Colombia

The price of gold is rising for the tenth consecutive year. As a result, more and more investors, financial market operators and central banks are turning to gold as a safe haven in the face of global economic instability. This has troubling consequences, because gold mining is one of the most destructive and polluting of all mining activities.

Colombia: oil-palm plantations, violation of human rights and Afro-descendent communities’ quest for true dignity When you talk about the violation of human rights, you must talk about Colombia. When you talk about the huge expansion of oil-palm plantations, you must talk about Colombia. Both issues go hand in hand in that country

The Chocó is a biogeographical region that forms part of the neotropics (meaning that it contains the largest area of tropical rainforest). Its high rainfall levels, tropical temperatures and isolation have helped make it one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions as well. In Colombia it encompasses the Pacific Coast region and, among others, the department of Chocó, located between the jungles of Darién and the basins of the Atrato and San Juan Rivers.

In Colombia the State resorts to criminalizing social and grass-roots organizations as a method of repression aimed at imposing by force the global market’s agribusiness, large scale infrastructure works and the extraction of natural resources involving high human, social and environmental costs.

It seems like a slap in the face. The oil palm agro-industry has chosen precisely 16 October, World Food Sovereignty Day, and the Latin American country most hit by oil palm – Colombia – to hold the first Latin American meeting of the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.”

Since the beginning of the decade, all the areas of expansion of oil palm plantations have coincided geographically with areas of paramilitary presence and expansion, to the extent that some of the new plantations being developed have been financed as farming projects for the same demobilised paramilitary from the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – United Self-Defence Force of Colombia) who had previously made incursions into these very areas.

The municipality of Puerto Wilches, located in the Central Zone defined by the Agricultural Plan for the Implementation of the Biodiesel Programme, is home to much of the agricultural activity in the department (province) of Santander. According to the Agricultural Plan, there are roughly 21,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the municipality, representing 91.7% of the department’s palm oil output.

On 28 March 2006, in the midst of strong pressure from the Government and the timber industry, Law 1021 was adopted in Colombia, better known as the “Forestry Law” (see WRM Bulletin No. 105), enabling major timber investors to have easy and privileged access to the country’s forests, thus compromising the future of these forests, both public and those belonging to Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.

The disappearance of the forest would seem to be the premise in the various political instruments created in Colombia for the forestry sector. However, most of them euphemistically set out objectives for conservation and protection.

Between 2001 and 2005, plywood panels manufactured by Pizano S.A., one of the largest timber companies in Colombia, could be purchased in the U.S. The panel was manufactured in part using timber from one of the plantations certified by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), and in part from the natural forests in northeast Colombia, forests in which guerrilla organizations, paramilitary groups and the army fight for control of the territory and its natural resources. Consequently, these plywood panels were stained with blood.

As member of a group of international observers, invited by the Justice and Peace organization, we had the opportunity to visit an area in Colombia (Curvaradó) where ten years ago the local communities suffered from a violent eviction process and are now returning to their territories.

The Peoples’ Permanent Tribunal – Colombian Chapter met on 26 and 27 February 2007 in Lower Atrato to bring to trial transnational companies focusing on the issue of biodiversity and exploitation of natural resources in Colombia. The participating communities and social organizations – including environmental organizations – accused Smurfit Kapa Carton de Colombia “of violating human, environmental, social and cultural rights.