Hanneke Mol

‘A Gift from the Tropics to the World’: Power, Harm, and Palm Oil

In the context of a professed energy crisis and a climate crisis spiralling out of control, highly biodiverse natural and sociocultural environments are giving way to vast monocultures of presumably carbonneutral energy crops. One such crop is the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis).1 In Colombia, the largest producer of palm oil in the Americas, the official narrative of the National Federation of Oil Palm Growers describes ‘the world of the oil palm’ as A warm and humid one, of shades of green, inhabited by hundreds of animal and plant species. But it is also a world of human relations and labour, where the rural and the urban, the national and the international, agricultural, extractive and industrial activities meet. It is a world where diverse and complementary endeavours merge to form a chain of production, generating wealth and fomenting social development. (Fedepalma, 2006: 2)

Agro-Industry Expansion Through “Strategic Alliances”: The Shifting Dynamics of Palm Oil-Related Dispossession

In order to open up new terrains to capital accumulation, agro-industries expand into, transform, and, in the process, frequently destroy socio-natural spaces where a noncapitalist logic of production and subsistence hitherto predominated. The expropriations upon which such capital accumulation rests have more often than not been of a forcible and violent character. Marx, writing about the “primitive accumulation” that separates producers from the means of production (1990, p. 875), noted that what he viewed as the prehistory of capital is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Harvey (2003), among others, has pointed to the continuity of the features of expropriation described by Marx as primitive accumulation, coining the term “accumulation by dispossession” to refer to this (see also Gutierrez-Gomez, this volume).

Colombia’s Contested Grounds

Towards the end of August 2016, a peace agreement between the government of President Santos and the FARC was reached but when put to the Colombian people for approval in a referendum held on October 2, 2016, the agreement was rejected with a slight majority of votes.

Introduction: The Theft of Nature and the Poisoning of the Land in Latin America

Over the last 25 years, Green Criminology has developed into a fertile area of study that now attracts scholars from around the world with a wide range of research interests and theoretical orientations. It spans the micro to the macro–from work on individual-level environmental harms to business/corporate crimes to state transgressions–and includes research conducted from both mainstream and critical theoretical perspectives, as well as arising from interdisciplinary efforts. Nonetheless—and in line with the proposal for a Southern Criminology put forward by Carrington and colleagues (2016)—it is still the case that much work needs to be done to ensure that the environmental crimes and harms affecting the lands and peoples of the Global South are brought to the forefront of a truly transnational Green Criminology. This volume makes a contribution to this process as the first text to focus specifically on examples from Latin America.

The Play of Power in the Politics of Harm

Many of the adverse social and environmental impacts associated with the palm oil industry that were mentioned in the previous chapter exceed strictly legalistic definitions of crime.

Preparing the Ground

In the previous chapter, I sketched the broader context within which to consider the operations of the palm oil industry, and the corresponding politics of harm, in the Colombian Pacific coast region.

Conclusion: To Miss the Forest for the Trees?

In sharp contrast to government and industry depictions of palm oil as a source of progress and prosperity, for many inhabitants of Colombia’s Pacific coast palm oil is not considered to generate the conditions for a better tomorrow.

Reaping the Fruits

In industry discourse, oil palm is praised as a “social and ecological crop” (La agroindustria de la palma de aceite en Colombia, Fedepalma, Bogota, 2006). Whether palm oil production is really all that social and ecological differs greatly according to what, and whose, criteria are followed.

Palm Oil in Colombia: National and Local Context

As mentioned previously, the principal focus of this study lies on the social and environmental harms associated with the operations of the palm oil industry in the Pacific coast region of Colombia.