The World Trade Organisation is arguably the most boring international group in the world yet has given rise to a state of emergency and curfews in Seattle this week and brought the National Guard on to the streets. How could this happen?

Seattle was thrilled to win out over other US cities and land the WTO summit which begins the next round of international trade negotiations. But this week trade ministers, their armies of officials, the lobbyists and the media have scurried along wet streets under the eyes of riot police and stayed in at night under curfew as Seattle battled with an invasion of anti-WTO activists.

"Is there anything more ridiculous in the news than the protests against the WTO in Seattle?" asked columnist Thomas Friedman, an ardent admirer of the globalisation of the world's economy under the aegis of the WTO.

"These anti-WTO protesters - who are a Noah's Ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix - are protesting against the wrong target with the wrong tools," Friedman wrote.

Ralph Nader, the noted defender of consumers against multinationals and bureaucracies and who campaigns for the WTO's abolition, lists its critics as "consumers, labour, environmentalists, human rights activists, fair trade groups, AIDS activists, animal protection organisations, those concerned with Third World development, religious communities and women's organisations".

And yet this much-despised organisation, one of whose architects is Ireland's Peter Sutherland, is only five years old. It was Sutherland who, at the urging of former EU Commission President, Jacques Delors, took over WTO's predecessor, the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and steered the Uruguay round of trade negotiations to a successful conclusion.

This included replacing GATT with WTO as the body to impose the agreed rules on world trade. But as Friedman says, the WTO is only administering the rules agreed by the 135 member countries themselves to liberalise world trade.

What he does not point out is that developing countries have little say as the richer countries pursue ever larger markets. But nearly everyone agrees that trade is good and has greatly improved prosperity, if unevenly, for the world's population. Ireland is one of the countries most dependent on external trade.

Protesters never showed up at previous world trade negotiations, so why did the roof fall in when the WTO came to Seattle?

The trouble is that while the GATT stuck mainly to reducing tariffs on imports and making goods cheaper for consumers, the WTO staff based in Geneva has been given extensive powers to sanction countries they judge to have broken the rules of fair trade, in services as well as goods, and in doing so have infuriated many.

For example, it upheld a complaint from India, Pakistan, Malaysia and Thailand against a US ban on imported shrimps which were caught by methods that endangered turtles and angered the environmentalists.

It angered consumer groups by ruling against the EU's ban on the import of US beef raised with artificial growth hormones.

It ruled against the EU's preference regime for bananas imported from poor former colonies in the Caribbean as unfair to the giant US companies which grow bananas more cheaply in Central America with the help of poorly paid peasants. That galvanised campaigners against the exploitation of the developing countries.

The big labour unions in the US and in Europe want the WTO to enlarge its scope and lay down rules against unfair labour practices in developing countries which allegedly threaten American and European jobs. The developing countries see this as bullying by the US and threatened at Seattle to walk out.

And on it goes. The WTO just keeps making enemies - and where better for a confrontation than Seattle this week, where the 135 member countries planned to begin a new round of trade liberalisation to be wrapped up over the next three years?

The delegates from the poorer countries were stuck for a day in their hotels when they could have been arguing their case for fairer treatment from the rich countries which dominate the WTO, the so-called "Quad" consisting of the US, the EU, Japan and Canada.

And many of the poorer countries see the clamour in the Seattle streets for tougher environmental and labour rules as against their interests. It is not always easy to distinguish the goodies from the baddies when it comes to trade.

Definite baddies were the Seattle police, who tear-gassed those peacefully protesting against "corporate greed" and de-forestation but let a band of black-clad anarchists rampage through the fashionable shopping streets.

The damage, which runs into millions of dollars, brought the National Guard of army reservists onto Seattle streets for the first time since the second World War to aid the police. Three nights of dusk-to-dawn curfews were also ordered with over 400 protesters arrested.

This meant the cancellation of receptions and dinners for the WTO delegates, who had thus more time to try to agree an agenda for the next trade round. The big battle was between the US and the EU over agriculture.

The US has been gunning for years against the export subsidies which the EU pays to its exporters of beef and dairy products to allow them compete on the world market. The US has its own elaborate system of domestic subsidies for farmers, but argues they do not "distort" trade the way the EU's system does.

The turtles and the forests are quickly forgotten when the big boys get stuck in. Ireland is glad to be part of the EU bloc when facing up to pressure from the American administration and the farm lobby, which can be as tough as what the SWAT teams were lobbing at the protesters in the streets outside.