This issue goes to the heart not only of Pakistan's efforts to alleviate the miseries of the poor here, but also to the West's efforts to combat terrorism.
Terrorism finds fertile ground in a situation where developing countries face tariff and other barriers to their products in the major markets of the developed world, whose purchasing power obviously makes these markets highly attractive and lucrative for developing countries' exporters. An overwhelming proportion of Pakistan's exports is routed to the West and Japan.
The West in general and the US in particular on 9/11 have learnt to their cost the price of ignoring the conditions of poverty and deprivation that give rise to extremist ideas.
It is therefore an imperative and in their own interest that they must take cognisance of this issue and open up their markets to the developing world, in a fair quid pro quo for their own constant pressure on the latter to open their markets to the products of the developed world.
Since we are poised to enter the brave new world of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), it is pertinent to remind ourselves of the issues on which the last WTO Conference foundered in Cancun. Amongst other issues, it was agriculture that was at the heart of the developing countries' demands for fair global trade.
The developed world refused to budge on the question of withdrawing the subsidies it provides to its own farmers, which directly affect developing countries' farmers and exporters.
To illustrate the point, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said in a recent report entitled "State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2004" that $230 billion in support paid to farmers in wealthy countries is adding to the burden of declining commodity prices and threatening the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people in the world's poorest countries.
A combination of trade barriers, subsidies in industrialised countries and a 40-year decline in real prices of commodities was sapping the only sources of cash income for many of the 2.5 billion people in developing countries who live off farming.
Support for farmers in industrialised countries was 30 times the amount of aid for agricultural development in poor countries. To add to the woes of developing countries' farmers brought about by skewed markets because of heavy subsidies to developed world farmers, agricultural commodity prices have plunged to their lowest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
More than 50 developing countries, including most of the poorest ones, depend on exports of up to three farm commodities for 20-90 percent of their foreign earnings.
This snapshot of the agricultural global market serves to underline the importance of the agriculture sector for the developing world. Since aid is no longer sought as the first choice for developing economies, with the exception of the very poorest or Least Developed Countries (LDCs), it is trade that can help relatively developed countries in the third world to pick themselves up by their bootstraps out of poverty and misery.
The West has only gains to make, short-sighted fears of the cost to highly subsidised Western farmers or textile industry notwithstanding, if such developing countries receive increased access to Western markets. The biggest of these gains, as recent history shows, is to cut the ground from under the feet of extremists whose message would fall on relatively barren soil if developing countries are doing well economically and alleviating domestic poverty.