Millau, France—I write this on a plane from southern France, from the
trial of Jose Bove and his 9 colleagues who “deconstructed” a MacDonalds
last August. This is a first, rough, draft, but I want to get it out
while fresh. If anyone receiving this would like me to clean it up for
distribution or publication, please let me know.
There are several stories one might tell. One story is of the protest
and its consequences. Another story is, perhaps, of epochal proportions.
I first got involved with Jose three years ago when I was scouting
European food projects for US farm leaders to study. I stayed in his
village and helped him milk his 250 sheep (from which he makes his own
special cheese as well as selling some milk for the manufacture of
Roquefort).
I because fond of Jose for his political savvy, for the delightful
twinkle in his eyes, and for his inner force that draws people around him
toward common purpose. When he was arrested last summer, I raised $5,000
from lots of friends and colleagues to help with legal costs. Much of
the money came from US farmers, so the media story of our help was a
useful antidote to media inclinations for framing the story as a French
versus US farmer confrontation. After I sent out an email asking for
money, one farmer called me and said, “A few of us were standing around
our farm co-op this morning wishing we had some way to help those French
guys, and now we have your email we’re glad to send some money so we can
have some small part in this.”
The MacDonalds protest was a response to US taxes on French farm products
including Roquefort. These US taxes are retaliation for European refusal
to import hormone beef. The US retaliatory taxes were imposed after the
WTO ruled that Europe must import this US beef because of a lack of
“compelling scientific evidence” for the public health significance of
this “impediment to free trade.”
The French farmers chose MacDonalds as a symbolic representation of Mal
Bouffe, bad foodm which they link to the WTO, globalization, and
industrialization of agriculture.
The case of the 10 farmers arrested for the demonstration in Millau went
to trial June 30, with a final sentencing to be announced in September.
Because Jose has a prior record for struggles against the French military
and against genetically engineered crops, he faces many months in prison.
The trial was a spectacle, planned carefully by the left farm
organization Confederation Paysan. At least 50,000 people jammed into
Millau, a small town on the banks of the Tarn River, nestled between
majestic mountain bluffs. On one of these bluffs over the only entry
road from the south, large white letters, lit by floodlights, exclaimed
the slogan of the 2-day political festival, “La monde n’est pas une
merchandise.” The world is not merchandise. On the back of the event’s
T-shirt, this slogan is followed by “Moi non plus.” Me neither.
This slogan comes right from Jose, and one of the fascinations for me is
the political divergence between this slogan and the narrower program of
the Confederation Paysan (CP)which ran the demonstrations and which Jose
helped found in the 1980s. Jose still contributes momentum and
leadership to CP, but the organization seems constrained to a somewhat
narrow trade union mentality. The organizational line of these leftist
farmers, along with their much weaker partners in the US, is all about
income and justice, and fueled with a righteous passion: “We are the
salt-of-the-earth, exploited by multi-national corporations and their
allies the big industrial farmers. We deserve a higher income, and all
you consumers and citizens should join with us to change farm and trade
policies so we get this income. If you give us support we will of course
take better care of the environment and our communities.” The CP has a
political program to require higher prices to be paid farmers by the
companies that purchase farm commodities. The reasoning is tight, the
policy agenda well-constructed, and its political likelihood minimal.
My sense of minimal political likelihood of this agenda is not so much
because of its grandeur but because of its narrowness. Agriculture is on
a treadmill of production, captured by a system of technology, low-priced
commodity markets, and near monopoly control of mass markets. Only a
major shift will impact this system, a shift that might include
restrictions on corporate markets, payments to farmers for their
environmental and social “products,” removal of land values from
speculative markets, and major investments in high quality regional food.
Jose Bove knows that deep values must be tapped if there is to be a
political transformation. His speeches and interviews are not about the
price of milk or wheat. They are about a fundamental transformation in
our lives, a refusal of the seductive power of money. A refusal to be
bough6t and sold. A refusal to allow life to be dominated by markets.
Jose’s politics echo the 1968 slogan on the streets of Paris, “All power
to the imagination.” But Jose is a farmer, a leader of his local
Roquefort farmers association, and a leader of the 2nd largest farmers’
organization in France. Jose works hard every day, and he has a
political base in the place he lives—the austere but majestic Larzac, a
rocky plateau which appears barren at first acquaintance but which seeps
into your pores with its subtle beauty. The wind blows constantly, the
soil is rocky, the grass is sparse, but the rock buildings and walls are
laced with flowers, the fields bespeak tender care, and the landscape
rings with old metal bells hung from the necks of grazing sheep.
I diverge into this description because Jose can only be known as a
product of this landscape and its history. That history includes a
1970-1981 struggle to keep the French army from seizing 35,000 acres of
the Larzac from local farmers. Ever since the local farmers and their
supporters won this struggle, they have managed much of this land as a
community and they have created a more thriving rural economy than most
places of much easier possibilities.
Threee years ago when staying at Jose’s hamlet of Montredon I was told of
a farmers’ market on Wedenesday evening. Montredon has houses for 6 or 7
families and is a long way from towns of any size, so I assumed that this
market, on a weekday evening, would be small. I was surprised. Hundreds
of people shopped for vegetables, fruit, preserves, cheese, meat, wine,
ceramics and leather goods. After a while Jose and a couple of other
guys fired up a large barbecue and grilled people’s meat for them. We
all sat around eating and drinking, and then the music started. Later
came a small play. It was hard to distinguish producers from consumers
because this was a community.
The Larzac community was forged in common struggle in which farmers,
peace activists, left organizations, and back-to-the-landers joined
together and eventually grew together. Out of this community arise some
of the most visionary leaders of the French Green Party and other social
movements.
The Larzac is a hard place to make a living but many people have learned
to make a life there. A rich life with diverse interactions among people
and nature. It’s ironic that Roquefort, one of the most delicious
cheeses of the world, comes from this windswept rocky plateau. It’s not
ironic that Jose Bove can brilliantly compare the quality of his food,
culture, and community with the antiseptic arrogance of the US trade
policy and MacDonalds. It’s easy to see the injustice of taxing French
sheep farmers to force Europeans to accept US hormone beef. But this
fight is about a whole lot more than farmers caught in the cross-fire of
a tit-for-tat trade dispute. Jose picked MacDonalds as a symbolic target
because bad food is indeed symptomatic of the disconnects that afflict a
culture dominated by market exchange. Everything has become commodified,
even our time, our intelligence, the wa65ter we drink, our landscape.
Jose and his neighbors say no. No, we refuse. We insist on our value to
one another and the value of our land. We insist that these values not
be measured in dollars or francs. We insist that the WTO not be granted
the power to force us to eat food from factories. We insist that values
of community, culture, taste, work, and nature not be measured in
dollars. We insist on protecting our traditions from the economists who
would have us fill our homes with things produced wherever they can be
produced most “efficiently” or “cheaply.” The equations of market price
are just too narrow to allow ourselves and what we put in our mouths to
be measured by them.
Jose’s battle is not merely a battle of farmers. Jose’s battle is one of
people and the earth. Tracy Chapman once wrote a song with the line,
“All you have is your soul.” Now we have the makings of a political
alignment. The 50,000 people who came to the trial in Millau, following
on Seattle, represent a global search for meaning, a global need to live
in our hearts and bodies, grounded in the soil and sun, using our
intelligence to re-create modern society as respectful of us and our
sustenance.
“The world is not merchandise. Me neither.”
Hal Hamilton
Center for Sustainable Systems
P.O. Box 342, Hartland VT 05048 USA
Phone: (802) 436-2333
hhamilton@centerss.org
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