Pâté, bonhomie, and a slap at engineered food

Most had brought along the tools they needed for their work - scythes, machetes, gardening scissors, knives, and pruning hooks.

One of their leaders, Jean Lantaron, called for quiet as he laid out ground rules. "On no account will anyone use force," he said. "If we run up against physical opposition, we will not confront it. We will negotiate and discuss, and that is all."

As it happened, there was no risk of violence. The farmer whose crop was being cut down did not show up, and the handful of gendarmes who were waiting by the cornfield made no attempt to intervene, beyond taking photographs and noting the license plate numbers of some of the cars that had brought the protesters.

"We are just here to take note of the damage," one of the policemen explained. (The next day, some car owners were called to their local police stations to make statements, but they were not charged. Neither Monsanto nor the farmer had lodged a complaint.)

As the police watched, the protesters went to work. Within five minutes, the 80-square-yard plot of corn was felled, leaving nothing but rows of stalks.

The demonstrators piled the offending crop neatly by the side of the field.

Marie-Agnès Delmas, a small-scale goat-cheese producer, was pleased with her work. "The big cartels want to get control over farmers," she said, by selling them patented, genetically modified seeds that they cannot save and replant the next season without paying the patent holder, such as Monsanto. "We've got nothing to gain from GMOs, and our independence to lose," added Tarrieux. "We would end up being dependent on the seed salesmen every planting season."

Tarrieux is also worried about the unknown effects of GMOs on plant and human health, although none of the tests done so far in the United States or Europe have found dangers to human health in the GMOs approved for human consumption.

"We don't know enough yet," she argued. "And when you look at the way mad cow disease happened because farmers fed their cows on animal meal, it's obvious that there are a fair number of things that we were told was progress at the time but which we shouldn't have done."

Nor did any of the protesters seem convinced by arguments that GMOs are the key to ending hunger in developing countries, which could benefit from the promised higher yields.

"The problem is not GMOs; it's the way food and wealth are distributed," snorted Jacqueline Schetober, a middle-age woman wearing a badge proclaiming her membership of ATTAC, an anti-globalization movement calling for a tax on international financial flows to fund third world development. "It's a question of whether we want the market or democracy to decide things."

Mixed in with many of the protesters' motivations, suggested Ashley Serre, an American who runs a raspberry farm with her French husband in the Pyrenees, is "a general suspicion of American business."

But at the heart of the protest, said Ms. Delmas, was a simple desire to maintain the traditional quality that small-scale farmers using conventional methods say they alone can ensure. "In this country we still have a system of small farmers doing sustainable agriculture, and it works," she said. "We want to keep it."

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