New York -- President Yoweri Museveni called for the end of "parasitism" and double standards in world trade at an address to the high-level debate of the United Nations General Assembly Sunday morning. He also addressed terrorism in a brief closing section of the speech by differentiating between terrorists and freedom fighters.

"The song about aid is meaningless without access to markets," Museveni said, decrying European and American agricultural subsidies and their distorting effect on the food export market.

Sunday morning’s opening roster of speakers was clearly a lesser draw than U.S. President George W. Bush’s address to the assembly Saturday. Fifteen observers sat scattered among hundreds of empty seats in the fourth-floor press gallery during Museveni’s speech. And on the assembly floor, a number of countries’ tables were empty.

Museveni delivered the speech in a manner both less polished and more entertaining than the heads of state who preceded him on the podium Sunday morning. He held up the pages of his speech for easier reading; but he also spoke with modulated voice and great passion.

He drew the first laughs of the morning session while recounting his attempts to find a good pineapple outside of Uganda. Museveni said he packs Ugandan food to sustain him when he travels outside the country. When he was in the UK last week, the pineapple stocks ran out, so Museveni sent a staffer to buy pineapples at a supermarket. "I just took one slice and terminated the whole exercise at once," Museveni recalled. "First of all, the pineapple is hard; it is less sweet; and has got an ammonia like pungent taste."

He added that he had a similar experience in Washington, DC, and he asked, somewhat whimsically, "Why must the citizens of the world endure these deprivations on account of policies designed to serve narrow interests?"

While the telling was amusing, the story’s implication was potentially explosive. Museveni wants Ugandan food exports to play on a level field, and he complained that members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development spend US$361 billion annually to subsidize farmers. But powerful agriculture lobbies support the subsidies and would fight bitterly to keep them.

The lobby’s strength in the U.S. is a major reason food items were not included in the products for which trade barriers to the U.S. market were dropped in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

"We have not yet started negotiating for food," Uganda’s ambassador to the U.S. Edith Ssempala told The Monitor about talks on a proposed AGOA II. "But yes, food is one of the areas we are interested in."

Museveni commended the U.S. government for passing and implementing AGOA. But his words when discussing trade were generally quite aggressive. In briefly recounting the history of Africa-West interactions, and the current state of trade, he used the words "parasitic" or "parasitism" seven times, in such sentences as, "Subsidies to farmers of Europe must end if we are talking of a ‘global village’ of symbiosis and not parasitism."

He also made clear that blame for parasitic relations lay with both the parasite and the victim. "Even today, however, the authorship of the inequality among peoples is still a joint responsibility of the victims (Africans, Arabs and other marginalized peoples) of the parasitic globalization movement that is now 500 years old on the one hand, and the beneficiaries of this, hitherto, unequal and, in the past, evil movement on the other," Museveni said.

Moving abruptly from trade to terrorism, Museveni said the world can learn from Africa about the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists. "Not a single plane was hijacked by African freedom fighters," he said.

In drawing what he said was the key distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters, Museveni said, "While a freedom fighter, sometimes, may be forced to use violence, he cannot use indiscriminate violence. The one who uses indiscriminate violence is a terrorist."

While condemning the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Museveni expressed support for groups he considers to be freedom fighters. "The just aspirations of the Palestinian peoples and of other oppressed peoples like the people of Southern Sudan must be supported so that we get peaceful resolutions of these conflicts." He also said that "Africa has always been the allies of the Palestinians."

Not everyone would agree that the Palestinians fall in the category of freedom fighters, however, as the Intifada has included numerous attacks on Israeli civilians.

Museveni closed by noting that African nations have recently been able to solve African conflicts through African mechanisms, such as in the cases of Lesotho and Burundi, and said this was a sign Africa is ready to become part of the "New World Order." This was a strange point, as some critics have asked why Museveni and President Paul Kagame met to iron out their differences in London last week, with a British government official, instead of through an African peace mechanism.