Food, Farms, and Solidarity: French Farmers Challenge Industrial Agriculture and Genetically Modified Crops by Chaia Heller (review)

This book presents a fascinating and in-depth case study of a French agricultural union, the Confédération paysanne, surveying its history, ideology, leadership, and political activism. Chaia Heller focuses on the Confédération’s campaign of the late 1990s against genetically modified crops, examining the way in which it radically altered the terms of the debate, by challenging a scientific discourse of ‘risk’ and mounting a broad social, political, and ethical critique of neo-liberal globalization. The critical role of the Confédération, Heller argues, was to contest a dominant industrial agricultural model that placed precedence on profit over the well-being of people and nature. Heller’s study draws on long periods of ethnographic research, during which she worked alongside activists in Paris, participated in demonstrations and meetings, and visited farms and villages throughout rural France. Her account is brimming with sharp observations and rich cultural detail, and includes descriptions of her first meeting with the Confédération at the Salon de l’agriculture, conversations with staff at the union’s Paris headquarters, and an account of her trip to Seattle in 1999 when she accompanied the French delegation taking part in the anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations, which ended in violence as the American police mounted an attack on peaceful demonstrators. Heller’s book is written in an engaging, impassioned, and anecdotal style, but it also marshals a formidable arsenal of theory that weaves political ecology, science studies, and social movement theory into a study of political activism within a small farmers’ union. Yet the book offers much more than a simple case study. Heller uses the Confédération paysanne as a kind of prism through which to explore some of the most deeply complex and urgent questions of our time, and in particular the conflict between a capitalist model seeking to extend its reach into food production and the plight of small farmers desperately struggling to survive in the face of powerful multinational corporations. She reveals the cynical strategies of multinationals that appropriate a discourse of community, solidarity and ethics to encroach on the terroir market and force smallholders out of business. Yet she avoids making simplistic oppositions between capitalists and anti-capitalists or between good and evil. She is interested in defining what she describes as a ‘postindustrial condition’ in which both large corporations and smallholders participate and in which both sides seek to exploit each other’s language and strategies for their own gain. Rather than portraying the Confédération paysanne as a heroic David fighting Goliath, she presents its position as one of both adaptation and refusal. The result is a rich, multilayered, and nuanced analysis that sets out all the complexities and contradictions of the Confédération paysanne in its struggle against industrial agriculture. Notwithstanding a few minor quibbles — there are frequent misspellings of French words and some of the material on the Confédération is dated — this is a highly original, insightful, and exhaustively researched account that presents in fine detail one of the key battle lines of our time.