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Say No To Lousy Food

Activist pacifist and farmers leader Jose Bove has been described as the Watt Tyler of Europe. In France he is compared to the Asterix cartoon character for his battles against globalisation. Raised in Berkeley California Jose Bove returned to his native France in 1968 to study at Bordeaux University. In 1975 he became an organic farmer breeding sheep in the hills behind Montpellier the region that produces Roquefort cheese. Since then Bove has become a figurehead for anti globalisation activists in France and is famous enough to have lunched with Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and been embraced by President Jacques Chirac. Bove first political campaign was against the French government in the 1970s when he and a few hundred other sheep farmers attempted to stop the Larzac region of France from becoming a military base. After ten years of almost daily battles with the police the group succeeded and Larzac became a National Park. In 1987 Bove helped to set up the Confederation Paysanne Peasant Confederation with the aim of fighting for the rights of small farmers against agricultural barons. In 1997 Bove began mounting protests against crops altered by biotechnology and in June 1999 destroyed 3 000 genetically modified...
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