Chair, Northern Plains Resource Council; Chair, National Family Farm Coalition Trade Task ForceNPRC chair Dena Hoff is bringing peasantry to Big Sky Country. In addition to her NPRC work, Hoff has represented Via Campesina, “an international movement which coordinates peasant organizations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities.” A prairie Eva Peron, she has vowed to fight biotechnology and crop technology improvement firms like Monsanto: “My skin is white but my hands are those of a farmer. The fight is global. Monsanto lives on our blood and land. We have to drive them out.”

In this effort, she is frequently working with notorious militant anti-genetic improvement activist Jose Bove, who led a mob in destroying a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in France in 1999 and led attacks on a field of genetically improved rice. They appeared together at an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy-sponsored breakfast during the Seattle WTO riots in 1999, and were spotted at the same anti-biotech rally in Bangalore, India, in September 2000.

In addition to her post at NPRC, Hoff chairs the Trade Task Force at the National Family Farm Coalition. This is the organization of anti-business rural groups that forced the Pork Checkoff to a nationwide vote in early 2000 (with help from Bill Clinton’s agriculture secretary Dan Glickman).