07 FEB 02: THE DEMOLISHER
OF MCDONALD’S
ABOVE: French farmer
Jose Bove has some French bread, cheese and wine after he was freed from
the Villeneuve les Maguelonne jail in the south of France, Tuesday, September
7, 1999. Bove, leader of a radical farmers’ union, was jailed for nearly
three weeks for vandalizing McDonald’s restaurant property. The small Farmers’
Confederation has made McDonald’s the main target in a wave of sometimes
violent protests, decrying the fast-food chain as a symbol of American
trade “hegemony” and economic globalization.(AP Photo/Christophe Ena).
from New
Left Review 12, November-December 2001
JOSÉ BOVÉ
The demolisher of McDonalds
explains his personal background, the history of
the Peasants Confederation
in France, and the international objectives of Via
Campesina. Struggles in
the countryside of the Massif Central or Karnataka as
spear-points in the anti-globalization
movement.
You founded the Confédération
Paysanne in 1987. What is its project?
JOSE BOVE: Firstly, its
a defence of the interests of peasants as workers. Were
exploited, tooby the banks,
by the companies who buy our produce, by the firms
who sell us equipment, fertilizers,
seeds and animal feed. Secondly, its a
struggle against the whole
intensive-farming system. The goals of the
multinationals who run it
are minimum employment and maximum, export-oriented
productionwith no regard
for the environment or food quality. Take the
calf-rearing system. First
the young calf is separated from its mother. Then
its fed on milk thats
been machine-extracted, transported to a factory,
pasteurized, de-creamed,
dried, reconstituted, packaged and then, finally,
re-transported to the farmswith
huge subsidies from the EU to ensure that the
processed milk actually
works out cheaper than the stuff the calves could have
suckled for themselves.
Its this sort of economic and ecological madness,
together with the health
risks that intensive farming involves, that have given
the impetus to an alternative
approach.
…Were
committed
to developing forms of sustainable
agriculture, which respect the need for
environmental protection,
for healthy food, for labour rights. Any farmer can
join the Confédération
Paysanne. Its not limited to those using organic methods
or working a certain acreage.
You just have to adhere to the basic project.
There are around 40,000
members now. In the Chambres dAgriculture elections
this year we won 28 per
cent of the vote overalland much more in some
départements. It
was 44 per cent in Aveyron, and 46 per cent in La Manche.
How did this come to pit
you against the junk-food industrymost famously,
dismantling the McDonalds
in Millau?
During the eighties we built
up a big campaign in France against the pressures
on veal farmers to feed
growth hormones to their calves. There was a strong
boycott movement, and a
lot of publicity about the health risks. Successive
Ministers of Agriculture
were forced to impose restrictions, despite heavy
lobbying from the pharmaceutical
industry. At the end of the eighties the EU
banned their use in livestock-rearing,
but it has been wriggling about on the
question ever since. In
1996, the US submitted a complaint to the WTO about
Europes refusal to import
American hormone-treated beefexploiting the results
of a scientific conference,
organized by EU Commissioner Franz Fischler, that
had concluded, scandalously,
that five of the hormones were perfectly safe. But
there was so much popular
opposition, linked to peoples growing anxieties about
what was happening in the
food chainmad cow disease, Belgian chickens poisoned
with benzodioxin, salmonella
scares, GMOsthat the European Parliament actually
held firm. When the WTO
deadline expired in the summer of 1999, the US slapped a
retaliatory 100 per cent
surcharge on a long list of European productsRoquefort
cheese among them. This
was a huge question locallynot just for the sheeps
milk producers, but for
the whole Larzac region.
When
we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonalds in our
town, everyone understood
whythe symbolism was so strong. It was for proper
food against malbouffe,
agricultural workers against multinationals. The actual
structure was incredibly
flimsy. We piled the door-frames and partitions on to
our tractor trailers and
drove them through the town. The extreme Right and
other nationalists tried
to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast
majority understood it was
no such thing. It was a protest against a form of
food production that wants
to dominate the world. I saw the international
support for us building
up, after my arrest, watching TV in prison. Lots of
American farmers and environmentalists
sent in cheques.
…What were your demands
at Seattle?
Firstly, all countries should
have the right to impose their own tariffs, to
protect their own farming
and food resources and maintain a balance between town
and countryside. People
have a fundamental right to produce the food they need
in the area where they
live. That means opposing the current relocation of
American and European agribusinesschicken
and pig farms, and greenhouse
vegetablesto countries
with cheap labour and no environmental regulation. These
firms dont feed the local
people: on the contrary, they destroy the local
agriculture, forcing small
peasant-farming families off the land, as in Brazil.
Secondly, we have to take
measures to end the multinationals dumping practice.
Its a well-established
tactic used to sweep a local agriculture out of the way.
They flood a country with
very cheap, poor-quality produce, subsidized by
massive handouts in export
aid and other help from big financial interests. Then
they raise prices again,
once the small farmers have been destroyed. In
sub-Saharan Africa, livestock
herds have been halved as a result of the big
European meat companies
flooding in heavily subsidized frozen carcasses. The
abolition of all export
aid would be a first step towards fair trading. The
world market would then
reflect the real cost of production for the exporting
countries.
Thirdly,
we absolutely refuse the right of the multinationals to impose patents
on living things. Its bio-piracy,
the grossest form of expropriation on the
planet. Patents are supposed
to protect a new invention or a new technique, not
a natural resource. Here,
its not even the technique but the products, the
genetically modified seeds
themselves, that are patented by half-a-dozen
chemical companies, violating
farmers universally recognized right to gather
seed for the next years
harvest. The multinationals GM programme has also been
a ferocious attack on biodiversity.
For instance, something like 140,000 types
of rice have been cultivated
in Asia, over the centuries. Theyve been adapted
to particular local tastes
and growing conditionslong-grain, short-grain,
variations in height, taste,
texture, tolerance of humidity and temperatures,
and so on. The food companies
are working on five or six strains, genetically
modified for intensive,
low-labour cultivation, and imposing them in areas of
traditional subsistence
farming. In some Asian countriesthe Philippines and
China are the worst casesthese
half-dozen varieties now cover two-thirds of
rice-growing land.
…The
Marrakesh accords were supposed to be subject to a balance sheet at
Seattleof course, this
never came. Not that we need an official report to know
that the countries of the
South have been the biggest losers: opening their
borders has invited a direct
attack on the subsistence agriculture there. For
example, South Korea and
the Philippines used to be self-sufficient in rice
production. Now theyre
compelled to import lower-grade rice at a cheaper price
than the local crops, decimating
their own paddy production. India and Pakistan
are being forced to import
textile fibres, which is having a devastating effect
on small cotton farmers.
In Brazila major agricultural exportera growing
percentage of the population
is suffering from actual malnutrition. The
multinationals are taking
over, denying large numbers of farming families access
to the land and the possibility
of feeding themselves.
Arthur Magazine 