Published on Wednesday, June 28, 2000 by Agence France-Presse


Anti-Globalisation Groups Line Up For 'French Seattle'

PARIS - The trial Friday of farmworkers leader Jose Bove for
dismantling a McDonald's restaurant brings France into the front
line of a burgeoning international grass-roots movement opposed to
the mounting forces of globalisation.

Millau, the southern town on the river Tarn where the trial is to
be held, has already been dubbed "Seattle-on-the-Tarn" ahead of
the expected arrival of up to 50,000 Bove supporters protesting
against the variety of perceived ills symbolised by the double-arches
of the worldwide fast-food chain.

Bove and nine farmworker colleagues are charged with breaking into
a worksite at Millau last August and taking apart a McDonald's
restaurant then under construction.

Their action was targeted at what they see as the damage to the
rural economy represented by the fast-food culture, not to mention
the offence to French culinary traditions.

But Bove's Peasant Confederation and their numerous allies fit into
a developing trend in which the power of multinational corporations
and international bodies to govern people's lives is being challenged
at the grass-roots.

The scale of the protests provoked by globalisation of the world
economy was highlighted at last November's World Trade Organisation
summit in Seattle, where demonstrations by tens of thousands of
protestors contributed to the breakdown of top-level talks aimed
at establishing a millennium round of trade terms.

Since then, similar demonstrations have taken place in Washington
for the World Bank/IMF annual meeting in April, in London to mark
May Day on May 1, in Bangkok in February during a UN trade conference,
and in Geneva last weekend for a world summit on social development.

Though the number and nature of the groups involved have varied
from one protest to the next, the informal coalition pitted against
the power of corporate enterprise embraces trade unionists, religious
leaders, environmentalists, farmers, consumers, human and animal
rights activists, peace advocates, artists and anarchists.

Their strategies involve rallies, marches, prayer services,
alternative conferences, street theatre, boycotts, blockades and
counter-demonstrations of every kind.

Groups such as the Ruckus Society in the United States, Britain's
Reclaim the Streets, the Direct Action Network or People's Global
Action have all taken to the streets to make their various points.

In broad terms their argument is that increasing poverty, low wages,
cuts in social services, sweatshops, global warming, deforestation
and genetic engineering form part of a planetary system "based on
the exploitation of people and the planet" and that international
corporate finance is the primary villain.

French participation in the anti-globalisation movement has focused
on agriculture, the environment, nuclear waste and the threat to
French culture represented by the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment.

There is the same profusion of special-interest groups in France
as elsewhere, though few have taken to the streets to the same
extent as their British or US counterparts.

The best-known organisations are the 40,000-strong French Peasants
Confederation, of which Bove is a leading member, and ATTAC, a
broadly-based civic group militating for the introduction of a
"Tobin tax" on cross-border financial transactions, named after
the US Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin.

Several leading figures in the international anti-globalisation
movement will be heading for the south of France to lend their
support to Bove and his fellow defendants.

They include Lori Wallach, the US jurist who helped organise the
anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Susan George, the Franco-American
president of the Globalisation Observatory, Indian ecologist Vandana
Shiva, and the former European Union negotiator at GATT trade talks
Paul Tran Van Tinh.