiness in the past two years".

According to Mr Mike Dolan, deputy director of Global Trade Watch, a group affiliated with consumer activist Mr Ralph Nader, "the target is the 135-member nations, to put pressure on the delegations to turn their attention away from their slavish devotion to the corporate agenda.