Biodiesel Fuels Displacement in Colombia

"Biofuels have become 'very in vogue' these days" - World Bank Latin America Development report, 2008

African Palm oil is super thick and pumpkin orange. Courtesy: nrpw.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - Biofuels are divided into biodiesel (plant-based oil), and ethanol (plant-based alcohol). The number one source of biodiesel is African palm oil. Demand and production of biofuels are growing globally. The U.S. government is taking steps to switch to biodiesel in national parks, public school districts, utility companies, NASA, USDA agencies, and all major branches of the U.S. military.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush advocated for a global increase in the production of biofuels in order to cut revenues of enemy nations such as Venezuela. Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe seeks to make Colombia the world's top biodiesel producer by growing 6 million hectares of African palm by 2020, and over 40 million hectares in the coming decades.

The U.S. has invested billions of dollars in Colombia to "fight the war on drugs and terror," and a great amount of this pie is spent funding projects dedicated to replace illegal crops with legal ones, especially those most apt for export (cash crops, in this case, African palm).

To make room for the palm monocrops, native forests are usually cleared up. The crops are heavily sprayed with fertilizers and pesticides, and the final product, biodiesel, is more expensive than regular diesel.

Indonesia, with 6 million hectares of palms, is the world's top palm oil producer. Millions of hectares of forest have been cleared for palm projects, endangering wildlife and indigenous communities. In Malaysia, oil palm cultivation is responsible for the majority of the country's deforestation.

The current food crisis, high food prices and the impossibility of some people to afford food at these prices, are in great part caused by an increase in land use by biofuel crops, which diminish the availability of land for food crops, or diminish the food supply itself by using food crops such as sugar and corn to make ethanol. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food has labeled biofuels a crime against humanity because of its impact on global food prices.

In Colombia, the producing of ethanol with sugar cane increased the price of panela, a food derived from the cane, which is one of the main staples of the rural population... But the darkest side of the production of biofuels in Colombia is the forced, violent displacement and murder of thousands of people.

Colombia has one of the highest displacement rates in the world. Sources differ on the total number of displaced Colombians. The following numbers reflect only displaced people, and do not include refugees (displaced persons who have emigrated from the country):

- 2 million according to the Colombian government, which has only kept track of the number of displaced people since 2000

- 3 million according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees

- 4 million according to the Advisory Board for Displacement and Human Rights

People in rural Colombia face the threat of displacement on a daily basis, with a national average of two displaced families per hour, and massive displacements occur regularly. On June 4 2008, eight-hundred people were displaced in the Colombian state of Antioquia. In 2007, the Colombian army aerially fumigated coca crops in the state of Narino. Afterwards, armed Colombian troops entered to hand-eradicate the remaining illicit plants. Because of their previous experiences with Colombian military, almost one-thousand people fled their lands to Ecuador in fear for their lives.

Justice for Colombia's refugees and internally displaced persons is not taking place. Although agencies such as the UN-ACNUR and the Colombian government are supposed to provide people fleeing with adequate supplies (for three to six months), oftentimes they lack documentation or never reach the appropriate offices to become registered refugees. Many displaced and refugees have been waiting for years, even decades, to return to their lands or to be compensated. In April 2008, the restitution of over one million hectares to displaced people that had been approved was suspended indefinitely. The impunity of crimes of displacement is worrisome: only 1% of this crimes have gone to trial.

The majority of Colombia's displaced were not poor, but owned land and houses in Colombia's beautiful countryside. "What we know for sure is that someone is taking these millions of hectares," reported the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. As with the unclear number of refugees and displaced, the numbers vary for the amount of their land lost. The most cited statistic is from 6 to 7 million hectares.

Gaviotas

Gaviotas, meaning seagulls, is the name of an "eco-community" of 200 people in the Colombian Eastern state of Vichada. It was founded in 1971 by Paolo Lugari, an Italian environmental engineer who received an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 for his work in creating Gaviotas. The place has been praised by the United Nations as a "model of sustainable development," and Lugari was named "the inventor of the world" by Colombian Noble Prize in literature winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

One of the most interesting aspects of Gaviotas is the way in which Lugari obtained the land: he squattered it. Basically, he acquired 25,000 acres for free in the 1970s, making use of a Colombian law that allowed people to take land occupied and worked for over two years (this statute was suspended in 2006). On top of this, the Colombian government "donated" an additional 43,000 hectares to be used in Gaviotas II, the first part of the megaproject, which involves the planting of 120,000 hectares with African palm and pines for biodiesel production.

In the 1970s, at the onset of the OPEC embargo and its result of raising oil prices, The United Nations gave Lugari a substantial research grant. Gaviotas' energy projects have since continued to be funded by the UN, the Colombian government, foreign governments, non-governmental organizations, and private businesses.

The first biodiesel plant in Colombia was built in Gaviotas in 2004 with the help of Colorado's company Boulder Biodiesel and the University of Colorado. Since then, the owners have been planning to expand biofuel production. The joint plan of Gaviotas and the Colombian government is to plant about 6 million hectares with biodiesel producing trees, transforming Colombia into a top biodiesel exporter.

Several foreign investors have expressed interest in the megaproject, estimated to cost billions: JP Morgan, the European Union, the governments of Japan and Spain, and national banks. Gaviotas is also financing its African palm plantation through the use of profits from the sale of bottled water.

Investors expect a population of one to five million African palm workers to move to the area. These workers will have to come from other regions, and following the country's trends, this means that the project will host either displaced peoples or demobilized armed groups as workers.

In February 2008, in the state of Meta (bordering the state of Vichada where Gaviotas stands), the Colombian government had promised to resettle 800 displaced families in 17,000 hectares, but in the last minute backed from the offer, and instead granted the land to African palm business.

In defense of this move, president Uribe said that the solution to the refugee resettling problem was to "associate these two groups [the displaced with the African palm companies]".

He specified that the government would generously support this venture by not requiring any taxes from the companies, that instead would pay this money to the displaced as salaries.

Furthermore, he said that if these lands were granted to the displaced, broken into small pieces for each family, the land would become a "non-productive slum of poverty." He also said the government was about to give the land to the displaced, but there were "no displaced peoples nearby."

Sometimes, the displaced are forced to sign 50-year contracts. In this way, the landless provide cheap labor, guaranteed by the state. When land is given back to displaced people, this is done under the condition that they participate in biofuel projects, dedicating their crops and labor to the production of sugar cane and palm for the production of these. These were the reasons for the strikes in the state of Meta in 2003 and 2005 regarding sugar cane growers, and in 2005 and 2008 regarding palm workers.

It is interesting to note that Gaviotas plans to plant 6 million hectares with African palm to create profits for MNCs, and this is the same number of hectares believed to be lost by Colombia's displaced population.

Forced Displacement for Biodiesel in Choco

The Choco state in Colombia's Pacific coast has the world's greatest concentration of biodiversity. For centuries, the Choco rainforest has been the home of indigenous people and the descendants of African slaves, developing one of the country's richest cultures.

For several decades, the Colombian government and foreign interests have been interested in making a profit from Choco. In 1968, the government agency, Corporacion Autonoma Regional Para el Desarrollo Sostenible del Choco, (National Corporation for the Development of Choco, CODECHOCO) was established to plan the region's resource management. The first recommendation CODECHOCO made in the 1960s was to plant oil palm in the region. Interestingly, the first director of CODECHOCO was nobody but Paolo Lugari, the founder of Gaviotas.

Using UN-UNICEF funds, the Colombian government began the Development Plan for the Pacific Coast (Pladeicop) and Plan Pacifico, centered around the development of energy and forestry projects in the region.

A few years later, several banana-growing Chocoan communities, thousands of people, were violently displaced and their land taken by African palm producers. To this day, they have not been able to return to their lands, now fully covered with African palm plantations.

On February 24, 2007, the Colombian army led the three-day long Operation Genesis, that was said to be an attack against the guerrillas of the Fuerzas Revolucionarias Armadas de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC). Hundreds of soldiers of the XVII Brigade and paramilitaries from the AUC Brigade "Autodefensas Campesinas de Cordoba y Uraba" (now called "Bloque Elmer Cardenas") bombed and invaded Chocoan villages. 113 people were killed, and over 4000 people were forced to leave their homes in fear. The human rights abuses during the operation included machine-gun shooting against the unarmed populations, setting fire to their properties and crops, rape, and disappearances.

"There never was a combat. There was no guerrilla," reported the Inter-ecclesiastical commission on Justice and Pace. There were also no investigations, judgements, nor punishments on the part of the Colombian government against the perpetrators, who are accused of crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism.

Soon after the Chocoans' departure, private companies began establishing plantations of African palm for the production of biofuel, with the financial help of the Colombian and U.S. governments.

According to Eustaquio Polo Rivera, the Vice President of the Major Leadership Council of the Chocoan Curvaradó River Basin, soon after the massacre, the police collected signatures from the displaced to build army bases in the region, saying that these would protect the people when they returned to their land. But this was not what happened. According to Polo, the signatures were used to forge documents stating that the villagers approved the palm plantations.

The remaining inhabitants were forced to sell their land through tactics of intimidation: "They told us that we should sell to them, and that if we didn’t want to sell to them, our widows would sell cheaper," tells Polo. He says that two different actors gained control of their lands: several palm oil corporations such as Palma SAA and Palma Curvarado, backed or financed by international interests, and paramilitary bosses.

Soon after the forced migration of Chocoans, the displaced were forced to return, only to legally transfer their land to the new owners. They were coerced into accepting $100 dollars per hectare (the market price of their land at the time was of $5,000 dollars per hectare), and families were obliged to clear their lands' crops and weeds before turning it to the companies.

Since the displaced have lost their major source of income, their lands, they have no alternative but to work as peons in the palm plantations, where, if they are paid at all, they receive the amount of $15 cents per planted palm.

"The strategy has been to displace people, and once the territory is abandoned, the palm tree agribusiness occupy them ... It is this silent history of disappeared forests transformed into plantations. It is the history of ancestral cultures transformed into a palm-dependent proletariat. It is these voices demanding a halt to the destruction called for by biodiesel defenders" (Roa: 2007).

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Michelle Andujar was born in Cali, Colombia, in the midst of the 1980s cartel wars and moved to Oregon in 2001. She double-majored in Journalism and International Studies at the University of Oregon, where she received scholarships and Academic Honors. She has visited over 20 countries and speaks English, French, Spanish, and some Arabic. Michelle's talent is a welcome addition to the Salem-News.com team; an experienced, well-traveled writer who directs her energies in areas that make a difference. Michelle is now a freelance Spanish interpreter and journalist based in Salem, Oregon. Look for her reports on Salem-News.com that will range from Mideast political affairs to local issues and events. You can write to Michelle Andujar at mandujar@uoregon.edu