CANCUN, Sept 11: A South Korean protester killed himself during a clash with riot police protecting ministers meeting on Wednesday here to jump-start stalled world trade talks.

The middle-aged farmer, named by friends as Lee Kyung-hae, climbed onto a high security fence during a violent protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and waved a banner that read “WTO kills farmers”.

He then stabbed himself in the chest and later died in hospital. A friend said his suicide was an “act of sacrifice” to show his disgust at the WTO and its policies.

About 5,000 activists joined the protest and about two dozen broke through eight-foot-high metal barriers to attack police on the edge of Cancun’s upscale hotel zone.

Demonstrators threw chunks of paving stones, sticks, metal bars and bottles at police, who fought back with batons and tear gas. More than a dozen people were inured as police held off the protesters.

The 146-nation WTO opened its five-day meeting in Cancun with serious divisions on a host of disputes, topped by agricultural subsidies in the United States and Europe.

British development charity Oxfam on Thursday called on political leaders at the WTO talks to commit themselves to changing Europe’s agricultural subsidy regime, which it said was biased toward helping the bloc’s richest producers most.

Oxfam said Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was also preventing poorer nations, which receive much of the cheap, heavily subsidised food, from pulling themselves out of poverty.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had earlier called on the richest nations to scrap those handouts.

“Sadly, the reality of the international trading system today does not match the rhetoric. Instead of open markets, there are too many barriers that stunt, stifle and starve,” Annan said in a speech read out on his behalf in Cancun.

“These barriers and subsidies in developed countries must be phased out, as possible, for the sake of humanity.”

Mexican peasants joined foreign activists in the protest against what critics say is an unfair world trade system tilted against developing countries.

A group of 21 developing states, have formed an alliance to demand that rich countries scrap the farm handouts they say condemn millions of their farmers to poverty.

The US and the European Union reject the demand as impracticable.—Reuters