a small picket has been organised already fyi

not sure if small picket will be sufficient

smile

i think a nosie presence as well as a noise presence might be useful

his weekend, four 10ft-long rubber sharks, festooned with US and EU flags, patrolled the pavement in a rather swanky part of London.

They were joined outside the Foreign Secretary's official residence by dozens of other costumed protesters, all of whom shared the sharks' outrage at rich countries' "predatory" tactics in global trade talks.

On Friday and Saturday, the so-called G6 group - the US, the EU, Australia, Japan, Brazil and India - held tortuously complex negotiations. With the sharks circling outside, delegates haggled over property rights, dumping and reciprocal liberalisation.

But they failed to agree a draft World Trade Organisation deal - a deal rightly billed as a once in a generation chance to boost global business and lift millions of people out of poverty.

The WTO's 149 member states had hoped to complete the trade round in December, at a summit in Hong Kong. For five days (and nights), they tried to finalise a series of intricate agreements to lower domestic trade barriers.

But Hong Kong failed, as Cancun had two years earlier. This trade round has been in dispute now since 2001. And the clock is ticking - loudly. Unless consensus is reached by May, the expiry of special fast-track powers given to President Bush by the US Congress dashes all hope of a deal.

The traditional pattern of WTO agreements is that rich countries give agricultural and industrial support and, in return, the rest of the world opens its markets to more western goods and services. By tearing down barriers and encouraging investment, this trade round, says the World Bank, could add £260bn to global income by 2015.

The sharks don't agree. They are disgusted that African countries were excluded from these latest talks. Any WTO agreement, they say, would be unfairly stacked towards the west.

In recent months, global trading relations have soured badly - so much so that we could be about to see a big multinational trade negotiation fail for the first time since the 1930s. That would be a big setback for the global economy.

The acrimonious air is largely of the west's own making. The E, in particular is in the midst of a nervous breakdown over the merits of free trade - the principle on which it was founded.

Trade commissioner Peter Mandelson last week called on his colleagues to reject "simplistic protectionist solutions". Stubborn EU members are testing the limits of Europe's own competition and single-market rules. Italy wants to ringfence its financial services industry, Spain its energy market. Paris has designated 11 sensitive sectors in which French companies must be safeguarded from foreign takeover.

Such moves undermine the EU's credibility with the WTO, says Mandelson. How can other countries be expected to abide by global trading rules when the EU flagrantly breaks its own?

But Mandelson himself has lately announced random obstacles to Asian import, with furniture and shoes the latest products to be targeted. And last year's "bra wars" fiasco - during which the EU broke a long-standing pledge to drop barriers on Chinese textiles - was hugely damaging.

Witness, too, the EU's reaction to the bid by India's Mittal Steel for Arcelor, Europe's largest steelmaker. The hostility to the proposed takeover in France, Luxembourg and Spain has bordered on xenophobia.

We've seen something similar in the US response to the purchase of P&O's American interests by Dubai Ports World. Congress has blocked the deal, objecting on security grounds, to five US container terminals being owned by an Arab company. No matter that port security would have remained in American hands.

Very little time remains to complete this trade round. Yet in Europe and America the protectionist voices are getting louder. Across the western world, the spectacular economic ascent of Asia is being watched partly with awe, but mostly with fear.

The liberal market philosophies that generated prosperity in the west are now creating enormous wealth elsewhere. But that is confronting established powers with the harsh realities of relative decline.

The west is now in danger of squandering a crucial WTO deal due to a misguided lapse into economic nationalism. That would be disastrous, both commercially and politically. Rubber sharks aside, these are dangerous times for free trade.

Don't forget that rape alarms double as BULLSHIT ALARMS! ;-)