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Massacres and Paramilitary Land Seizures Behind the Biofuel Revolution
Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.
Surging demand for "green" fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia's population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world's worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.
Several companies were collaborating by falsifying deeds to claim ownership of the land, said Andres Castro, the general secretary of Fedepalma, the national federation of palm oil producers.
"As a consequence of the development of palm by secretive business practices and the use of threats, people have been displaced and [the businesses] have claimed land for themselves," he said. His claim was backed up by witnesses and groups such as Christian Aid and the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.
The revelations tarnish what has been considered an economic and environmental success story. The fruit of the palm oil tree produces a vegetable oil also used in cooking, employs 80,000 people, and is increasingly being turned into biofuel.
"Four years ago Colombia had 172,000 hectares of palm oil," President Alvaro Uribe told the Guardian. "This year we expect to finish with nearly 400,000."
"Four years ago Colombia didn't produce a litre of biofuel. Today, because of our administration, Colombia produces 1.2m litres per day." Investment in new installations would continue to boost production, he added.
However the lawlessness created by four decades of insurgency in the countryside has enabled rightwing paramilitaries, and also possibly leftwing rebels, to join the boom. Unlike coca, the armed groups' main income source, palm oil is a legal crop and therefore safe from state-backed eradication efforts.
Farmers who have been forced off their land at gunpoint say that in many cases their banana groves and cattle grazing fields were turned into palm oil plantations. Luis Hernandez (not his real name) fled his 170-hectare plot outside the town of Mutata in Antioquia province nine years ago after his father-in-law and several neighbours were gunned down. When he and other survivors were able to return recently, they found the land was in the hands of a local palm producer.
"The company tells me that it has legal papers for the land, but I don't know how that can be, as I have land titles dating back 20 years," said Mr Hernandez. He suspects palm companies collaborated with the paramilitaries. "I don't know if there was an official agreement between them, but a relationship of some sort definitely exists."
A government investigation reportedly found irregularities in 80% of palm oil land titles in some areas. "If there have been abuses and the titles are shown to be false, then the land needs to be returned and all the weight of the law needs to be brought down on those that are responsible," said Dr Castro, of the producers' association.
Christian Aid is funding an effort to protect peasants who are trying to reclaim land from the paramilitaries, said Dominic Nutt, who has visited the plantations. "It is the dark side of biofuel."
The paramilitary groups, first formed in the 80s by businessmen, landowners and drug lords to fend off guerrillas, became a powerful illegal army which stole land, sold drugs and massacred civilians. Under a peace deal with the government they have officially disbanded but many observers say remnants remain active.
Displacement continues, with an average of 200,000 cases registered every year over the past four years, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, with most coming from palm oil-growing areas on the Caribbean coast. "We can't keep up, they just keep coming," said Ludiz Ruda, of the Hijos de Maria school in a shantytown outside the coastal city of Cartagena. Since opening last year it had been swamped with impoverished newcomers, she said. "More than 80% are refugees."
Cocaine output rises regardless
Coca production in Colombia has surged despite US-funded eradication efforts, according to an estimate that casts fresh doubt on Washington's "war on drugs". Satellite imagery collated by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy survey suggests that cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, jumped 8% last year to 156,000 hectares.
The estimate was made public before a trip to Washington this week by President Alvaro Uribe. If confirmed, it would be the third consecutive rise in production, and a blow to the US strategy of bolstering Colombia's security forces to help them destroy the crops.
Under its Plan Colombia project, Washington has funnelled more than $5bn (£2.5bn) in mostly military aid to its South American ally since 2000 - its biggest aid project outside Afghanistan and the Middle East. The Democrats say the security forces are accused of human rights abuses and complicity with traffickers.
Mr Uribe revealed the unpublished findings in an effort to get the bad news out of the way before he started lobbying Congress; the White House did not immediately respond.
"They told me they were worried about revealing this number because of my upcoming trip to the United States - that the Americans should reveal it," he said. "But that's why I'm revealing it. We're not trying to put makeup on what is a serious matter."
Plan Colombia began in 1999 and was supposed to halve production of coca within five years, using sprayer planes and officers on the ground. But the latest estimate suggests that since then it has risen 27%.
Last month Mr Uribe trumpeted a UN report that said cultivation was down to 79,000 hectares. The conflicting figures were incomprehensible and disorienting, said the president: "Could it be we've worked in vain? That all our work hasn't produced the desired results?"
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
14 Comments so far
Show All[["Could it be we've worked in vain? That all our work hasn't produced the desired results?"]] –Uribe
Contrary; combine the two parts of the story and it's a success story.
I can see George Bush saying "Fine job BeBe"
$5Bn for military expenditures and the town is full of corporate robbers stealing land from peasants. No journalist in their right mind; no labor leader, will ever stand up without being literally shot down in this country.
Meanwhile the US/Columbian government sprays Roundup from aircraft on great swaths of land poisoning not only coco, but IMHO everything else as well.
"It is the dark side of biofuel."-Christian Aid – Don't blame biofuel!!!
This behavior is typical of capitalism, the same happened here at the hands of the railroads and standard oil. The cost of sugarcane based biofeuls in lives and destroyed rainforest is far too high.
biofuels, like clean coal and nuclear, are chimeras. the hottest stock being traded is wind energy coporations. this article is a manifestation of what perkins describes in the book, 'confessions of an economic hitman'.
When people say that an uncontrolled free market is the best possible system under which to operate, I think of examples like this and I decide "Thanks, but no thanks."
More thoughts and background on biochar:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/5/19/15043/2010
It hardly seems to be a slam dunk of we can figure out how to make it a net benefit to the global picture at all.
Wow, I want even less to do with this inefficient, polluting technology now that it entails not only destroying the rainforest, but murder and theft.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Bio-fuel
It is not necessary to use food crops, or destroy natural habitat to supplement our addiction to oil.
It seems counter intuitive, but making bio-char from crop residue creates energy, sequesters carbon, and enhances soil.
Research the links below for Terra Preta 'technology' for potential to alleviate climate change and aid sustainable development of food and fuel.
Terra Preta is Portuguese for black earth. "Rich black soil – terra preta – was created by humans up to 4000 years ago in infertile regions of the Amazon. The high nutrient content of terra preta is recreated today by low-temperature slow burning pyrolysis of biomass. The resulting product, black carbon, known as bio-char, reduces the need for fertilizers. It can also be used as a fuel." (1.)
"Inspired by the fascinating properties of Terra Preta de Indio, bio-char is a soil amendment that has the potential to revolutionize concepts of soil management. While "discovered" may not be the right word, as bio-char (also called charcoal or biomass-derived black carbon, recently in context of agricultural application also named agri-char) has been used in traditional agricultural practices as well as in modern horticulture, never before has evidence been accumulating that demonstrates so convincingly that bio-char has very specific and unique properties that make it stand out among the opportunities for sustainable soil management.
The benefits of bio-char rest on two pillars:
1- The extremely high affinity of nutrients to bio-char
2- The extremely high persistence of bio-char
These two properties (which are truly extraordinary - see details below) can be used effectively to address some of the most urgent environmental problems of our time:
1- Soil degradation and food insecurity
2- Water pollution from agro-chemicals
3- Climate change
'Soils with bio-char additions are typically more fertile, produce more and better crops for a longer period of time.'" (2.)
"Important lessons can be learned from the recalcitrance of black carbon and its effects on the biogeochemistry of soils. Given the apparent ubiquity of black Carbon established by several authors (Schmidt and Noak, 2000; Skjemstad et al., 2002), refinements of global Carbon models and sequestration estimates may be necessary. Further, the potential for enhancing sequestration by active management of black Carbon could be established with important linkages to energy production and land use." (3.)
"Eprida offers a revolutionary new energy technology for sustainable fuels and sustainable income while producing co-products which also allow us to remove greenhouse gases from the air. We mimic nature's methods for biomass conversion and build a sustainable food and energy production." (4.)
(1.) http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/February/20020601.asp
(2.) http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biochar_home.htm
(3.) http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm
(4.). http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4
And the sad part is, if you add up all the biofuel projects, the solar projects, the wind projects, and everything else that can produce "clean" energy more or less in perpetuity (which rules out almost all hydro, as dams have limited lives and global warming is cutting into the availability of water where it was once abundant and reliable year round), the whole of worldwide clean and renewable energy projects accounts for a small fraction of one percent of worldwide energy consumption.
Clean energy is growing at 30% to 60% per year, which means that in a few years, if all goes well, it may represent 1% of the energy being used today. However, energy consumption, and population for that matter, is growing by several percentage points every year. There is no way clean energy can even keep pace with growth in demand, let alone get ahead of the curve in the next decade or two. That makes it a fantastic investment--very rapid growth in supply with even more rapid growth in demand!--which means there is tons of money to spend on hyping the hell out of it, lobbying for subsidies and land grabs for it, and even killing people over it (as we do for oil, of course), but it won't really do the vast majority of people on the Earth, or the Earth itself, any good at all within our lifetimes, taken as a whole.
No, to do anything meaningful about GHG emissions, energy needs, and the overall health of the planet, we need large scale conservation efforts. Consider that saving just a fraction of 1% of today's energy use, which we can easily do by replacing a respectable portion of incandescent bulbs with CFL lamps and sealing and/or insulating a small fraction of our very inefficient buildings, would do more good than all of the hundreds of billions that will be spent developing new clean energy sources over the next several years. And unlike biofuels, we don't need to kill anybody or drive up the price of food to the point that millions more poor people will starve while driving endangered tropical species into extinction to do it.
Just a thought.
Actually, the truth is that renewable energy technologies can supply all basic human needs, just not the gluttonous consumption of energy that is so common in Western industrialized nations.
These include solar photovoltaics, solar thermal heating, wind turbines, and domestic biofuel production using fossil-fuel free agricultural strategies - biochar is a good example of how to do agriculture right.
The real question behind any discussion of biofuel must also include reform of the global agricultural system. I always tell people to keep in mind that all the cotton produced by slave labor on plantations was 'organic' - so the technological reform must go hand in hand with the socioeconomic reform.
Thus, a sane agricultural strategy would entail (1) the banning of factory farmed hogs, chickens and cows, (2) equitable prices for all farmers for their crops, so that all the profits don't go to agribusiness banks, (3) an end to reliance on fossil fuels for fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide production, (4) limiting agricultural subsidies to those farmers who switch to renewable energy (solar and wind powered electric tractors and pumps, for example).
This article applies just as much to Amazonian soybean production for food export to Europe, as well as Brazilian land clearing for cheap beef for McDonalds, as it does to biofuel production. These exploitative arrangements are all the result of IMF/World Bank trade deals like NAFTA.
Biofuel production using sustainable agriculture and fair socioeconomics is entirely possible - but by itself it can never replace fossil fuels. Investment in solar and wind electricity, and in electric-powered transportation, will provide a far greater share of future energy needs than biofuels will.
Well, Castro was right again! The CIA is still importing cocaine under the guise of stopping it. These big companies, who are they? Multinationals I presume? Using militias like the ones we train here? If I remember the right wingers where the ones who made the most money off the drug war before, when Castro kicked the drug importing boats off his shores and pissed off our government again after the bay of pigs. Funny how a lot of the Bush cronies are the same people who where involved in the Iran Contra scandal and the drug running problems in Columbia in the 80s and 90s. Does all of Bushs policy moves hurt local indigenous populations? It seems so.
To date no studies have been done on the health effects of the pesticide laced GMO corn which has now contaminated all corn crops.
So let us burn billions of tons of the poison laced corn and release it into the air we breathe world wide???? STOP PEOPLE! STOP! THIS IS MADNESS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?***#!
Who profits off of Columbian coco and Afghanistan opium?
Good Question! You could ask journalist Gary Webb if he didn't commit suicide.
I was in contact with Mr Webb, yes he knows
only HEMP is the solution and a flower now being grown in Montana
seniorpescado- I admire your love of the sea, and hope for zero population growth! That being the only hope for over fishing. Till then agreements with world fisheries needs to be honored by all governments! This is sooo important!
Thanks for your concern for our planet!