Here is the interview with Jose Bové. I think his demands are very reasonable:
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24605.shtml
Firstly, all countries should have the right to impose their own tariffs, to protect their own farming and food resources and maintain a balance between town and countryside. People have a fundamental right to produce the food they need in the area where they live. That means opposing the current relocation of American and European agribusiness—chicken and pig farms, and greenhouse vegetables—to countries with cheap labour and no environmental regulation. These firms don’t feed the local people: on the contrary, they destroy the local agriculture, forcing small peasant-farming families off the land, as in Brazil. Secondly, we have to take measures to end the multinationals’ dumping practice. It’s a well-established tactic used to sweep a local agriculture out of the way. They flood a country with very cheap, poor-quality produce, subsidized by massive handouts in export aid and other help from big financial interests. Then they raise prices again, once the small farmers have been destroyed. In sub-Saharan Africa, livestock herds have been halved as a result of the big European meat companies flooding in heavily subsidized frozen carcasses. The abolition of all export aid would be a first step towards fair trading. The world market would then reflect the real cost of production for the exporting countries.
Thirdly, we absolutely refuse the right of the multinationals to impose patents on living things. It’s bio-piracy, the grossest form of expropriation on the planet. Patents are supposed to protect a new invention or a new technique, not a natural resource. Here, it’s not even the technique but the products, the genetically modified seeds themselves, that are ‘patented’ by half-a-dozen chemical companies, violating farmers’ universally recognized right to gather seed for the next year’s harvest. The multinationals’ GM programme has also been a ferocious attack on biodiversity. For instance, something like 140,000 types of rice have been cultivated in Asia, over the centuries. They’ve been adapted to particular local tastes and growing conditions—long-grain, short-grain, variations in height, taste, texture, tolerance of humidity and temperatures, and so on. The food companies are working on five or six strains, genetically modified for intensive, low-labour cultivation, and imposing them in areas of traditional subsistence farming. In some Asian countries—the Philippines and China are the worst cases—these half-dozen varieties now cover two-thirds of rice-growing land.
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