Colombia: Biodiesel from oil palm
The Western
world, and in particular the countries of the North,
gave in to addiction to fossil fuels. This path has led to something
that today nobody can doubt: climate change. Many solutions have
been put forth to face it, but most of them let humanity’s race
towards suicide continue as vigorously as before.
Biofuel mega-projects
are some of the proposals to solve the problem. However, have
those who submitted them as an alternative measured the consequences
their creation could have on important ecosystems, peoples and
culture? In the first place, this article delimits the steps taken
to open up the field to these projects, focussing in particular
on the implications of planting African palms, from which one
of the biofuels to be produced is derived.
Biofuel has its own
story. Briefly, during the 1973 energy crisis, Brazil reconverted
part of its sugar industry to produce ethanol and became the leading
exporter. Today, Colombia wants to follow this example and become
a producing power, particularly of bio-ethanol and biodiesel.
In 2001, Law 693 was
issued, linked to Law 939 of 2004, opening up the way for biofuel
production. Law 693 stipulates that Colombian gasoline must contain
10 percent ethanol by 2009 and in a period of between 15 and 20
years, it should gradually reach a proportion of 25 percent.
Whereas law 939 of 2004, fosters the production and marketing
of biodiesel for diesel motors, at a percentage of 5%.
Since the end of 2005,
the production from the sugar cane industry in Cauca, Providencia,
Manuelita and Mayagüez (all located in the Department of the Cauca
Valley, in the West of the country), in
addition to the industry in Risaralda, has been close on one million
litres daily of bio-ethanol, aimed at satisfying the demand of
the west of the country and the Bogotá Savannah. The talk is now
of assembling 27 other plants scattered over 17 departments of
the country, to extend the blend of 10% with gasoline throughout
the whole Colombian territory. According to the forecasts of the
National Fuel Federation, by 2010 internal consumption could double
simply by rising the percentage of blend to 15%. By then,
Colombia will have the capacity to export a figure close on 2,300,000
litres per day of ethanol.
A similar legislation
to that referred to above is being prepared for biodiesel, derived
from African palm trees. This plant already has a derivate
used for food, which is the one most commonly known today: palm
oil, with a production of 600 thousand tons. But in fact, it is
biodiesel that is of interest to us in this article.
Before going into figures,
it is important to say that the major beneficiaries from bio-ethanol
legislation – and now from legislation being prepared for biodiesel
– are precisely the sugar cane agro-industrialists from the Cauca
Valley whose industries were mentioned on discussing ethanol,
and in the case of biodiesel, it is the palm agro-industrialists
who will benefit.
The consumption of diesel
oil in the country for automotive transport is growing at a faster
rate than that of gasoline, exceeding the national oil company
Ecopetrol’s refining capacity, so the country imports 5% of the
domestic consumption of diesel oil. Thus an opportunity has arisen
for African palm agro-industrialists who have year by year, increased
the area under cultivation.
In Colombia the expansion
of these plantations has shown a sustained growth. In the mid-sixties
18 thousand hectares were under production. By 2003, there were
over 188 thousand hectares and presently, approximately 300 thousand
have been planted. Furthermore, seven plants are being assembled
in different palm regions of the country, at an approximate cost
of 100 million dollars. According to the Colombian palm
trade union, Fedepalma, since 2001 Colombia is the main producer
of palm oil in America and fourth largest producer on a world
level, after Indonesia, Malaysia and Nigeria. Out of the
total oil production, 35% is exported.
However, several economic
studies consider international palm oil markets to be insecure,
insofar as world production increases day by day and prices continue
to be low. Nevertheless, agro-industrial palm projects have been
a priority for the present Government and are promoted, particularly
in regions such as the Colombian Pacific, the plains in the east
and the Caribbean region, as the characteristics of these regions
make them ideal for the development of these plantations.
The target is to reach one million hectares in a few years time.
Experts on this type
of agro-industrial development have denounced that these crops
are used to launder money from drug trafficking and as a mechanism
used by para-military groups to force displacement of the population
as their aim is to take over important and rich regions. Their
strategy has been to displace the people and once the land is
abandoned palm-growing companies occupy them. Jiguamiandó and
Curvaradó, two municipalities in the Pacific region are outstanding
examples of this strategy. The Urapalma Company illegally occupied
these Afro-Colombian territories.
These Chocó communities
received the deeds for their lands in November 2000 after years
of reiterated violations of their human rights, nine years after
the National Constitution had recognized the territorial rights
of Afro-descendent and Indigenous communities.
The deeds were received at a time when the communities were displaced.
On their return they found their territories occupied with oil
palm plantations. A long drawn out legal process started with
claims by the communities to recover their territories. This process
was tainted with major irregularities to favour the oil palm companies.
Something similar is
taking place in the Tumaco region (located in the South of Colombia,
on the border with neighbouring Ecuador). The communities have
also gone through forced displacement and have been threatened
and it is thus that the companies or even the State itself propose
that the members of community councils, as an alternative to enable
them to stay in their territory, become “rural sector entrepreneurs.”
In other words, they are being forced to involve themselves in
partnerships or productive chains with palm oil companies.
In this way, territories that used to be rainforests have now
become monoculture palm plantations, depriving the Afro-descendent
communities of their culture and their territory and destroying
regions that are among the most diverse on the Planet.
Last June, President
Uribe declared at the Fedepalma Congress in Villavicencio the
following:
“[…] I would beg […]
[the Minister of Agriculture] to fit into quarantine Tumaco entrepreneurs
and the Afro-descendent compatriots and not let them leave the
office, locking them in until they reach an agreement. It has
to be this way…Lock them in and propose as a case [sic], that
the State contributes, that they reach agreements on the use of
these lands and the government contributes risk capital resources.
And propose a date and tell them: gentlemen, we are in conclave
and we will not leave this place until we reach an agreement […]
Because here we must recognize what is good and what is bad, in
this Meta and in Casanare and in what is starting to yield in
the Guaviare, some extraordinary growth of the palm, not in Tumaco,
no. And Tumaco, which has the road, go a little further north,
that area of Guapi, El Charco with excellent conditions and without
a single palm tree, full of coca that we must eradicate […]”.
These declarations filled
the Afro-descendent communities with wrath and they responded
vigorously to the President of the Republic.
“If this oil palm, Mr.
President is your mega pilot project, it is not one on our ethnic
territories. Worse still, if it were it would lead to most serious
environmental, social and cultural damage. We affirm this on the
basis of what we have seen of this monoculture plantation since
the end of the sixties to the present, that is to say, over thirty-five
years now, suffering from the impacts of over twenty thousand
hectares of forced sowing of this ‘Plantation within camera’ which
still continues to expand in a violent way in our collective territories.”
(Letter to the President of the Republic from the ethnic territorial
authorities and legal representatives of the Community Councils
of Afro-descendent communities from the Kurrulao ethnic territory
(Colombian South Pacific).
With these proposals
for biodiesel production, the palm companies and the
promoters of these companies now have new reasons to continue
growing. But plantation stories are painful.
They are stained with the blood and tears of the Afro-descendent
and peasant communities of the Pacific, of Magdalena Medio,
and the Colombian Caribbean. It is the silent story of forests
disappearing to become plantations. It is the story of ancestral
cultures becoming oil palm proletariats. These voices are clamouring
to stop the destruction proposed by those defending biodiesel.
By: Tatiana Roa Avendaño,
Censat Agua Viva, e-mail:
hipochicho@hotmail.com; www.censat.org.
Sources: People’s defence office. Defence Resolution N° 39 of
2005; El Espectador. “Ley de tierras podría prestarse al lavado
de activos”, October 21 2006; Gestión del Instituto Colombiano
de Desarrollo Rural – Incoder”, August 2006; Salinas, Yamile,
los vericuetos de la palma aceitera, Abdala, 10 November 2006;
Procuraduría General de la Nación. “Análisis de la ejecución de
la Reforma Agraria y la la Gestión del Instituto Colombiano de
Desarrollo Rural – Incoder”, August 2006. Web sites visited: Revista
Semillas, www.semillas.org.co;
Fedepalma. www.fedepalma.org
