It wasn't supposed to be this way.

The World Trade Organization, the international free trade body whose ministerial talks in Cancun, Mexico collapsed last week, was never intended to be hampered by consideration of the concerns of the worlds poor.

A group of over 20 poor nations from the South, led by its largest economies particularly Brazil, and including India, Mexico, and new WTO member China blocked the U.S. and European Union last week from imposing yet another round of trade agreements, this time regarding agricultural products, that would have helped cement the widening economic imbalance between rich and poor.

Until the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle, rich countries, particularly the U.S., pretty much called the shots in the WTO, a trade organization begun in 1994 largely founded through U.S. efforts and dedicated to bringing NAFTA-style trade practices to the world. Large corporations from the U.S., Europe, and Japan could take advantage of cheap labor in the South, and sell their products there by undercutting smaller indigenous industries. Countries like the U.S. would lose jobs but get lots of cheap stuff. Poor countries would lose local jobs, and then compete with each other in a race to the bottom to see who could offer global corporations the fewest taxes, least environmental or worker safety laws, and cheapest, most pliant labor forces.

Here in Seattle, protests that had been erupting for a decade in countries like India and Indonesia astonished the world by coming to a wealthy, comfortable city in the North. Once he meetings started, a group of African delegates took the protesters message to the ministerial talks themselves blocking destructive new agreements.

Two years ago, the next WTO ministerial meeting was held in the feudal oil kingdom of Qatar with the entire country closed off to those annoying protesters. Not much happened in the meetings themselves, as the U.S. and E.U. were primarily concerned with making sure an agreement, any agreement, could come out of Qatar to convince the world that the WTO was still a going concern.

This year, in Cancun a posh island resort even more closed off than usual to ordinary Mexicans the substantive matters could be put off no longer. The U.S. and E.U. wanted a new agricultural agreement that would remove trade tariffs even as U.S. agribusiness, for example, continue to receive massive farm subsidies and price supports from the federal government. Those large corporations now dominate American agriculture, having all but extinguished the family farm over the past 20 years; they have now also nearly destroyed Mexican agriculture thanks to NAFTA, dumping cheap corn and other commodities in the Mexican market and driving the prices so low Mexican farmers cannot sell their crops and make enough money to survive. In Mexican states like Michoacan and Guerrero, whole rural villages are abandoned, their former residents gone either to the city or the States in a desperate search for a livelihood.

This is the future that the U.S. and Europe want for the farms of the rest of the world, too. And in the wake of Seattle and the rift that has never been closed since, the refusal by the governments of poor countries to go along now threatens the very existence of the WTO. The U.S., in particular, created the WTO; if the WTO doesn't do what the U.S. wants, the WTO ceases to be a useful institution.

European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, whose closing speech as the Cancun talks disintegrated was tinged with bitterness, blasted the stalemated organization and the structure that made the Cancun rebellion possible. The WTO remains a medieval organization, Lamy said after the talks broke off. Rep. Charles Stenholm (R-TX), one of the architects of the U.S. agricultural trade proposal, characterized the breakdown thusly: The WTO resembled the United Nations. And we all know what Republicans think of the United Nations, where the great masses of unwashed poor countries also actually have a vote just like the rich ones.

The U.S. would much rather have international trade decided on the model of the IMF or World Bank, which are instead more or less run on the one dollar, one vote principle. Lamy had it exactly backward medieval rule, at least in Europe, was generally the absolute power of kings. The kings owned the resources of their domain, and their poor subjects paid tribute but got nothing in return. That's more the vision of what the E.U. and U.S. wanted the WTO to be than what it has become.

The breakdown in talks constituted a tremendous victory for fair trade advocates, many of whom inside and outside the meetings had descended on Cancun to voice their opposition to the agricultural agreement and other proposals on foreign investment and competition being pushed by the E.U. and Japan.

Inside the halls, Cancun became an even more dramatic victory than Seattle had been. No new talks were scheduled, and with their traditional dominance stymied, the U.S. may turn its attention elsewhere and abandon the WTO entirely as its vehicle for creating a global economic structure that helps corporations rule the world.

That process has already begun. Since the disastrous Seattle meeting, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations have been deemphasizing the WTO, preferring to pursue the same policies of dominance through multilateral regional agreements. The most important of these is the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a proposed pan-hemispheric free trade zone; the next scheduled meeting to continue FTAA negotiations comes in Miami in November.

In Miami as in Cancun, Quebec, Seattle, and cities and towns across the global South the drive by farmers, labor, environmentalists, anti-poverty activists, and many others to dismantle transnational corporate control of the world's economies will continue. And now, the momentum is all on the side of economic and social justice.