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New Left Review 12, November-December 2001
The demolisher of McDonald’s 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.
JOSÉ BOVÉ
A FARMERS’ INTERNATIONAL?
What was your formation as an activist in France—were you too young
to participate in 1968?
I was then in my first years of secondary school, outside Paris, but
of course I was affected by what was going on—the May events, the
discussions, the whole atmosphere. I didn’t do much, apart from an
occupation of the school football pitch. It was in the last years at
school that I started going on demonstrations. When I was 17 I got
involved in the struggle against military service—for the rights of
conscientious objectors and deserters. There was a network of groups
throughout France. We used to attend the military tribunals every
week to offer support for the boys doing military service—and for the
regular soldiers, put on trial for stealing or getting into conflict
with an officer. We collected all the statistics and publicized what
was really going on inside the army. In 1970, 71, I moved to Bordeaux
with my parents, just after the baccalauréat. I had been born there,
but my parents—agricultural researchers, who worked on the diseases
of fruit trees—moved round quite a lot. We spent a few years in
Berkeley when I was a child.
I could have gone to university in Bordeaux, but I wanted to work full-time with the
conscientious objectors. It was then, in the early 70s, that the peasants of the
Larzac plateau got in touch with us. The Army had decid
ed to expand the military base there—from 3,000 hectares to 17,000. The local farmers
asked for our support in setting up resistance groups. We built up a network of over
200 Larzac committees in France; there were some i
n Germany and Britain, too. All new construction on the plateau had been forbidden so,
in 1973, we started building a sheep barn there, right in the middle of the zone that
the Army had earmarked. Hundreds, even thousands
came to help—we called it a manifestation en dur: a concrete demonstration. We built
it completely in stone, in the traditional way. It took nearly two years. At the same
time, our network was in touch with a mountain fa
rmers’ group in the Pyrenees. We used to take military-service objectors to work up
there, on land that’s too steep and mountainous for machinery—everything has to be
done by hand. That was where I had my first experience
of dairy farming and cheese-making. Then, in the winter of 75–76, the Larzac farmers
decided we should squat the empty farms that the Army had bought up around the base. I
moved into Montredon, as a sheep farmer—with man
y close contacts in the region.
What were the main influences on you at that stage?
There were two strands. One was the libertarian thinking of the time—
anarcho-syndicalist ideas, in particular: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, the anarchists
of the Spanish Civil War. There were still a lot of Civil War ve
terans living in Bordeaux, and we used to have discussions with them. The other was
the example of people involved in non-violent action strategies: Luther King and the
civil rights movement in the States; César Chávez, t
he Mexican farm-worker who organized the Latino grape-pickers in California. There was
a strong Gandhian influence, too: the idea that you can’t change the world without
making changes in your own life; the attempt to int
egrate powerful symbolic actions into forms of mass struggle.
In much of Europe and the United States, there was a clear rupture between the
struggles of the sixties and seventies and those of today, with big defeats— Reagan,
Thatcher—lying in between. In the States, in particular,
there seems to be a new generation involved now in the anti-globalization protests. In
France, there has perhaps been less sense of a clear-cut defeat, but less generational
renewal, too?
The seventies were years of powerful militancy in France, coinciding with a political
situation in which there was a possibility of the Left parties taking office for the
first time. There was a lot of hope in 1981, when
Mitterrand was elected. The ebb came in the eighties. Some people argued, ‘We mustn’t
do anything that would damage the Socialists’. Others were disillusioned and quit
politics, saying: ‘We thought this would change thing
s, but nothing has changed’. They were the years of commercialization, of individual
solutions, when cash was all-important. We weren’t affected by that so much in the
peasants’ movement. On the Larzac plateau, after our
victory against the army in 81, we started organizing for self-management of the land,
bringing in young people to farm, taking up the question of Roquefort and intensive
farming, fighting for the rights of small producer
s, building up the trade-union networks that eventually came together in the
Confédération Paysanne. So for us, the eighties were very rich years. There was no
feeling of a downturn.
As for the young generation: it’s true that many of the campaigns of the nineties were
a bit drab. They made their point, but they did not draw many people in. It was the
emergence of another set of issues—the housing str
uggles of the homeless, the campaigns of the sans-papiers—that began to create new
forms of political activity, crystallizing in the anti-globalization movement of the
last few years. At the trial over dismantling the McD
onald’s in Millau in June 2000, we had over 100,000 supporters, lots of them young
people. Since then, in Nice, Prague, Genoa, there has been a real sense of a different
sort of consciousness. It comes from a more global
way of thinking about the world, where the old forms of struggle—in the workplace or
against the state—no longer carry the same weight. With the movement against a
monolithic world-economic system, people can once again s
ee the enemy more clearly. That had been a problem in the West. It’s been difficult
for people to grasp concretely what the new forms of alienation involve, in an economy
that has become completely autonomous from the pol
itical sphere. But at the same time—and this may be more specific to France—the
anti-globalization movement here has never cut itself off from other social forces.
We’ve always seen the struggle for the rights of immigran
ts and the excluded, the sans-papiers, the unemployed, the homeless, as part of the
struggle against neoliberalism. We couldn’t conceive of an anti-globalization movement
that didn’t fight for these rights at home.
You founded the Confédération Paysanne in 1987. What is its project?
Firstly, it’s a defence of the interests of peasants as workers. We’re exploited,
too—by the banks, by the companies who buy our produce, by the firms who sell us
equipment, fertilizers, seeds and animal feed. Secondly, i
t’s a struggle against the whole intensive-farming system. The goals of the
multinationals who run it are minimum employment and maximum, export-oriented
production—with no regard for the environment or food quality. Take
the calf-rearing system. First the young calf is separated from its mother. Then it’s
fed on milk that’s been machine- extracted, transported to a factory, pasteurized,
de-creamed, dried, reconstituted, packaged and then
, finally, re-transported to the farms—with 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. It’s this sort of economic a
nd ecological madness, together with the health risks that intensive farming involves,
that have given the impetus to an alternative approach.
The Right has always tried to control and exploit the farmers’ movement in Europe, in
accordance with its own conservative, religious aims. The agricultural policy of the
traditional Left was catastrophic, completely oppo
sed to the world of the peasants in whose name it spoke. We wanted to outline a
farming strategy—autonomous of the political parties—that expressed the farmers’ own
demands rather than instrumentalizing them for other end
s. We’re 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. It’s 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
d’Agriculture elections this year we won 28 per cent of the
vote overall—and 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 industry—most famously, dismantling
the McDonald’s 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. S
uccessive 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 wrig
gling about on the question ever since. In 1996, the US submitted a complaint to the
WTO about Europe’s refusal to import American hormone- treated beef—exploiting the
results of a scientific conference, organized by EU C
ommissioner Franz Fischler, that had concluded, scandalously, that five of the
hormones were perfectly safe. But there was so much popular opposition, linked to
people’s growing anxieties about what was happening in the f
ood chain—mad cow disease, Belgian chickens poisoned with benzodioxin, salmonella
scares, GMOs—that the European Parliament actually held firm. When the WTO deadline
expired in the summer of 1999, the US slapped a retalia
tory 100 per cent surcharge on a long list of European products—Roquefort cheese among
them. This was a huge question locally—not just for the sheep’s milk producers, but
for the whole Larzac region.
When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald’s in our town,
everyone understood why—the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against
malbouffe, agricultural workers against multinational
s. 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-Am
ericanism, 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, w
atching TV in prison. Lots of American farmers and environmentalists sent in cheques.
How have you coordinated international solidarity with peasants and farmers in other
lands?
>From the early eighties, we started thinking about organizing on a European level. We
>felt we shouldn’t stay on our own in France when there were other farmers’ networks
>in Switzerland, Austria, Germany. We needed a commo
n structure in the face of European agricultural policy, which is completely dominated
by the interests of agribusiness. That was why we decided to set up the Coordination
Paysanne Européenne, with its office in Brussels.
It was through this movement that we got in contact with peasants’ groups in other
continents. It was about ten years ago that the idea of setting up an international
structure was born. This was Via Campesina. There are
many different peasants’ organizations involved: the Karnataka State Farmers’
Association from South India, which has played a big role in militant direct-action
campaigns against GM seeds—they represent some 10 million
farmers; the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil, who lead land occupations by peasant
families, and have an important social and educational programme. There are regional
networks in every continent, organizing around their ow
n objectives—Europe, North America, Central and South America, Asia and Africa. And
then there is an overall coordinating executive which is based in Honduras at the
moment, but will be moving to Asia next year.
You went to Seattle with Via Campesina. What was your critique of the WTO?
It was a big victory for agribusiness when food and agriculture were brought into the
GATT process in 1986: a huge step towards regulating agricultural trade and production
along neoliberal lines. Countries were no longer
free to adopt their own food policies. They were obliged to lower tariffs and take a
percentage of imports—which means, effectively, US and EU products: 80 per cent of
world food exports come from these two. The process
was taken further with the 1994 Marrakesh agreement that set up the WTO. Now a state
can only refuse to import agricultural or food produce on the grounds of protecting
the health of its population and livestock. The thre
at to these is determined by the Codex Alimentarius, which is in turn run by the food
giants: 60 per cent of its delegates are from the EU and US.
The Marrakesh accords were supposed to be subject to a balance sheet at Seattle—of
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 they’re compelled to import lower-grade ric
e 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 Brazil—a maj
or agricultural exporter—a 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 o
f feeding themselves.
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 agribusiness— chicken and pig farms, and
greenhouse vegetables—to countries with cheap labour and no environ
mental regulation. These firms don’t 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. It’s 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 comp
anies 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 countrie
s.
Thirdly, we absolutely refuse the right of the multinationals to impose patents on
living things. It’s 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, it’s not even the technique but the
products, the genetically modified seeds themselves, that are ‘patented’ by
half-a-dozen chemical companies, violating farmers’ universally rec
ognized right to gather seed for the next year’s 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. They’ve been adapted to particular local tastes and growing
conditions—long-grain, short-grain, variations in height, taste, texture, tolerance of
humidity and temperatures, and so on. The food compan
ies 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 countries—the Philippines and China are the
worst cases— these half-dozen varieties now cover two-thirds of rice-growing land.
What would be your alternative to the WTO?
We’ve argued for an International Trade Tribunal—in parallel to the International
Court of Human Rights—with a Charter, and judges nominated by the UN. There should be
transparency of action, and private individuals, grou
ps and trade unions should be able to bring cases, as well as states. The Tribunal
would play a constitutional role, advising on whether international economic accords
should be ratified: they would have to concur with th
e individual and collective rights to which UN members are signatories—the right to
food, to shelter, to work, education, health. These rights need to be imposed upon the
market; they should be respected not just by state
s but by economic institutions. It’s a similar process to that of the Kyoto accords on
the environment.
Kyoto surely doesn’t offer a very powerful precedent?
I agree. But these things take time. The call for an International War Crimes Tribunal
has now been ratified by 30 or 40 countries, although it’s taken almost four decades.
But it’s essential to ask what structures we do
want, for multilateral trade. We have to develop a long-term global vision, without
being naïve. That will require a certain balance of forces.
Others in Via Campesina—the MST, for instance—have called for the abolition of the
WTO, rather than its reform. Are the experiences of North and South at odds here?
‘Food out of the WTO’ is Via Campesina’s demand. We’re all agreed on the three main
points—food sovereignty, food safety, patenting. For the people of the South, food
sovereignty means the right to protect themselves agai
nst imports. For us, it means fighting against export aid and against intensive
farming. There’s no contradiction there at all. We can stage an action in one part of
the world without in any way jeopardizing the interests
of the peasants elsewhere, whether it’s uprooting genetically modified soya plants
with the Landless Movement in Brazil, as we did last January, or demonstrating with
the Indian farmers in Bangalore, or pulling up GM ric
e with them when they came to France, or protesting with the peasants and the
Zapatistas in Mexico—effectively, our demands are the same. Of course there are
different points of view in Via Campesina—it’s the exchange of
opinions and experiences that makes it such a fantastic network for training and
debate. It’s a real farmers’ International, a living example of a new relationship
between North and South.
Shouldn’t the anti-globalization movement oppose globalized forms of military
power—NATO, for example, as well as the WTO?
That’s more complicated. It’s not to say that one shouldn’t fight against NATO. But
behind the military conflict there is often a far more cunning and destructive form of
economic colonization going on, through the progra
mmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank—opening regions up to the multinationals,
dismantling public services, privatizing utilities. In Sarajevo in the mid-nineties,
for instance, there were people in the French military
contingent who weren’t officers at all but representatives of the multinational,
Vivendi—originally Eaux de France. They spent their whole time studying the water
mains and the infrastructure. When the fighting was over,
they were on the spot to offer their services in reconstructing Bosnia’s utilities.
Today, it’s Vivendi that runs Sarajevo’s water system, as a private service. It’s a
form of economic domination that we’re seeing through
out Latin America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
We do need to denounce the role of the sole military superpower as world policeman.
But its economic dominance is more important. There tend to be anti-war protests
against particular conflicts, rather than around militar
ism as such. There was quite a big mobilization in France against the Gulf War,
although it wasn’t easy since it was a Socialist government that was prosecuting the
War. But the way the West struck simply in order to cont
rol the oil was so brazen that it did generate real protest. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the
situation was much more ambiguous. There was a lot of debate inside the movement
between those who opposed the NATO intervention and o
thers who said, quite rightly, that Miloševic’s regime was a rotten, red- brown
affair—the old Stalinism in Serb national dress. And people had known what was going
on in Kosovo for years. There was a lot of discussion as
to what form resistance and solidarity should take. But for me, there can never be a
good war. As soon as you reach that stage, it is inevitably the people who lose. I was
against both forms of military intervention, as
I oppose the American bombardment of Afghanistan.
What is your attitude to the anti-globalization ‘republicanism’ of Chevènement, which
has had its reflections in Left thinking elsewhere: Benn in Britain, for example?
I had a public debate with Chevènement on French radio when I was at the
anti-globalization conference at Porto Alegre last January. It came down to an
opposition of two completely different points of view. Chevènement th
inks that the borders of the nation-state can serve as a rampart against
globalization. I believe that’s an illusion. Multinational corporations, multilateral
accords on investment, free-trade rules operate on quite anoth
er level, over and above national frontiers. To say one can have a strong state makes
no sense in this context. It just gives people the mirage of a satisfactory form of
protection. As Interior Minister, Chevènement was r
esponsible for implementing the most restrictive immigration policies, abrogating the
basic human right to freedom of movement. Closing the frontiers does nothing to
resolve the fundamental issue at stake in immigration—t
he inequality between North and South.
Surely the one state whose power hasn’t lessened in the face of these multilateral
accords is the USA?
Of course the US completely dominates the IMF and the World Bank, and its will is
hegemonic within the Security Council. But the US government, in turn, is just a tool
of the big companies. Its political function is simpl
y to relay the economic interests of the major firms—which is why, in the last
elections, many people didn’t see any choice between Bush and Gore. Ralph Nader’s
campaign highlighted the real nature of American politics. C
andidates are effectively elected to be the representatives of financial or industrial
groups. The system is entirely at the service of economic interests, which retain the
real power. One can see this happening in detail
ed ways at the level of the federal administration: the power of the multinationals
imposes itself directly on the running of the machine. The US state functions as a
motor of support for them, institutionally and ideolog
ically. But neoliberalism is not just an American preserve. It goes right across the
board—Europe or America, governments of the Right or Social Democrats. In their
negotiations with the WTO, there has been no difference
between the current EU commissioner for trade—Pascal Lamy, a member of the French
Socialist Party—and his predecessor Leon Brittain, a British Conservative. The same
thinking— la pensée unique—really is hegemonic everywhe
re today. It’s not just la pensée américaine. We need to pay attention to its
proponents within our own countries, rather than see only the Stars and Stripes.
Jospin came to power promising a more radical agenda than either Blair or
Schroeder—what’s the balance sheet?
There is scarcely any difference between the economic programmes of the Right and
Left—if one can call the Socialist Party that. For example, there’s been no attempt at
a genuine reduction of the working week, just a seri
es of negotiations within each sector. They’re trying to take a middle path. They
could have gone much further. Now, with their eyes on next year’s elections, the PS
have been trying to recover votes on the Left by making
a show of interest in the autonomous movements. But it’s just at the level of talk.
They’re doing nothing about the movements’ programmes at the level of policy. At the
WTO talks in Doha the French government will be rig
ht behind the EU positions. The main question in the legislative and presidential
elections next spring will be the percentage of abstentions. A lot of people have been
very disappointed in the policies of the Union of th
e Left—and they don’t necessarily recognize themselves in the hard-left candidates,
who will get a few votes in the first round. Chirac and Jospin offer no real choice
between alternatives. Their vision of society is the
same. We’re moving increasingly towards a situation where economic logic is stronger
than any political will. Party leaders simply adjust to the prevailing wind. The
Confédération Paysanne is not calling for a vote for an
y of the parties. I myself wonder whether one should vote at all.
There has been talk of your standing in the presidential election yourself?
Never. That’s not my role. In fact, it’s a condition of membership of the
Confédération Paysanne that you cannot stand in an election. Curiously enough, the
first person who said I was thinking of standing in the presiden
tials was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, just after Seattle. A few days later the Socialist Party
repeated it—as if the aim was to break the social movement by saying: they do all this
just to serve as a trampoline towards a politic
al party, or to enter office. As if one couldn’t have an autonomous movement with a
logic of its own, acting as an oppositional force outside the established political
domain. I would never see it as my role to act like t
he leader of a political party, as a professional representative who takes
responsibility out of other people’s hands. The aim of a social movement or a union
like ours is to enable people to act for themselves. The econo
my has become an autonomous sphere today, imposing laws of its own. If we are going to
create a new politics we have to understand this.
You went to the Israeli-occupied territories this summer, to demonstrate with the
Palestinian farmers. What did you learn about the situation there?
First of all, I experienced the reality of the Israeli military occupation of
Palestine—that it really is a war of colonization. They’re trying to impose an
apartheid system on both the occupied territories and the Arab p
opulation in the rest of Israel. They are also putting in place—with the support of
the World Bank—a series of neoliberal measures intended to integrate the Middle East
into globalized production circuits, through the exp
loitation of cheap Palestinian labour. Along the frontier with the occupied
territories, they’re setting up the same sort of enterprise system you see along the
Mexican–US border. So there is a very acute economic dimensi
on to the conflict. The UN resolutions need to be implemented. But there also needs to
be a radical reorientation at the economic level, that would offer a viable future to
the Palestinians.
The financial press has been triumphantly announcing that September 11 has put paid to
the anti-globalization movement. What is your assessment—did the terrorist attacks in
the US ‘change everything’?
Underneath, nothing has changed. The world situation remains the same. The
institutions are unchanged. And the anti-globalization movements, too, are still here.
With the bombardment of Afghanistan, we are seeing the dome
stic propaganda needs of the United States being elevated to war aims, inflicting
revenge on an innocent people already suffering miseries of deprivation, while
threatening further destabilization in that part of the worl
d. There is also no doubt that the US wants access to oil wells outside the control of
OPEC, and may have its eye on reserves in the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia. The
position of the Confédération Paysanne has been
: ‘No to Taliban, No to Terrorism, No to War’.
We also see a new awareness, born of the economic crisis, of the need for regulation
and public intervention. In that sense, the logic of globalization is more on the
defensive now. The critique of neoliberalism that we h
ave been developing over the last years is more valid than ever after September 11.
But the response of most of the states who’ve signed up for what they call the ‘war
against terrorism’ is to call for an expansion of neo
liberal policies, as if that could resolve the inequalities between different
countries, or social layers. They have understood nothing. September 11 should have
been a chance to take stock of the sort of social and ideol
ogical costs this regime has been exacting, and to call for its radical reform.
Instead, they are seeking to reinforce their global domination, escalating the dangers
of wider international conflict. As neoliberalism incr
eases the balance of misery in the world, it just augments the numbers of those
desperate enough to throw themselves into fanatical, suicidal attacks against it.
Previous texts in this series have been Naomi Klein, ‘Reclaiming the Commons’ (NLR 9),
Subcomandante Marcos, ‘The Punch Card and the Hour Glass’ (NLR 9) and John Sellers,
‘Raising a Ruckus’ (NLR 10).
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always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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