At the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the demonstrators are having a more successful time of it

At the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the demonstrators are having a more successful time of it — and they’re on the same side as the conference participants. The raid began around dusk on Thursday. A convoy of 18 buses rolled up to the gates of a farm in Não Me Toque, a drowsy farm-belt town in southern Brazil. The handful of security guards on duty stood by helplessly as hundreds of protestors spilled out of the buses, toppled the two meter fence and streamed over the property, waving flags and cheering as they marched. OWNED BY MONSANTO, the American agricultural and chemical combine, the farm was an agricultural research station dedicated to experimenting with strains of genetically modified soybeans and other crops. Although Brazil banned widespread planting of GMOs two years ago, experimental farms such as Monsanto’s are allowed. But to the protestors — who ranged from landless peasants to militant Catholic youth — these fields nurturing dubious “Frankenfoods” were a powerful emblem of global corporate evil in their back yards. They camped out in the fields and on Friday morning, with television cameras rolling, ripped the crops out of the field like a human threshing machine. By the time the military police brigades stepped in, the Monsanto field was nothing but genetically modified compost. At least two other protests against GMOs were staged that morning, one in Porto Alegre, some 300 kilometers away, and another in Recife, in northeast Brazil, where one farmer died and several more were injured as 500 protestors clashed with police. The scattered demonstrations had a common thread.This was “one more blow in the urgent fight against multinational corporations,” said Jose Bové, the French farm leader and heralded McDonald’s basher, who had flown to Brazil to lend his now patented protest voice to the preferred enemy of the day: globalization.