This event was timed to coin­cide with the start of the peat-cut­ting sea­son, which can only begin when the peat has dried out enough.

All morn­ing Leeds & Sheffield Friends of the Earth and oth­ers col­lect­ed mes­sages from the peo­ple of Thorne and the sur­round­ing area, on cards, plac­ards and bal­loons. They got a real­ly good response from the local pop­u­la­tion who are well aware of the dam­age being done to their moors. At the same time activists from the north were tak­en on guid­ed tours of the site and learnt as much as they could about the peat-cut­ting process.

After lunch every­one gath­ered at a friend­ly pub and then set off in a pro­ces­sion to the peat works. Some of the (small­er) mes­sages col­lect­ed dur­ing the morn­ing were hand­ed in to a pok­er-faced secu­ri­ty guard and then around 50 peo­ple strolled into the pro­cess­ing plant, past him and the four or five bum­bling police offi­cers. They had a good look round the vast site and inside lots of build­ings, they con­ga’d through the piles of stacked up com­post bags and ceilid­hed along­side the rail­way line.

There were no arrests as we danced out of the site and back to the pub. After a love­ly day we decid­ed to have a big­ger, bet­ter and longer tres­pass of the site and the moors on Tues­day 25th June, with some camp­ing avail­able the night before — more details avail­able from Leeds EF!

Oth­er actions will of course be going on all the time!

The man­ag­er of a McDon­ald’s restau­rant in Milan was injured Sat­ur­day when farm­ers — along with a cow, a pig and two chick­ens — staged an impromp­tu protest over genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied food prod­ucts. The cow slipped on the restau­rant floor, acci­den­tal­ly hit­ting the man­ag­er with a hoof, Ansa news agency report­ed. The uniden­ti­fied farm­ers left the scene a few min­utes lat­er in a van.

McDon­ald’s staff lat­er report­ed the inci­dent to the police, while the man­ag­er was tak­en to see a doc­tor. It was not imme­di­ate­ly clear why the farm­ers tar­get­ed the US fast-food chain but GM food ingre­di­ents are wide­ly on sale in North Amer­i­ca.

They are banned or shunned in oth­er coun­tries, espe­cial­ly in west­ern Europe, amid fears that the engi­neered crops could pose as yet unknown health risks. Genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied organ­isms are crops to which genes have been added in a bid to improve yields or their resis­tance to pests. The most pop­u­lar GM crops are corn, cot­ton, pota­toes, soy­beans and toma­toes.

ROME, — Agence France Presse 3 March 2001

Mil­i­tants opposed to research into genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied organ­isms (GMOs) broke into a farm lab­o­ra­to­ry in north­east Italy Sat­ur­day as Group of Eight (G8) envi­ron­ment min­is­ters met in Tri­este to find a com­pro­mise over a UN treaty on glob­al warm­ing.

Some 50 pro­test­ers in white coats broke open the doors to the lab, run by a region­al agency for agri­cul­tur­al devel­op­ment at Poz­zuo­lo del Friuli near Udine where stud­ies and exper­i­ments on trans­genic seeds were said to be car­ried out. Seed sam­ples, notably of maize, that were tak­en
by mil­i­tants would be ana­lyzed by inde­pen­dent lab­o­ra­to­ries, Ansa news agency cit­ed one of the mil­i­tants, Beppe Cac­cia, as say­ing. Police did not inter­vene dur­ing the 15-minute protest and no fur­ther inci­dents were report­ed.

Demon­stra­tors held ban­ners read­ing “Stop GMOs” and “Stop Franken­food exper­i­ments” in Ital­ian. A region­al envi­ron­men­tal leader, Pao­lo Ciani, lat­er called the protest a “seri­ous act”. Ciani, who is also deputy pres­i­dent of the north­east­ern region around Tri­este and Udine, said that no trans­genic exper­i­ments had been car­ried out at Poz­zuo­lo del Friuli for the last three years, at the spe­cif­ic request of the region­al gov­ern­ment in Tri­este.

But Cac­cia said that pro­test­ers would not be gagged. “The protest this morn­ing is a slap in the face of the mon­strous and dis­pro­por­tion­ate secu­ri­ty appa­ra­tus set up for the G8 envi­ron­men­tal
meet­ing,” he added. “Biotech­nolo­gies are okay if they serve to improve life as in the bio­med­ical sec­tor but they are unac­cept­able in farm­ing where there is no need to pro­duce more,” he said. “Today’s out­put is huge; it’s the dis­tri­b­u­tion between rich and poor coun­tries in the world
which is unbal­anced.”

As the West tries to bul­ly Third World gov­ern­ments into using GM crops, peas­ant farm­ers around the world are denounc­ing prod­ucts that would increase eco­nom­ic depen­den­cy, destroy the liveli­hoods of all but a priv­i­leged few farm­ers, and replace local­ly con­trolled food pro­duc­tion with cor­po­rate-con­trolled mono­cul­ture for export.

On 29th Novem­ber 2000 Fil­ipino farm­ers held mas­sive demon­stra­tions at Mon­san­to’s offices in Min­danao at the end of the Con­ti­nen­tal Car­a­van 2000 — a series of protests across India and Bangladesh.

They were joined by farm­ers from Indone­sia, Thai­land, Japan and Korea. Habibur Rah­man, a farmer rep­re­sent­ing Nayakr­ishi Andolon (New Agri­cul­ture Move­ment), stat­ed: “the Bangladeshi farm­ers reject genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered rice and I am pleased to learn about the strong resis­tance here in the Philip­pines.”

On 3rd Jan­u­ary 2001 Indi­an farm­ers relaunched their ‘Cre­mate Mon­san­to’ cam­paign as 300 vol­un­teers of the new­ly formed ‘Hasiru Sene’ (Green Brigade), part of the Kar­nata­ka State Farm­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, pulled up and burned Mon­san­to’s tri­al of GM cot­ton.

On 26th Jan­u­ary over 1200 Brazil­ian farm­ers stormed a Mon­san­to research sta­tion and pulled up GM corn and soya tri­als. The occu­pa­tion was timed to coin­cide with the inter­na­tion­al protests against glob­al­i­sa­tion at the meet­ing of the World Eco­nom­ic Forum in Davos, Switzer­land.

“We’re stay­ing here indef­i­nite­ly,” said Solet Cam­po­lete from the Land­less Work­ers Move­ment, “these seeds trick farm­ers and cre­ate depen­den­cy on seeds pro­duced by a big multi­na­tion­al.” They scrawled on the walls, ‘Mon­san­to is the end of farm­ers!’ but per­haps they got that the wrong way round!

On Sun­day 7th Jan­u­ary 2001 part of a farm-scale tri­al site at Har­bury in Here­ford­shire was destroyed by ‘Two Peas­ants, a Pix­ie and a Pair of Marigolds’. The five entered the field short­ly before mid­night and dur­ing four hours pulled up about 200sq metres of oilseed rape.

In a state­ment, the group explained they had tak­en action after an ear­li­er demon­stra­tion and pub­lic meet­ing had failed to pre­vent the tri­al from going ahead. “As local peo­ple we formed an affin­i­ty group with both col­lec­tive and well-rea­soned per­son­al moti­va­tion for our actions.

We feel that the strength of our argu­ments will vin­di­cate our action and keep the issue in the pub­lic domain,” they stat­ed. “We want to remind the gov­ern­ment, Aven­tis and the farmer, who have brushed aside the strong argu­ments and gen­uine con­cerns of the pub­lic, bio-sci­en­tists and envi­ron­men­tal­ists, that peo­ple aren’t con­tent to see this con­tin­ue and feel their only avenue to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment is to take direct action them­selves.”

“We com­plete­ly cleared the area of all the oilseed. We were lit­er­al­ly on our knees pulling them out at the roots. It was to high­light the issue to the local and nation­al gov­ern­ment that we don’t feel the pub­lic is being lis­tened to. And because we feel they have act­ed ille­gal­ly, we feel we have done noth­ing wrong,” a pro­test­er explained, vow­ing the cam­paign would con­tin­ue as long as the tri­als and the use of the tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ued.