20th anniversary of José Bové’s 'attack' on a McDonald's in rural France
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But overall, all his fight, kind of as what the twitter thread says, where against globalization (in the food industry) and in some way for protectionism within France / EU. I know a lot of people consider protectionism a bad thing, but a free market only works when the different actor have roughly the same power. It was (and it still is) not the case, as US had the power to make other actor accept their term and their product, which was heavily damaging the local farmer.
I'm all for GMO as its the only way we realistically have a chance to feed all these damn children people keep having.
This is nothing new and a known consequence of globalization. Especially when their is no/low tariff and cheap transportation, as is the case within the EU.
This mean that, either you let some industry die off and rely entirely on importation (which we did for a lot of manufacturing where everything is know produce in mostly Asian country) or you heavily subsidized it to keep it alive.
In the case of agriculture, France heavily subsidized it to keep it alive as it is considered a strategical industry. It is a huge sink hole for France, and as far as I know for the EU. I don't know if they really profit from it financially speaking, but they do need it for soft power and to not being subject of more influence from other country.
Overall, their is probably some hypocrisy about globalization within farmer. But isn't it also a natural human behavior ? We tend to scream about injustice unless this injustice profit us.
I am no economist but I think that the low cost of transport is one of the factors that could be somehow influenced. We keep trucking stuff thousands of kilometers whereas it could grow and be processed just next-door.
Worked wonders for China though, lifting them from abject poverty to an industrial powerhouse.
This feels like an exaggerated trope to me.
There's certainly some concept of resentment of the US around the globe. Having traveled to a decent number of places and lived outside the US, however, I can't say that it's a significant amount among countries that the US makes some effort to maintain a cordial relationship with.
A trade war involving tariffs and food regulations is still rather minor in the grand scheme of diplomacy and conflict.
To challenge your made-up statistic, I'd bet that isn't even true of Americans if they were offered a choice and a work permit for France.
Not trying to trash them or start a flamewar. The French people and government do have a reputation in the Anglo world, probably equally as much as the US does in Europe. The country-side and cities are very nice there no doubt.
I'm not from the US so depending on the relations at the time it might be a different experience. I assume when they were trashed in US media for not joining the Iraq war I there were at least some resentment against US tourists.
And that does not seem to be an isolate event : I can read weekly horror stories in Hacker News about health bills in the U.S.
https://www.nationalityindex.com/
However, as a place to live it would probably be far less clear for most people.
The US does this because: 1. National security (US farmers wouldn't grow stuff if nobody bought it, which is a problem if the US ever goes to war. Then, they might suddenly need it.) 2. Vote banks (Rural US happens to be the key in deciding elections and support for laws. Due to the electoral college and each state having 2 senators.) 3. Ideology (The reasons you mentioned. Free market ...)
I understand that a global agricultural market with a single norm would be better for mercantile exchanges, but for the single producer EU (or China, or whatever) is a sufficiently big market to be targeted exclusively if they want. OMC should not conflate normative barriers with tariff barriers, they have a real purpose (maybe USA is wrong to eat so much pesticides).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/u-s-and-e...
but the US didn't sentence this guy to prison, it was French courts
Including a leader picture of the McBaguette. Never ate there, but I have had a decent local McBier in .de.
https://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/usa-mcdonalds-fries-have-1...
Some of that article is absolute trash.
Saying "yeah sure, but no", is just a cheap dismissal of GP's point.
As far as I can tell it was the classic "Accept our deal or face consequences" type of US foreign policies. I can't be the only one thinking that importing meat from the other side of the world for a purely economical reason is insanity, especially when the local meat market is perfectly fine and of better quality.
Reminds me of all the meat scandals we had in the last decade in France, all of it coming from foreign countries, all of it due to companies trying to increase their margin at all cost: horse meat sold as beef, sick/old animals sold as healthy, minced meat made primarily skin, cartilage and other by-products, yummy...
How dare those customers get to have access to cheap food! They should only be able to buy organic, local approved veggies from their local overpriced grocery store!
France didn't want to import US Beef (fair), the US threatened to not import French cheese in retaliation (seemingly also rather fair).
How dare customers want to have access to healthy AND cheap food. They don't get to chose both!
And what's with the wages "race to the bottom" ensuring everybody will only be able to get cheap food - if at all?
>France didn't want to import US Beef (fair), the US threatened to not import French cheese in retaliation (seemingly also rather fair).
Yes, fair as well. So?
(Although one is a crappy, unhealthy beef grown in abhorrent conditions, the other is high quality cheese).
You may not like US beef, and you don't have to eat it, and you're probably well off enough that you get to make that choice. Protecting a domestic cheese production probably doesn't increase food availability for the poor - nor is that domestic cheese production some health food.
And those advocating are usually those "well enough" that don't have to suffer the "food for the poor" themselves.
>Protecting a domestic cheese production probably doesn't increase food availability for the poor - nor is that domestic cheese production some health food.
As part of the typical French diet, as is its use in France (and Europe), it's much healthier than the kind of crap passed for food to the poor in the US, or the fads peddled year after year as some "miracle food" to richer consumers (quinoa, chia, kale, and such).
Like VHS vs Betamax, sure there are better choices for food and commercial uses. But corn won, won early and won big. It'd cost trillions to switch to something else now.
So complain all we like; still we find ourselves in the same place. Corn is king.
Biggest french region cultivating corn is Les Landes which was a big swamp before the 18/19th century, maybe because it's more adapted to corn as it rains often (oceanic climate) but is hotter than Brittany.
[1]: https://www.agro.basf.fr/fr/cultures/mais/basf_agro_et_la_fi...
The local shop didn't want the mafia's "protection" (fair), the mafia killed the shop owner (seemingly also rather fair).
More seriously I don't think allowing foreign entities to destroy your local means of productions brings any good in the long term. Once your local producers are out of business you're essentially relying on the goodwill of some for profit companies to not increase the price of their products, or you're at the mercy of "The Market™️". Especially for something as fundamental as food.
This isn't the mafia killing a shop owner for not buying them. This is your customer leaving because they don't like your prices.
You don't get to force people to do business with you.
Really makes you think about how Europe did for thousands of years before our great American saviors helped us. Local food wasn't expensive before globalisation, talk to your grandparents you'll see how different things were not so long ago.
> This is your customer leaving because they don't like your prices.
You do understand that when the market is not flooded with cheap subsidised alternatives that issue doesn't exist ? Fresh/local products were not a niche market a few decades ago, it was simply all that was available. You didn't have to buy cheap bananas from costa rica because you simply didn't have access to bananas, so you bought local apples &c. you couldn't buy cheap beef from the US because all the meat available was local and priced so that people could afford it.
> You don't get to force people to do business with you.
But apparently you get to say "Accept our subpar products or we will make you pay!", and I genuinely fail to see the difference in practice. If this isn't some form of abuse of authority I don't know what it is.
So what? French consumers choosing American import meat over locally sourced meat is not America's fault. The parent's point totally stands, whether you like it or not. If French consumers have a choice between locally sourced meat and imported American one, and the majority buys the latter, then that's obviously on the French.
I mean, think what the alternative even means: The majority of French consumers would choose American meat, yet a minority of French farmers would rather disallow their own people to have a choice. If these farmers are so integral to French society, then surely that same society would buy locally sourced meat. But they apparently wouldn't/don't.
>> You don't get to force people to do business with you. >But apparently you get to say "Accept our subpar products or we will make you pay!", and I genuinely fail to see the difference in practice. If this isn't some form of abuse of authority I don't know what it is.
That's literally just normal trade between countries. France does that just like every other entity involved in global trade that has to keep its own interests in mind(meaning all of them.)
France does not have as much available land as the US does, we cannot squander it away. We can't afford a spill like the one in WV from a few year back, it would kill hundreds of people. and destroy a high percentage of our lands. I'm pretty sure the spill have never made to the national headline: that's how much land you have. In France we would talk about this for years.
Our farms are way closer from the cities than yours, we cannot afford to feed our beefs and chickens with antibiotics and just hope for the best and pray it will have no impact.
Please understand that we don't have the same population concentration, nor the same money to hide/fix the issues caused by the farming industry.
Buy the food you collectively want in bulk from the wholesalers and then sell it back to yourselves as customers. This removes the overhead of profit (and often labour, the highest cost, if co-op members do shifts at the store) and in many cases marketing, packaging and other costs. It thus allows you to have access to healthy, fresh, local, sustainable, etc. food at a reasonable price.
Now you have two solutions:
* you are educated (or at least knowledgeable) and you know that if the antibiotics do not show any effect after 3 days, this is caused by resistance, so you go to the doctor again and he gives you type2 antibiotics.
* You are not knowledgable and you let the infection get worse. You have two new solutions:
* * You're young and in good enough shape: depending on the bacteria type, you will suffer for some time, probably have troubles walking and lasting scars.
* * Are you old and/or in a bad shape? Tough luck. Depending on the bacteria type, you might die.
Why should the US put up with this? We have a natural advantage in agriculture, with very high productivity.
If you're against free trade, ok, but that's going to apply to European exports of all kinds. And if the trade motivation for links with Europe goes away, so does the motivation for defending Europe via NATO. NATOxit (NATOff? NATOut?) would cost Europe enormously.
We certainly should have free trade for fungible goods and services. Anything we permit to be made and sold internally we should permit to be imported. But we should have the power to regulate hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides in food and we should respect the decisions of other countries to regulate what they permit in their food.
I strongly reject the idea that food is somehow exempt. This is moral posturing and, like the noxious and genocidal anti-GMO position, is being used as a cloak for frank protectionism by ag interests that would be destroyed by superior overseas competition.
Not at all. I am reticent to tell others what they should do within their own borders. Treaties regarding external interactions are important.
> This is moral posturing
It is not posturing to prefer that I not have to personally vet the provenance of everything I buy in the grocery store. We know what happens when there is insufficient regulation of food. You get melamine in infant formula because it boosted somebody's profit margin.
Anyway, what trade treaties require is that health regulations have a rational basis, not be merely pretexts for protectionism. Too much of what I see from Europe is the latter, not the former.
You have not made to me a compelling case that a legitimate concern over what one allows into one's food supply is an external interaction.
The hormones we are talking about here are proteins. They are injected into cows, because they are destroyed by digestion.
So no it wouldn't really be the choice of individual buyers.
I don't think the word "attack" is as loaded a phrase as that person thinks it is... and less loaded than the tweets linked to.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/-the-amer...