Veteran campaigner finds parallels with 70s protest

By ALEX DUVAL SMITH in Paris

Thirty years after a bunch of hippies brought flower power to bear on a plan for a military camp in southern France, 150,000 ecologists and campaigners against global trade rules returned to the site over the weekend for a festival aimed at putting the world to rights. The militant farmers' leader, Jose Bove, who was at Larzac then, was there again.

"There are parallels with 1973," said Bove, spokesman of Confederation Paysanne, a small-scale farmers' union that hopes the weekend's "festival of parties and debates" will rally public opinion ahead of next month's meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Cancun, Mexico.

"Then, workers and peasants realised they had to fight together. Today, the situation is the same. Last spring, French people began demonstrating in support of their right to pensions and a good education. They realised that they were defending sectors that were under threat from a global sell-off. We are all fighting the same battle," he said in his opening speech.

The address was to have been printed out and circulated at the festival because Bove expected to be in prison. He was jailed in June for damaging genetically modified crops, but this month he was freed by a judge in Montpellier, who cut his six-month sentence to community service.

The Larzac festival took place on a 100ha plateau in the Aveyron, not far from the village where 58-year-old Bove and his wife breed ewes whose milk makes Roquefort cheese. The couple - stragglers from a hippie commune - settled there after winning a long battle with the military.

At the festival, debates on issues such as equitable trade and genetically modified crops were led by altermondistes ("other-worldists"), including Lori Wallach of the US group Public Citizen; Evo Morales, a Bolivian MP, and Francois Dufour, of the French anti-globalisation group Attac.

French left-wing parties shared a stand at the festival but Bove said none of them had been specifically invited. "What worries me [about the left]," he said, "is that, in 1999, Lionel Jospin [then the Socialist Prime Minister] did not have the courage to say no to the Seattle negotiations [on world trade].

"The left needs to be clear," said the farmers' leader. "Are they in favour of this neo-liberal globalisation or do they believe that it should be slowed down?"

The WTO talks in Cancun next month will focus on plans to liberalise trade in agricultural and industrial goods through reduced customs levies, and on access to drugs in poor countries.

- INDEPENDENT