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Activist
Review The World Is Not for Sale: Review by Bill Weinberg
But this time Bové was committing a different act of resistance: distributing Roquefort cheese he had smuggled into Seattle in violation of U.S. trade policy. The United States, following a WTO decision in its favor, had imposed prohibitive tariffs on Roquefort in retaliation for a European Union ban on U.S. beef treated with biotech hormones. As the merry protesters wolfed down the exotic contraband cheese, a phalanx of riot police appeared in Darth Vader-like full body armor. Although the “robocops” retreated before bashing any skulls, the event marked the first confrontation of the week when the media discovered the global movement against globalization. Bové, who tells his story and expounds his politics in this new book of interviews, is proud of his role at Seattle. “Our objective was to stop the extension of the WTO’s powers,” says the farmer-protester. “In this respect, Seattle was a real, not just a symbolic victory.” The World Is Not for Sale, a series of conversations with Bové and his comrade François Dufour, Secretary General of the French Farmers’ Confederation, illustrates how in the era of globalization, politics is now about culture, about everyday life. As the global market comes to dominate the most intimate spheres of life, opposition is coming from unexpected places—even, as activist commentator Naomi Klein puts it in her foreword, “French food snobbery.” The 1999 anti-McDonald's action at Millau was called by the Farmers’ Confederation and the local Union of Ewe’s Milk Producers. Bové insists it was not a “ransacking” (as early press accounts had it), but an “organized dismantling.” This is an important distinction, especially as the propaganda against “terrorism” becomes more potent following September’s mass murder in New York. Bové and Dufour emphasize the festival spirit of the Millau “dismantling” and contest the claim that there were a million francs worth of damage (it was no more than 30,000 or 40,000 francs, they say). Arrested as a ringleader, Bové refused bail until activists—first from across France, then from around the world—raised it for him, insisting he was more useful on the outside. Released after 19 days and catapulted to activist superstardom, he was hailed as a hero by French lemonade vendors who refused to sell Coca-Cola and by the United States’ National Family Farm Coalition and feted in Paris by the Committee for Citizens’ Control of the WTO. “It was then that our struggle … moved beyond a mere farming issue,” he says. “The stakes had shifted to encompass opposition to the WTO, union repression, junk food—in short, globalization—and had succeeded in bringing together thousands of different voices.” McDonald's was “merely a symbol of economic imperialism.” But it was a telling one at a time of much fear over food in Europe; there had been contaminated Coke and Belgian chickens poisoned by benzodioxin, and mad cow disease was decimating British beef sales. Says Dufour, “Town-dwellers understand that an attack on the countryside and the quality of its produce is an attack on the relationship between the farmer, his land and the consumer. It is precisely this relationship which is missing in produce affected by food scares.” Mad cow disease was the result of “breaking the laws of nature by making cows carnivorous”– actually, cannibals, eating the recycled dead of their own species, thereby allowing brain-destroying protein crystals to spread. “Eating habits, quality, gastronomy, cultural identity and social relations all depend on farming and define what we refer to as agriculture. It follows from this that the farmer’s fate is indissolubly linked to that of all other citizens.” While Dufour seems to come from a more traditional farming background, it’s no surprise that Bové is something of a back-to-the-lander. Thoreau is one of his favorite bedtime authors, and in his youth he was active in the movements for nuclear disarmament and against military conscription. Denied conscientious objector status in 1974, Bové refused the draft and hid out on a farm in the Pyrenees, where he learned to make butter and yogurt. When local farmers in the Larzac plateau (under the banner of “sheep not guns”) started squatting lands that had been bought by the army for expansion of a military base, the young Bové was with them. In 1976, he broke into La Cavalerie military camp and made off with documents on the army’s purchase of the land, serving three weeks in prison. He later joined farmers who occupied a firing range with their tractors. In 1981, the campaign was successful, and President François Mitterrand cancelled the extension of the base. Some 6,300 hectares were not bought back by their original owners and became public property, which the farmers worked collectively. While in this country “hippies” and their more conservative neighbors are too often pitted against each other, in France antiwar radicals and farmers saw their cultures merge. If Bové and his movement are guilty of “snobbery,” it is not that of bourgeois haute cuisine, but that of the wholesome peasant fare that haute cuisine has always drawn from (much as “classical” music is often drawn from folk melodies). Bové cites the book Petit manuel anti-McDo à l’usage des petits et des grands (The Little Anti-McDonald’s Handbook for Young and Old Alike) by Paul Aries (which is screaming to be translated into English): “All the burgers have the same make-up; fat is added so that the proportion of fat to lean meat is identical in each branch, ensuring that it can be cooked in the same way.… Taste doesn’t come into it: that’s the reason for all the pickles and sauces. It’s the same with their chicken meat, reformed into ‘nuggets.’” The global plague of bad food is a political issue for Bové. “The food industry,” he says, “regards the farmer as merely the supplier of raw commodities to meet the needs of food manufacturers rather than those of the consumer.” This critique extends beyond food, because everything ultimately comes back to what we eat. Laments Bové, “The art of cooking and eating together will soon not be passed on to new generations; this has resulted in a loss of family cohesion, and of the ties that bind us to the land or the place were we live. Similar points can be made about birth and death. Death is no longer confronted, and the dying are no longer welcome at home but are sent to nursing homes and hospices. In fact, our deaths, like our food, have become standardized. It’s the same with medical intervention at birth. Technology is stripping meaning from all of life’s activities.” The food industry places profit before nutrition, flavor and safety. Says Dufour, “The sole purpose of using growth hormones, natural or synthetic, in raising livestock is to maximize the yield from the animals. This is done regardless of the consequences for the health of the consumer, or the quality of the meat. The use of hormones is just another way of making food production artificial, against the natural rhythms and cycles of animal life.” Recombinant DNA technology represents an escalation of the industry’s control over farmers. Dufour calls the patenting of living organisms “one of the biggest swindles of the [20th] century.” Bio-tweaked plants are programmed not to produce reliable seed, forcing farmers back to the seed company each season and destroying self-sufficiency. This system favors the big farmers who can afford the new seeds and all the “inputs” (pesticides and chemical fertilizers) they are designed to produce with. This is one reason why in less than 40 years, the number of farmers in France has declined fivefold. Bové calls genetic modification a “technique of tyranny.” Bové says the Farmers’ Confederation draws on the example of the Spanish anarchist National Workers Confederation (known as the CNT), which reshaped industry and agriculture in Catalonia in 1936-37, “placing social considerations at the forefront when it comes to deciding how work should be organized.” This vision contrasts to the current system Dufour describes when he says, “Globalization is treating the planet as one vast commercial domain, where no rules or restrictions apply, and goods are exchanged with no heed for social, ethical or environmental values. It’s the hegemonic market, intent on devouring everything.” Global capital has become a “worldwide dictatorship” in Bové’s view. “There are two different views of society. One where the market, with its own rules, runs everything, and where all human activity (health, education, culture and so on) takes place with capital as the bottom line; the other where people and their political institutions … are at the forefront of society’s concerns.” But Bové also decries that others picked up the anti-globalization call from the French countryside in a way that “talked up the anti-American element, playing the ‘typically’ Gallic card, invoking ‘sovereignty’ in a way that fueled nationalism.” Bové rejects chauvinism as “a selfish, frightened and irrational response. [T]he globalization of trade must be counteracted on the same level…that is to say, on a world scale rather than on a narrow-minded nation-state basis. Nationalists worry about the mixing of races, whereas we welcome fair trade, cultural exchange and solidarity: we stand for a dignified and free life under real democracy.” Toward the book’s end, Bové does get a little misty-eyed over French patriotism. “The victory of the sans-culottes,” he says, “was appropriated by the stooges of the state, so that the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ painted on the façade of every town hall, has lost its meaning. It’s up to us, in the streets, to rehabilitate democracy from the grass roots, to take over the slogan and give it back its original meaning.” That’s what started to happen those November days in Seattle, in the land of bad hamburgers, hormone-laden cheese, flavorless tomatoes and overpriced cappuccino. Bill Weinberg is a journalist and the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000). |
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the prelude to the opening of November 1999’s cataclysmic World Trade
Organization summit in Seattle, a downtown McDonald's was besieged by
protestors led by one José Bové, a French sheep farmer turned global celebrity
activist. That August, Bové had led a bunch of farmers, and their families
and farm equipment to a McDonald's under construction in the village of
Millau, in the southern French province of Aveyron. The construction site
was effectively dismantled and hauled away. Owners of the surrounded Seattle
franchise feared the worst. 