BRAZIL:  2,000  WOMEN  BLOCKADE  SUPERMARKET  IN  GE  FOOD  PROTEST
 

Amidst widescale protests against corporate control of the food chain 2,000 Brazilian
women blockaded a supermarket 800 miles south of Brasilia in a protest against genetically engineered food
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AP Worldstream March 8, 2001 - International news , The Associated Press

BRASILIA, Brazil : Women farmers throughout Brazil demonstrated Thursday on International Women's Day to protest worldwide economic policies they say are unfair. Some 700 women members of Brazil's Landless Rural Workers Movement occupied a McDonald's restaurant in Porto Alegre, some 1,600 kms (1,000 miles) south of Brasilia. They burned flags bearing the fast-food chain's logo, criticized economic globalization and called the Brazilian government
a slave to ''world neoliberalism.''

Thursday's protest was inspired by the anti-globalization efforts of French activist Jose Bove a sheep farmer who shot to fame for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant in France and was
arrested in Brazil last January after he joined the workers movement in a massive protest. Also on Thursday, some 2,000 women blocked access to a supermarket in Florianopolis, 1,300 kms (800 miles) south of Brasilia, claiming it sold genetically engineered food. And in Belo Horizonte, some
600 kms (380 miles) southeast of Brasilia, a group of women protested in front of the local city council chambers demanding that the government speed up agrarian reform.