By Olivia Guigue
Jose
Jose Bove One morning in August 1999, in a small town on the Larzac Plateau in the southern center of France, Jose Bove, with a hundred farmers, began dismantling a McDonald’s restaurant still under construction. The local police and the media, notified by the militants, were there to state the facts and immortalize the leader, handcuffed, arrested for invasion of privacy. The demonstrators contested the decision of the World Trade Organization to validate punitive new American taxes on certain imports from Europe— namely the famous Roquefort, or ‘bleu’, cheese. The U.S. government had levied these new taxes in specific response to the refusal of the European Union to import hormone-treated beef from the United States. Since that arrest, which received a lot of coverage, Jose Bove became the whiskered icon of the anti-globalization farmers’ struggle, and against
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“la malbouffe,” or junk food, symbolized precisely by the mega-firm McDonald’s. Bove was incarcerated for several months and fined—a portion of which was paid by American farmers in solidarity against corporate agriculture. But under that handsome moustache, Jose Bove is actually a ’68-studentradical disguised as a farmer. A look at his education and militant career will help to explain where this man comes from and what his demands are. Jose Bove’s parents, dazzling researchers, were invited to the University of California at Berkeley. Born in 1953, Jose Bove was only 3 years old when he left for the United States. He was a fluent English speaker when he returned—which proved very useful, later, in his role of international representative. He registered in bilingual Catholic high school, yet simultaneously attended the Community of Lanza del Vasto, a European disciple of Ghandi who advocated a philosophy of nonviolent direct action. Apparently he resisted religious education, since he was expelled in 1968 at age 15, for defending drug use in a class essay. At the beginning of the ’70s, Jose Bove lived in Paris. As an active pacifist he campaigned against the war in Vietnam. At 17, he organized a screening of Peter Watkins’ film The War Game. In 1973, because of his refusal to answer a French military draft summons, a warrant was issued for Bove’s arrest. He goes underground, finding shelter at a farm in the Pyrenees near Spain. That same year he participated in a national meeting against the enlargement of a military base in Larzac. Jose Bove was among the few campaigners there who intervene to save François Mitterrand, a politician who had recently lost his bid for president, from attack by a violent group of Maoists in the crowd. Upon his election as President in 1981, Mitterand announces the cancellation of the military camp extension project, turning the projected base property over to area farmers. It was a victory for the Larzac, a famous stronghold of the extreme Left. As Jose Bove himself said, it was an “activist accident” that transformed him into a farmer. Concerned by the increasingly difficult plight of farmers, he participated in 1987 in the creation of the Confederation Paysanne—Farmers’ Confederation—of which he was then made one of five National Secretaries. This new syndicate sought to change agriculture in opposition to the modern agro-food industry, in the name of respecting consumers, farmers, and the environment. In 1995, Bove was the only Frenchman to participate in a Greenpeace operation against the resumption of French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean ordered by President Chirac. In 1999, Bove participated in the demonstrations against the WTO summit in Seattle. In January 2001, on the margin of the World Social Forum in Brazil, he mounted an antiGMO action against a subsidiary of Monsanto, accused of illegally produc-
VOLUME 15 ISSUE 1 SEPTEMBER 2006
Bove