Chicago Tribune
JOSE BOVE SAYS HIS VANDALISM OF A MCDONALD'S IN FRANCE WAS A SYMBOLIC ACT AGAINST MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS.
By Ameet Sachdev, Tribune Staff Writer.
Jose Bove is the most talked about sheep farmer in all of France.
He once defended farmland in the south of France against the expansion of a French military base. He has traveled to Tahiti to protest his government's testing of nuclear missiles in the South Pacific. He has destroyed a field of genetically modified corn.
But one recent act of defiance stands apart in a lifetime filled with provocative behavior because he attacked an icon of Americana: McDonald's.
Last year, Bove and a small group of farmers trashed a McDonald's restaurant that was under construction in the quiet little town of Millau, near his stone farmhouse. Bove insists he is not anti-American. The stunt, Bove explains, was a symbolic act against multinational corporations and what he calls the standardization of food.
"When you walk into McDonald's in France, you eat the same thing as you would at a McDonald's in China, Africa and the rest of Europe," Bove said in an interview last week at O'Hare International Airport while on his way to an agricultural conference in Wisconsin.
Since the attack, the vandal has become a national hero. Thousands turned out at his trial in June, some carrying signs that read "Bove!" or "McDo Dehors!"--McDonald's Get Out! The French press has hailed him as a French David taking on an American Goliath. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin invited him to dinner.
On Wednesday, he returns to court to learn his sentence. He faces charges that could result in a fine of as much as $70,000 and up to five years in jail. But it is considered unlikely that he or any of his nine co-defendants will serve any jail time for the vandalism, which resulted in $110,000 worth of damage.
For its part, McDonald's says it has been unfairly targeted as a symbol of corporate globalization. "Eighty percent of our restaurants are owned and operated by individual entrepreneurs," said company spokesman Walt Riker. "We are neighborhood restaurants."
He added that McDonald's has nothing to do with the criminal proceedings. The local owner of the restaurant and the French division of the Oak Brook-based fast-food chain dropped their charges against Bove and the other farmers.
Bove is confident he will not serve any time. "They will be crazy if they put me in jail again," he said.
Indeed, he has become the face of the anti-globalization movement--a cause that seems to be gaining more supporters since the protests at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle late last year. In Australia earlier this week, 10,000 demonstrators blocked delegates from entering the World Economic Forum's three-day Asia-Pacific Economic Summit.
"Bove has communication skills that help him take arcane complicated trade issues and make them motivating and passionate," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, who testified on Bove's behalf at his trial. "That has been key to activists around the world."
Bove now travels around the world when he is not tending to his flock. Bove led some of the demonstrations in Seattle and later at a trade meeting in Switzerland. This past weekend he was part of a panel discussion at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Food is a topic dear to Bove's heart. He has been milking sheep to make Roquefort cheese for the past 25 years. The 47-year-old Bove has the tanned, weathered look of a peasant farmer. He sports a handlebar mustache and often has a pipe in his mouth. Born in Bordeaux, he learned English while spending three years of his early childhood in California while his parents, both biochemists, conducted research at Berkeley.
But this cowpoke image belies his activist nature. Bove heads the Confederation Paysanne, a union of French farmers. He says an idol is Henry David Thoreau, the 19th Century American social critic.
Bove and his cohorts took a tractor, pickaxes and power saws to the local McDonald's in August 1999, shortly after the WTO approved an increase in U.S. taxes against French delicacies such as Roquefort cheese in retaliation for Europe's decision to ban imports of hormone-treated American beef.
The stunt landed Bove in jail. He refused to pay bail for three weeks in protest. Supporters, many of them American farmers, raised the money to free him.
The protest turned into more than just a defense of small farmers against international trade rules crafted by bureaucrats. Bove used McDonald's to symbolize the growing threat to French identity from the American-led global economy.
"The WTO is telling us what we have to eat," Bove said. "In France, nobody agrees with this."
The message struck a chord with the French public, whose culture is defined largely by its food. French cuisine is something to be savored, while the best-known American food, fast food, is picked up at a drive-through window.
Bove became known as the "Robin Hood of Roquefort."
While supporting Bove, the French still flock to the Golden Arches. McDonald's restaurants in France serve 1 million people a day, a company spokesman said.
That's enough evidence to some international trade observers that the anti-globalization effort only goes so far.
"No one obliges Frenchmen to go to McDonald's," said Robert Z. Aliber, professor of international economics and finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Bove himself uses a symbol of globalization: a Nokia cell phone. But for Bove the phone is just an instrument, not a cultural threat.
"It's one of the tools we use to fight," he said.:
