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,
