Day 284 - 22 Oct 96 - Page 18
1 multi-national corporations have power over the situation
2 where people become hungry. The next point, obviously we
3 have got the investments, is the beef, the dollar hungry
4 rulers in the third line down, on the hungry for dollars;
5 i.e. the fact that rulers and governments and powerful
6 companies and privileged elites, those with some kind of
7 powerful interest in the third world, are looking to US
8 corporations and international trade and therefore
9 dependent on them.
10
11 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is just any additional defamatory -- I do
12 not want you to strain to find it, I don't want you to
13 think because I have asked the questions there may be more
14 there. I have got your point, which I will consider, about
15 causing eviction, whether it be by actually buying the land
16 or not, but causing it by the general inference.
17
18 MR. MORRIS: Yes.
19
20 MR JUSTICE BELL: And what you are casting your eye over, and
21 I have mentioned it now because it may be more relevant, if
22 it has any relevance at all, in other parts. What you are
23 looking for is meanings which are defamatory which
24 McDonald's have not pleaded but which you say are there and
25 which you say you justified with the evidence.
26
27 MR. MORRIS: Right. Well, what I did was I just went through
28 just now identifying every potentially defamatory meaning
29 in that section which McDonald's had not pleaded.
30
31 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Keep going then.
32
33 MR. MORRIS: Obviously, it goes on then about the power of the
34 US dollars results in poor countries producing more and
35 more food for export to the States; out of 40 of the
36 world's poorest country 36 export food to the USA, the
37 wealthiest. The fact that, and the next section,
38 countries, third world countries where most children are
39 under-nourished, are actually exporting the staple crops as
40 animal feed to fatten; i.e. to fatten cattle for turning
41 into burgers in the first world. That, of course, is
42 highly relevant to the soya evidence in the case, the use
43 of Brazilian soya by German cattle for McDonald's use.
44
45 The next allegation is the best farmland in poor countries
46 is being used for our benefit, which would relate also to
47 the soya. The fact is that we have had evidence that soya
48 production results in the eviction of people who have no
49 alternative but to go on to deforest further areas, and
50 some of the soya production is as a result of deforestation
51 itself. We have had evidence on that as well. But there
52 is a further defamatory allegation that the best farmland
53 is used for cash crops as well, whether it is for beef or
54 for soya. Then these cash crops, where it says McDonald's
55 is directly involved in this economic imperialism. So, it
56 is the cash crop economy that is being identified there.
57
58 Under 'gross misuse of resources', in that box -- which
59 McDonald's have made no complaint about whatsoever in the
60 case, it is not even part of the defamatory words
