Today I chaired a press conference focussing on ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific) countries' deep concerns about the fate of the cotton, sugar and banana industries, writes Glenys Kinnock.
They certainly "told it as it is" and made it very clear that on no account would they sign up to any text or join any consensus that did not include these issues.
Sugar and bananas have benefited from preferential access into Europe's markets and now the system is being systematically and brutally dismantled.
The coalition countries have come here with a full team of farmers who make a moving case that has dominated this ministerial. The US has offered them duty-free, quota-free access, which has been met with derision from the farmers who know that this is just meaningless.
These west African countries are too poor and uncompetitive to benefit from this offer and the issue remains the US subsidies which are destroying the livelihoods of 10 million farmers. Cotton is a priority issue in these negotiations and, like in Cancun, threatens to scupper the whole process.
The conviction is clearly growing that development is not the real priority here and confidence continues to wane.
Small developing countries today asserted their interests, conscious as they are of the fact that they are being sidelined and that their priorities on, for instance, special and differential treatment, are not being addressed.
They don't want to wreck the talks but they categorically refuse to be the losers. These countries are small and vulnerable and their people's lives are threatened. They have every right to expect to be better off at the end of all this. Development cannot be an annex to the discussions, they say.
Furthermore, they remind us that they are not supplicants waiting for handouts. They want to bring prosperity from the dignity that only jobs alone will bring.
The value of the crops we discussed today at the press conference is not just about accounting and banking. They are about the stark realities of survival. Millions of people face terrible uncertainty and the ministers I was with on the platform today will not stand aside when their countries are being pushed backwards into further poverty.
Cotton, sugar and bananas are literally life and death issues and no-one should underestimate the ACP's solidarity and unity at this time.
* Glenys Kinnock is blogging from the WTO summit all week. Read her posts from yesterday, Wednesday, Tuesday and Monday.
