"Those who are negotiating in the World Trade Organization (WTO) are dealing with their own interests and those of the large corporations; they are not considering us farmers. The negotiations are about agriculture and food, but they are not speaking with us, the people who in practice guarantee these things. They are deciding about our lives and making resolutions that for us are synonymous with death. That's why the WTO should cease", said the Korean leader Yoon Geum Soon, at the close of a large demonstration of women from Via Campesina, that took place in Hong Kong today, December 15, the day of struggle of rural women against the WTO. The onerous conditions imposed by agribusiness, that oblige farmers to buy everything and become indebted, is bringing rural women to a point of desperation, driving them to emigrate and even in some cases, to commit suicide. Thus, the coercion towards mercantile logic in agriculture not only puts women's rights at risk but also their very lives, emphasized the representatives from different parts of the world, in the debate previous to the mobilization. Under the presumed argument that trade rules have nothing to do with gender inequalities, the WTO takes decisions that exacerbate the exclusion of women. In Europe, for example, according to Josie Riffaud, of Via Campesina-France, women farmers have no professional status, and consequently have neither guaranteed income nor social security; in these conditions, they are forced to assume inaccessible costs of agricultural production, which includes the implementation of expensive technologies, imposed as an obligatory condition for entering the dynamics of industrialization. In the South, women are affected by similar situations, without considering that, in most countries, they produce more than 50% of the food supply. Indian women, for example, produce up to 70%, while 60% is produced by women in Korea and Thailand. Yet the logic behind commercial and economic competition, on which the WTO rules are founded, obviates this reality and assumes that agricultural production comes exclusively from transnational companies, whereas in reality, most of world continues to be supplied by small-scale farming, in which women predominate. Tougher living conditions in the rural areas have led to an exodus of farmers in the global South towards the big cities and to other countries. This involves enormous human costs, not only due to the crisis it generates in rural communities, but mainly because it forces migrant farmer women to take on the most devaluated jobs in the urban areas, such as domestic work or prostitution. In the countries of the North, migrant women are obliged to accept labor conditions that in many cases resemble slavery. Those who remain in the countryside, on the other hand, have to get additional jobs, on top of farming, they said. Chukki Najundaswamy, from India, commented that the WTO rules take women away from their traditional activities and from the possibility of continuing to develop their knowledge, such as seed hybridizing and conservation, which is being snatched from their hands, while farmers are compelled to use commercial and even GMO seeds, under transnational brands. Under those conditions, women lose their status as farmers and producers to become employed by agribusiness, in tasks that earn no recognition, said the Japanese representative. She added that in rural areas devastated by the commoditization, women have almost no place. Also, the possibilities for women to obtain land are increasingly remote, as the Philippine representative pointed out. At present, as land is being monopolized by transnational companies, the ratio of access to land by women is barely 1%. The women farmers exposed these and dozens of other reasons why the WTO would change nothing by adding a few social or gender considerations to some of its texts. They want the WTO out of agriculture and women's lives, without which, equality will never arrive for them. (Translation ALAI).