Day 284 - 22 Oct 96 - Page 20


     
     1        things that have been identified.
     2
     3   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   What I have put down -- McDonald's have used
     4        their power as a multi-national and as part of a particular
     5        economic system directly or indirectly to cause the
     6        eviction of small farmers to trap poor countries into
     7        producing more and more food for export, to cause the
     8        exportation of staple crops and to turn the use of the best
     9        farmland to meat production, whether as ranching or grain
    10        feed.  I am not suggesting that that could not be tuned up
    11        so that it is rather more elegantly expressed.  But you say
    12        that is all part of responsibility for starvation in the
    13        third world?
    14
    15   MR. MORRIS:   Yes.  That includes the-----
    16
    17   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   I am not driving you to say something which
    18        you couldn't mean to say.
    19
    20   MR. MORRIS:   That would include...  I did not catch all of
    21        that.  That would include the point which is in the 'gross
    22        misuse of resources' box about the inevitable waste because
    23        of the feed -----
    24
    25   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   Well, those are detailed ways in which you
    26        would say, 'If we prove what is in the box, that goes some
    27        way to proving that the meaning is true, what is said in
    28        the meaning is true.  But at the moment we are just
    29        concentrating on what the meaning is.'
    30
    31   MR. MORRIS:   Right.
    32
    33   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   The same kind of exercise, can that be done
    34        with rainforest?   I am not saying that I agree with this,
    35        I will have to decide and see where it takes me when I have
    36        heard Mr. Rampton about it.  (Pause)
    37
    38   MR. MORRIS:   I am trying to identify those passages.
    39
    40   MR JUSTICE BELL:  Let me see if I can get you started.  We have
    41        really moved over from starvation to the effect on the
    42        environment here.  Because even driving the people out is
    43        not really directed at poverty, it is directed at the fact
    44        that they have lived in the forest without damaging it for
    45        thousands of years.  What McDonald's have alleged is
    46        destruction by lethal poisons.  I will leave out about
    47        lying about using recycled paper, because I have treated
    48        that as part of waste, which is another head, and
    49        contributing to a major ecological catastrophe,
    50        particularly by driving the tribal people who do no harm to 
    51        the environment out of the forest. 
    52 
    53   MR. MORRIS:   Sorry, I am trying to identify specifics which
    54        have not been pleaded by the plaintiffs.  (Pause)  Well,
    55        okay.  It is difficult because a lot of the references in
    56        this and the other section and in fact all throughout the
    57        pamphlet are not directed at McDonald's; they are directed
    58        at a general process.
    59
    60   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   I do not think that matters, quite frankly,

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