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March
20, 2001
Jose Bove
of Millau
A Farmer
for Our Time
The crowded courtroom
in the southern French town of Montpellier listened on February
9 to prosecutor Olivier Decout sweep through his peroration:
"One cannot systematically use violence against scientific
progress!" Outside, the police held back a thousand French
farmers who poured into the university town to rally for their
leader, Jose Bove, charged with fomenting an attack on a nearby
biotech research station belonging to a corporation called CIRAD.
The farmers,
belonging to the Confederation Paysanne, had taken crowbars and
sledgehammers to a CIRAD greenhouse, then pulled up and burned
a thousand genetically modified rice plants, simultaneously destroying
computer files holding the company's research data.
The action,
led by Bove, was one more in a series of attacks by French farmers
on genetically modified crops and fast food restaurants. In answer
to the prosecutor's accusation in Montpellier that he and his
companions were mere Luddites, Bove replied, "Why refuse
something which is presented as 'progress'? It's not because
of old-fashionedness, or regrets for the good old days. It's
because of concern for the future, and because of a will to have
a say in future developments. I'm not opposed to fundamental
research. I think it would be illusory and detrimental to want
to curb it. On the other hand, I don't think that every application
of research is necessarily desirable, at the human, social or
environmental level. And the only regret that I have now is that
I wasn't able to destroy more of it."
Bove now awaits
sentencing and three other actions in France alone. If there's
one organizer symbolizing the worldwide counterattack of peasants
and family farmers against corporate agriculture, copyrighted
bio-tech crops and global trading blocs organized by the big
capitalist powers, it's surely Bove.
Now 47, he
cut his teeth on insurgency in the famous student/worker uprisings
in France in 1968. In the 1970s he and his wife Alice led a successful
campaign to keep the French military from building missile silos
on the Larzac plateau where they had just moved to raise sheep
for milk for the area's famous Roquefort cheese. Bove speaks
fluent English. In fact, he spent four years of his youth in
Berkeley, where his parents, both biochemists, did research at
the University of California.
In 1987 the
Boves founded the Confederation of French Farmers, and in one
of the first of many brilliantly conceived publicity coups, the
farmers ploughed up a few acres of ground under the Eiffel tower
to protest an initiative of the EEC favoring corporate agriculture.
Later, while
many French radicals were patriotically defending French nuclear
tests in the South Pacific, Bove travelled in 1995 on Greenpeace's
Rainbow Warrior II to protest the tests, an act of some courage,
considering that back in 1985 the French secret service had exploded
a bomb on Rainbow Warrior I, killing a Portuguese photographer
called Fernando Pereira.
Bove didn't gain international
attention until August of 1999, when he and three of his compatriots,
armed with a tractor, pick axes and chainsaws, attacked and destroyed
a McDonald's under construction in his hometown of Millau. Bove
denounced McDonald's as purveyors of la malbouffe (bad beef).
He said that McDonald's was merely a symptom of a larger problem,
global corporations forcing genetically engineered or processed
foods down the throats of unwilling farmers and consumers. "The
WTO and the corporations are telling us what to eat." Bove
said. "In France, no one agrees with this."
Bove at a
biotech protest against Safeway in Washington, DC.
Almost overnight
Bove became a French hero, praised even by French president Lionel
Jospin, and touted in Le Monde as the new Vercingetorix, who
had repelled the alien invaders. In the US, the Wall Street Journal,
roused by this attack on one of the nation's leading exports,
lashed out at Bove as "a food terrorist". After knocking
down the McDonald's outlet Bove was arrested and refused to pay
his bail, which was then raised by American midwesterners in
the National Family Farm Coalition. The Coalition's president,
Bill Christison, flew to Millau to stand in solidarity with Bove
and two others on trial.
Quoting Lincoln,
Christison told the French court that "We testify on behalf
of our fellow farmers as they seek economic and social justice.
Corporate globalization, flawed agriculture and trade policy
are the real problems. These farmers made an effort to abide
by the law when looking for a solution but found there was no
other recourse."
There is a
question of how much cheese Bove has time to make. For the past
two years he's been on the road, in Seattle for the WTO protests
where he protested US tariffs on French Roquefort by smuggling
in rounds of the cheese, dispensing chunks to cops and demonstrators
alike in front on a downtown outlet of McDonalds. This last month
he was with an international coalition of peasant farmers called
Via Campesina, demonstrating at an anti-globalization forum in
Brazil, timed to coincide with the annual moot of the rich and
powerful in Davos, Switzerland.
While in Brazil
Bove and Christison were asked by the Landless Workers Movement
to accompany them in an attack on a test facility belonging to
Monsanto, where 1,300 farmers duly destroyed a thousand acres
of genetically engineered corn and soybeans. The peasants had
earlier forced the local governor to declare the province of
Rio Grande do Sul a biotech free zone but Monsanto secured an
exemption. If Monsanto returns, the peasants say, they'll put
the company's directors on a plane and send them back to the
United States.
The United
States is home turf to the world's mightiest corporate agribusiness,
as family farmers know all too well, having seen their average
income decline by 62 per cent since 1978, and have seen themselves
become little more than share croppers for the four or five companies
that now dominate US agriculture. Hence the support of Bove by
the National Family Farm Coalition.
"Our fight
is against globalization,", said Christison. "This
means domestic policies that support international deals that
are in the interests of corporate agribusiness. These policies
are created in board rooms of companies motivated by profit and
not the economic health of the farmer, the health of the consumer
or the vitality of the rural community. Globalization means policies
in the US that force our prices as low as possible by removing
an effective commodity loan rate or reserve. These policies force
the world price to levels that are unsustainable for farmers
around the globe."
After coming back to
France from Brazil (where he is now banned from returning), Bove
went right back to work - his political work, that is. He traveled
to Lille, in northern France, where he and four colleagues broke
into the local headquarters of the ruling party to protest lack
of support for small farmers. With them they brought a sow and
10 piglets, which they left behind in the party head's office
along with 20 bales of hay.
In the Montpellier
courtroom Bove wound up his speech from the dock thus: "Yes,
the action was illegal; but I lay claim to it because it was
legitimate. I don't demand clemency, but justice. Either we have
acted in everyone's interests and you will acquit us, or we have
shaken the establishment and in that case you will punish us.
There is no other issue."
[On March 16,
the French court found Bove guilty and then suspended his sentence.
Bove remained undaunted, calling the ruling ominous and vowing
to continue his crusade against industrial agriculture, biotech
and trade pacts that favor transnational corporations at the
expense of small farmers.] CP
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