© Andrea del Moral
libreplanet@hotmail.com
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After the Cold War, the fourth
world war has started.
Sub-Commandante
Marcos, head of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, after the Seattle protests
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After dodging police in the streets,
a young activist in the U.S. takes the battle against corporate forces onto firmer
ground
 “Eat your food. Children in Ethiopia are starving.” It is
a familiar refrain at the American dinner table to which scores of children have
replied: “Send them my broccoli!” But to Andrea del Moral, now 22, the question sparked
confusion. Why were children starving? “I still don’t understand it,” she admits,
“it’s not about not enough food in the world.”
That she continues to pursue the question sets her apart from her peers. A native
of wealthy Seattle, Washington, she has turned her back on lucrative job opportunities
to consider the co-existence of prosperity and starvation.
But the solution remains elusive. Looking back on a year of hard-core activism that
has included the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C., teach-ins and
cross-country road-trips, del Moral says frustration and hard lessons from the world
of global politics have forced her to re-evaluate how she can help bring down the
corporate forces that she believes are undermining food security.
With close-cropped curls and baggy carpenter’s pants, she describes her look as “a
little bit punk,” but she is no arrogant rebel. Del Moral is thoughtful, articulate,
with an easy, sometimes self-deprecating laugh.
That a young woman who has never known hunger should make it her vocation comes as
a surprise even to her own parents. But del Moral credits them for planting the seeds.
Her father is a botany professor and her mother works for the U.S. government’s Environmental
Protection Agency. “I grew up with that ethic [of environmentalists],” she says,
adding that “my family always encouraged me to make my own decisions.”
But to the dismay of her parents, del Moral abandoned her studies at a Montreal university
to pursue activism full-time. Surviving on money earned tutoring and taking on odd
acting roles, she began her subversive education with a band of like-minded twenty-somethings
in Montreal. While mounting street plays illustrating the nightmarish creations of
genetic engineering gone wrong, the troupe began plastering mock-labels on genetically
modified foods and holding demonstrations outside the city’s supermarkets.
Like thousands of other activists around the world, it was on the World Wide Web
that del Moral first heard the buzz about the WTO’s November 1999 meeting in Seattle. “At first I didn’t know
what the WTO
was,” she admits. By tapping into dozens of “list-serves” and email discussion groups,
del Moral soon began fluently using terms like “corporate seed supply” and “biopiracy.”
Practice before preaching
She also deepened her knowledge of the Bretton-Woods
institutions and their sister, the WTO. She now realizes that “these institutions were not formed
by people saying ‘let’s control the world’. They were created with good intentions
that went wrong.” For del Moral, “The big organizations are power structures that
are in complete contradiction with direct democracy, which has the most potential
for freedom.” While she understands the need for international bodies to regulate
and harmonize the laws of different countries, del Moral fears that these organizations
are more concerned with profits than with people, and advocates dismantling them.
In the months prior to the Seattle protest, del Moral travelled across the country,
attending demonstrations, workshops on civil disobedience and classes in Social Ecology,
the philosophy of living by nature’s example in which organic farming is central.
She soon discovered her knack for addressing crowds. But after speaking to more and
more people, she began to realize the limitations of her theories. She recalls meeting
with a farmer in western Canada, who agreed that big corporations like Nabisco were
manipulating the price of his harvest for their profits, but didn’t see how organic
farming would solve his financial problems. “For him it was about profits not production.
We thought about how we could help, but we are just city kids,” says del Moral, “I
have no place telling these kinds of people I have the solutions.”
Disappointed by that encounter, del Moral decided to learn to practice what she was
preaching in the context of the global economy. She figured the best place to get
the big picture was in Seattle.
Del Moral arrived in her hometown on the eve of Thanksgiving—ironically the American
harvest holiday associated with over-eating. No one anticipated the extent of the
violence that erupted in Seattle from November 30 to December 3. Television images
beamed around the world showed a devastated city in a state of emergency; riot police
in bulletproof armour beating back protestors, armed National Guardsmen roaming the
streets and graffiti-ed storefronts.
As WTO delegates
arrived, security was bolstered. Stepping into the streets she had roamed as a child,
del Moral felt the ground shift. Her first encounter with riot police in a parking
garage marked a moment of truth: she and her friends, armed only with big ideas,
were about to engage in a battle with far more powerful forces. “At that moment”
says del Moral, “I realized a sort of war was being waged upon us and this (the police)
was its visible manifestation… I wish I could carry that realization around with
me every day.”
While she steered clear of the front lines to avoid arrest, sleepless nights and
days spent dodging the police left her battle-weary. Once again, del Moral wondered
if she was making the best use of her energy. “We will never take down industrial
agriculture,” she recalls asking herself, “so why are we doing this?”
Committed to change but still searching for her place in the anti-globalization movement,
del Moral has retreated from the front lines, devoting herself to organic farming.
On a six-acre farm in the quiet hills of Vermont, she earns $50 a week tilling the
land, and experimenting with seed saving and ancient farming techniques which she
believes still hold the key to solving world hunger.
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