The France of Jose Bove

For the moment the far right in France is defeated but social movements are not complacent; they know the mainstream left cannot provide a lasting antidote. In their practice if not yet in theory they present an alternative, truly internationalist challenge to corporate modernity. None more so than Jose Bove, the radical farmers leader. He explains his vision for sustainable, democratic agriculture, healthy, affordable food and a just sustainable society

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France has long been seen as one of the most centralised, state dominated countries in Europe. While true in many ways, this image hides the reality of strong social movements rooted in a lively civil society. For example, the movement to challenge global de-regulation is probably stronger in France than anywhere else in the developed world; moreover, it is organised around positive proposals for a global egalitarianism. ATTAC, the movement for the Tobin tax and much else besides, is one component of this (discussed in Red Pepper July 2001). So also is the farmers' union, Confederation Paysanne, one of the most radical forces around in France today and an affiliate of ATTAC. It is internationalist -- and its leader Jose Bove participated in the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, and was recently thrown out of the Occupied Territories for joining Arafat under siege; it is green, spearheading the campaign against GMOs and the patenting of life -- many of its activists are facing gaol for uprooting GMO crops. But first and foremost it is a trade union, a union of paysans -- small independent farmers, opposed to the industrialisation of agriculture and the huge economic, social and nutritional costs it incurs. Its particular skill has been finding issues and ways of campaigning which bring together all its concerns. It understands the crisis of French farming as a production of the way that international trade is organised. It has made resistance to the World Trade Organisation and building links with other peasant movements facing similar problems across the world, central to its priorities. In the process it has won the support of a social group -- small farmers -- who have traditionally been a base for reactionary politics.

Jose Bove is currently spokesperson for the Conf, as the union is known. I went to see him in the bustling Conf office in Batignoles, a suburb of Paris, to learn from a movement to which the left in Britain has paid too little attention. He is a charismatic individual with a distinctly Gallic moustache, and a pipe at the ready (unless he is in handcuffs which has happened on more than one occasion in recent years as a result of his political interventions). His charisma lies partly in the directness and warmth with which he relates to everyone.

"We had begun our struggle against globalisation in 1987 against the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) We were alone, no one else was interested -- even when we had a demonstration in Geneva in 1994 when the WTO was created we brought 10,000 people together, largely from the farming world. At the time few people related to this, to the consequences of globalisation. It was the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Agriculture) which started to make people think; but we were already thinking because we had seen the consequences for world agriculture. We had to take action because we were directly affected by the WTO's decision to condemn Europe for refusing to import beef subjected to hormone treatment, and the US imposed extra taxes on 60 French products, including Roquefort which we produced. It was completely legitimate for us to act locally to denounce a global logic -- which is at one and the same time that of the market, of the mode of production and of the standardisation of food. And it was in this context that we took up the concept of malbouffe [bad grub]".

The local action Bove was referring to was an action against a McDonald's being built in Millau, in Bove's home territory of the Aveyron. Some three hundred people -- men, women and children -- were involved in festive spirit in the middle of the holiday season. Having notified the prefet in advance, they proceeded to dismantle the McDonald's. Ten people were subsequently charged and Bove himself spent 19 days in gaol before being released amidst a growing wave of support.

It was an action utterly in keeping with the analysis developed by the Conf over the years. The core enemy for them is productivism, the farm as industrial factory, which Bove presents as encapsulating both an ideology of progress for its own sake, the presumption of an unchallengeable technological logic and the predominance of the market.

Bove set out the background for me: "When we led this fight in 1999 we were in the middle of an important health crisis. Already ten years into the mad cow issue, we also had dioxin in chickens, pollution of the water table, in other words the consequences of an economic model which endangered both the environment and public health. For the first time, it appeared that the WTO was putting health at risk. In condemning Europe for refusing to import beef with hormones, the WTO was saying that just because you have forbidden the use of hormones in animal-rearing doesn't mean you don't have to eat beef with hormones! The logic of the market means you have to allow imports of American beef with hormones."

What does this analysis mean for the Common Agricultural Policy? Bove argues that the reforms of the CAP in the nineties were directly related to the state of negotiations within the WTO, the CAP now being merely a way of camouflaging the WTO agreements at the European level. "We must clearly change the logic of the CAP which has been completely catastrophic these last ten years. Five million farmers have disappeared at the European level, 30,000 farms have disappeared in France, the nutritional quality of food has declined and the environment has been destroyed across Europe. We must rethink, starting from a critique of these developments."

Bove sets out the principles for such rethinking:

"The first principle is to have an agriculture that creates jobs, thus which stops the concentration of farmland. Second, an agriculture which turns out quality products: that is to say, we must change the model of production so that support for agriculture is support for a different form of agricultural production. Third, we need an agriculture whose output is controlled at the European level and very clearly we must end direct or indirect subsidies for exports, a policy which is destroying the agriculture of the South, especially with regard to milk products, cereals and meat."

The Conf stands for an "agriculture paysanne" which translates badly into English where the word peasant so often conveys contempt, even on the left. Yet pride in being a small farmer in France is high, even if battered of late; and the policy is an attempt to restore that pride and the conditions in which such an agriculture can flourish. A small farmers' agriculture, it is forcefully argued, is sustainable, environmentally aware, employment-creating, and allows others to follow on into the profession.

Bove chuckled when I asked how he responded to those who said we needed to export to feed the people of the South:

"I think that's one of the greatest economic lies. In reality, today's world production exceeds world needs. It's simply that the economic circuits, as they currently exist, either prevent people getting food or destroy their capacity to produce it in areas and populations which are amongst the most vulnerable. The problem of agriculture in the south is that it is being destroyed by "dumping", that is the export price is lower not just than the price of production in Europe but even than the cost of production in the South. This destroys the capacity of the farmers of the South to feed their own populations. And the rules of the WTO reinforce this logic by obliging every country to import 5% of each of the food items it consumes. Yet 93-94% of agricultural output worldwide is consumed where it is produced. Only 6-7% circulates worldwide. And all the economic rules are based on this 6-7%, which is destroying all the rest."

These principles have led the Conf into outright hostility to GMOs and to an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of modern scientific research. Of the budget of INRA (the French National Institute for Agricultural Research), "95%" points out Bove, "goes towards productivist agriculture, to a model of more and more intensive selection, always to the intensification of production". The logic of GMOs and of patenting is "very clearly to force farmers to have to buy their seed year by year and thus to be completely captive by the market. In other words we have a research system which is driven by the desire for profit with a marriage between the private and the public sectors. And through the issue of GMOs the whole nature of public research can be questioned; its goals, its organisation, how it works against the interests of the citizens, how, at one moment in time, a technology imposes a logic of domination."

How do these concerns for agriculture and its future relate to Bove's politics in general? The ideas which motivate him are, he says, simple and commonplace: "The objective is at one and the same time to struggle to safeguard the commonweal, that is to say water, air, the earth and biodiversity and to construct a world which would be based on rights, individual civil and political rights and collective social, economic and cultural rights. From there, once these rights have been acquired, people will organise themselves as they want. It's not my problem, it's not for me to determine; I have no vocation to tell the world that it ought to function in this way or in that because I believe the logic of an alternative based on a single model is a catastrophe, as we've seen over the last century."

I wondered how this related to conventional electoral and party politics. Bove was clear that politics today is "rootless", led by a political class which relates to itself and reproduces itself, draining politics of its real meaning. It's this that has led to the emergence of the social movement and citizens reappropriating the debate, which is no longer a debate among experts but is becoming educational, starting from lived experience in order to reconstruct relationships. The same phenomenon, argues Bove, underpins Le Pen's impact in the first round of the Presidential elections.

"We've had a succession of governments, right-wing and social-democrat, which have been linked to each other and have, in effect, an identical politics, completely neo-liberal, integrating more and more strongly into the neo-liberal way, whether with regard to how to construct Europe, the international agreements with the World Trade Organisation, the abandonment of public services at the recent European summit at Barcelona, stock exchange regulation, the sans-papiers (including asylum seekers), the homeless, the fact that 60% of farmers have a revenue lower than the minimum wage. All this has created an explosive situation. In the meantime, social unrest has developed very strongly in recent years, notably around the issue of globalisation and all this has played a very important role which has been totally ignored by the traditional parties."

It was this which led to a haemorrhaging of support for both the traditional left and right. It was the level of abstentions, political abstentions -- which allowed the National Front to come second.

And for Bove, the logic was immediately clear:

"We must block their way , on the streets and elsewhere. But saying that doesn't mean we must show allegiance to the traditional parties, simply that we must sweep away the risk."

Bove has written briefly elsewhere of an alternative in terms of "counter-powers and world government". I asked him to elaborate. "First, since the world is diverse, I'm in favour, in a pragmatic way , even in an ideal society, of multilateral institutions to organise relations between countries. You can even call states into question, but since we have them today we work with what we've got. Second, it's a question of the hierarchy of rights, starting with the fundamental rights of man which imposes its logic on other rights. At the same time new rights, the right to work, environmental rights, biodiversity rights -- all these are fundamental rights which give a coherence to the protection of the individual and at the same time, the protection of the planet. Following from this, if one organises exchanges, relations between countries, they must necessarily be inscribed within a respect for the ensemble of these rights. What we have today is the reverse logic, the logic of the market and of military domination. We must at one and the same time struggle for a global project with the logic of turning existing values on their head; but at the same time, pragmatically, make things develop within the framework of institutions like the UN, because that's all we've got."

Bove is aware of the argument that the movement against corporate globalisation could inadvertently feed into the far right. But he does not consider it a serious problem: "They can pick this or that bit of what we say and use it out of context. We can see by how they have reacted to us, whether the extreme Zionist right with regard to Palestine or the extreme right in France which has attacked us strongly over the years saying we're not real anti-globalists, that they can't effectively recuperate the challenge of the social movement".

The Conf's commitment to a practical internationalism is one factor which makes it impossible for the right to benefit from Bove's challenge to the present global market. It campaigns in support of the rights of indigenous people like the Chiapas in Mexico and the rights of the Palestinian people to land and political and economic self-determination, and it links the threat to such democratic rights to the logic of WTO-driven economic globalisation. Moreover the Conf, along with the Movement of Landless People in Brazil, has been one of the leading organisations in Via Campesina, the international movement of peasants and peasant farmers. But really the evidence for Bove's confidence lies in the fact that while historically the far right has benefited from the support of small farmers, in France they have a radical alternative on the left and Le Pen appeals to them in vain.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)