It proposed that commerce should be allowed for certain products, but still keeping protectionist taxes over the clothes that may harm the industries as Cochabamba.

With changes in consumption and improvements in productivity, we all have industries in our own regions that suffer from overseas competition, but in the single market we do not raise protectionist taxes.

"The line taken by Pascal Lamy (director general of the WTO) is completely against the interests of people dying of hunger because it's exactly the protectionist taxes that allow farmers to cultivate food crops," he said.

The inequity of the tariff, as well as the fact that it was in direct contrast to the Compromise of 1833, which was passed to insure that southerners would not have to face high protectionist tax rates, caused massive unrest in the south.

Even if this tax were imposed in the pursuit of economic equalisation, the most it would do is to "provide some local justification for the imposition of a protectionist tax in respect of interstate goods at the later retail stage of distribution" (per majority).