Agence France Presse | August 6, 2003
Tens of thousands of anti-globalization activists are due in southern France on Friday for a three-day rally taking aim at the upcoming World Trade Organization talks in Mexico, organizers said.
Both local officials and festival organizers say the festive event on the bucolic Larzac plateau could draw between 50,000 and 100,000 participants, with militant farmer Jose Bove -- recently out of prison -- leading the charge.
"As opposed to a festival where people pay for tickets in advance, here everything will be free so we don't really know how many people are going to show up, but it looks like we'll have a great turnout," said Christine Thelen of "Building a World Together", an umbrella group of anti-globalization groups.
Organizers are hoping to match the attendance at a June 2000 rally, when 50,000 turned out during the trial of Bove and nine others for demolishing a half-built McDonald's franchise in the southern French town of Millau in 1999.
Bove, the emblematic hero of the anti-globalization movement, was granted conditional release on Saturday after serving a month in a prison in southern France for having destroyed genetically modified (GM) crops.
He was taken into custody on June 22 in a spectacular police raid on his home, a farmhouse on the Larzac plateau, to serve a sentence of 10 months, cut to six months by the traditional Bastille Day pardons meted out by President Jacques Chirac on July 14.
Dozens of discussion forums have been planned for the Larzac festival on topics like GM foods, the future of European agriculture and fair trade, all with a view toward the September WTO talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun.
"Proposals for change with respect to globalization in its current form should emerge from the Larzac meeting and ring out as a formidable warning shot aimed at alerting public opinion," organizers said.
Also on the agenda are more domestic issues like France's health care system and the status of performing arts workers, whose strikes over unemployment benefits led to the cancellation of many summer festivals across the country.
Singer-songwriter Manu Chao, a fixture on the anti-globalization circuit, is scheduled to entertain festival-goers on Saturday, along with British group Asian Dub Foundation.Agence France Presse:
