French Farmer Now World Leader Against
Globalized, Industrialized Food

The New Asterix

Attacking McDonald's made French farmer José Bové a folk hero.
Now he is taking on other multinationals.

Wednesday, October 25, 2000 in the Times of London
by Charles Bremner

Slightly built and clad in jeans and an old V-neck sweater, the middle-aged
sheep farmer hardly cut a dash as we walked into a Chinese eatery in the
drab Paris suburb of Bagnolet. But he might have been a rock or football
star. A quick hush was followed by a buzz as the customers realised that
they had a celebrity in their midst: José Bové, the scourge of McDonald's
and national hero in the struggle to save the Gallic soul from fast food and
free trade.

Bové's choice of the local Chinese was a typical touch for a man who has
used a campaign for Roquefort, the quintessentially French cheese made
from his ewes' milk, to turn himself into a figurehead in the global "citizens'
movement" against the World Trade Organisation. Not surprisingly, he had
refused my suggestion to repair to the nearby branch of the company
whose mascot, Ronald McDonald, hangs lifesize from a noose in his Paris
office. A Big Mac would have been unthinkable for a man who has just been

The French still see McDonald's, which has some 800 booming outlets in the
sentenced to three months' jail for his celebrated assault last year on the "McDo"
restaurant under construction in his home town of Millau. country, as rather
exciting, if unpatriotic, Bové says as he tucks into his beef satay. "If you question
people coming out of one, they're embarrassed. It's like they've just been to a sex
shop. They say 'I just went to see what it was like and I won't be going back'."

With trademark pipe in hand, the moustachioed "Saint José" patiently
explains that his peasants' revolt has nothing against the Americans or the British,
even if hamburgers were his target and Gandhi his model for resistance against
the oppressor. "Our struggle is not with the American 'Great Satan' it's with the
multinationals. A lot of them happen to be American. I tell the Americans that
what we did in dismantling the McDonald's restaurant was what they did at
Boston when they threw the English tea into the sea."

As for the British, they may not know much about food, but he admires the
anti-GMO movement and is cultivating his ties with Scottish crofters and Welsh
hill farmers. And he does not really object to all those anglais who have invaded
southern France in their Volvos and Land Rovers."It's all right if they try to fit in
and get to know the farming people, even if it's just for the holidays. What's bad,
though, is the way they push up prices. The worst are the ghettoes of foreign-
owned houses all those Dutch who bring their holiday food with them in their
cars." In little over a year, the war against "McDomination" has shot this eloquent
paysan from the obscurity of his hill farm in the lower reaches of the Massif Central
to the status of icon. Thanks to his assault on the Millau McDo, plus a talent for
exuding plain-man's indignation, France has fallen in love with the charismatic Bové.
He is being hailed as a new Asterix, leading the plucky Gauls in defiance of the
new Romans. A sort of Lech Walesa of the Internet, he is fêted as he jets around
the world attending summits of the "new international", the "alternative global
network" hat embraces Third World activists, environmentalists and neo-hippies.

In France he gets up the nose of the national farmers' union; mainstream politicians
defer to him, admiring his style but privately deploring his Luddite counter-revolution.
A new figure emerged yesterday in the ranks of those who do not worship Bové:
his wife Alice. She denounced him in his own union magazine for running a macho
organisation, exploiting her and leaving her for another woman. Most French may
do their shopping in cut-price supermarkets, but more than 70 per cent of the public
back his campaign against la malbouffe the term that he invented which roughly
translates as "horrible nosh".

His admirers, known locally as bovistes, include the likes of Anita Roddick, the Body
Shop founder, and Ralph Nader, the veteran American campaigner who joined Bové
and the other militants of the citizens' movement in the protests that disrupted last
December's Seattle summit of the WTO. In July, after more than 40,000 people
descended on Millau to turn his trial into a Woodstock-style happening, there were
calls for him to stand for the presidency.Covered by US TV networks, the "Seattle-
on-the-Tarn" spectacular put Bové on the front page of the New York Times and led
an American magazine to list him as one of the 50 movers and shakers of Europe.

As unlikely as the soft-spoken 47-year-old seems as a glamour figure, it is not hard
to see what lies behind his rise to folk hero. The ingredients are good timing, passion,
showmanship and clumsy tactics by the Americans and the French authorities. With
his ruddy cheeks and blunt manner, Bové may look like the authentic paysan, but he
hardly hails from the backwoods of la France profonde. He was the son of left-wing
university teachers and he spent four years of his early childhood with them in Berkeley,
California. "I have strong memories of America," he says. "I really like the United States.
The language is still in my ears and it really helps to be able to explain things to the
Americans in English." Henry Thoreau, the 19th-century Utopian, is one of his heroes.

Bové opted for the country life when, along with Alice, his future wife, he dropped out
of the University of Bordeaux in the wake of the 1968 student revolt and joined the
back-to-the countryside movement. He spent a decade in the epic fight by leftist
militants and small farmers to wrest the Larzac plateau, overlooking Millau, from the
grips of the Ministry of Defence. He squatted in an empty farm and has stayed on the
land since, raising two daughters and becoming a voice in the Confédération Paysanne,
a radical movement opposed to big farm business.

Bové had already been given a suspended sentence for destroying genetically modified
crops when Washington decided last year to punish Europe, and France in particular,
for banning the import of US beef over the use of hormones. Incensed by a 100 per
cent duty slapped on Roquefort, Bové decided on "direct action" and descended with
a platoon of fellow farmers and local protesters on the Millau McDonald's after notifying
the police of his plans.

"The Americans took Roquefort hostage, so we had to act beyond the law to defend
ourselves," he says. The one-hour demolition job did not, however, meet the docile
response that the gendarmes usually accord French farmers when they smash things.
Bové was arrested and briefly jailed after refusing to pay bail, becoming a household
name for a country that always takes the side of the protester or the striker. His glory
was ensured when he made the news raising his manacled hands in defiance. The
Millau trial and unexpectedly harsh jail sentence, passed last month, has confirmed
his martyr's crown.

Bové says he brought about a "déclic" - a wake-up call - that touched something in the
French psyche as fears over BSE, GMOs and food safety were compounding
longstanding unease over the loss of French identity. "Hormones versus Roquefort.
You couldn't get a better contrast between local quality and globalisation," he says.
"It took small farmers to get people to make the link between farming, food and
international politics." "Le déclic could have happened anywhere, perhaps, but in
France more than anywhere one of the first concerns for the individual is to know
what's on their plates, and it's through the paysans that this has come about." Bové's
doctrine of "food sovereignty" - set out in a bestselling book - proved potent for an
intellectual world that was boiling against the "imperialism" of world trade and France's
socialist Government's supposed surrender to globalisation. He became the darling
of Le Monde Diplomatique and other bibles of left-wing thinkers. For ordinary people,
Bové spoke for the France of petits villages, red wine and honest paysans that inhabits
the Gallic imagination.

Decoding "Bovémania", Jean Viard, a leading sociologist, says that Bové, with his
"exemplary lifestyle" has established himself as "a bridge between the rural and urban
universe. In one man, he is 'we the French'." Not everyone is joining in the adulation.
René Riesel, a colleague who broke with the Confédération last year, says: "José Bové
is pure showman with all that circus he cultivates around anti-globalisation. The message
is too narrow. He spouts rubbish and collects slogans, and Les Bovistes are sometimes
extreme reactionaries."

The view seems to be shared by Alice Monier, Bové's wife, whose attack on him in
Campagnes Solidaires, the union monthly, knocked some of the gilt off his halo. In the
indignant tones of the wronged spouse, she proclaimed her "sadness and disgust" over
her husband's "union of machos". Despite spending years as Bové's unpaid assistant in
his campaigning, she did not receive a single phone call from his colleagues, not even a
Post-it note on the back of a circular" to support her when their marriage broke up last
June. "In other words, the old male tactic of cowardice," she says. Bové insists that he
is not setting himself up as a model, a political leader or a French nationalist. He applies
a steam-age label to himself, claiming the mantle of "anarcho-syndicalism". "We are a
counterpower and not a substitute for politics. We have no fixed answer for everything.

We are trying to stir a two-pronged movement, linking the land to globalisation, making
people think." In practice, this translates as a form of Utopian protectionism. For a start,
the WTO should be rebuilt as a democratic regulator of trade rather than an instrument of
"planetary dictatorship". "Taxes should be used to encourage farmers in all countries to
produce quality food. People should be educated to shun the industrialised malbouffe that
is impoverishing the rural world and destroying a healthy way of life.

"People don't object to paying for defence, but feeding the population properly is surely
more important than the atomic bomb."

He admits the contradiction, some might say hypocrisy, of a modern, high-tech France
that worships his creed while rushing for convenience food and devouring Hollywood films.
France, he insists, is less of a lost cause than such countries as America, because, outside
Paris at least, people remain attached to old values. "We have remained a culture where
the time spent at the table is not just for consuming food. It's a social and family moment.
There is a frightening statistic from America that the average time a family sits at the table
is six minutes. That hasn't happened here yet."

As he launches his second book in a year, Bové has, of course, a few contradictions of his
own. To the public, he is a humble paysan who spends time milking his beloved ewes on
the Larzac plateau and struggling with local farmers against injustice. In reality, he has
become a full-time personnage médiatique juggling TV appearances with near non-stop
travel to citizens' summits from the Americas to East Asia. Since January, he has managed
to spend only a summer month on the farm, which he runs with a group of friends. The
travelling might have to stop if the appeal court at Montpellier confirms his jail sentence at
a retrial in the New Year. Either way, the event is certain to produce another explosion of
Bovémania.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------