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Rooted in Violence: The Expansion of Palm Oil in Meta

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Civil War and Uncivil Development

Part of the book series: Rethinking Political Violence ((RPV))

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Abstract

Continuing to acknowledge that civil war and development are not spread uniformly across countries, this chapter analyses the development of palm oil in Meta, the region of Colombia that leads the country’s palm oil sector. Colombia’s palm oil is increasingly exported to international markets. This chapter thus gives insights into how violence can facilitate emerging markets in civil war economies to enter and compete in the globalised economy. The evidence suggests that violence in Meta has benefited the palm oil sector. Acting in concert, Colombia’s military and paramilitary groups have forcibly displaced large swathes of Meta’s citizens, which has cleared land for palm oil cultivation and enabled palm oil firms to expand their operations. The paramilitaries subsequently provide security for these plantations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The use of such bio-fuels has been criticised as being an attractive ‘quick fix’ to reduce green house gas emissions, which could, according to Greenpeace (2012), make the situation worse: it is argued that the need to clear forests, compounded by the requirement to drain and burn peatlands to cultivate palm oil, releases more carbon emissions than burning fossil fuels.

  2. 2.

    In spite of these costs, the number of small-scale growers increased during the 1990s and 2000s, aided by government financing schemes. However, many small-scale producers accrue sizeable debts and subsequently enter into production agreements with large palm oil companies (for example, Mingorance 2006: 13; Leech 2009: 2) .

  3. 3.

    The laws and decrees include Law 788 (2002), Law 939 (2004), Law 1111 (2006), Decree 383 (2007) and Decree 4051 (2007).

  4. 4.

    As will be discussed, blight (‘bud rot’) is responsible for falling cultivation in the Western Zone.

  5. 5.

    Vistahermosa is also commonly written as Vista Hermosa.

  6. 6.

    Following the death of Mono Jojoy , the Eastern Bloc was renamed in 2010 as the Bloque Comandante Jorge Briceño.

  7. 7.

    Mingorance (2006) gives a detailed account of the palm oil industry in Colombia. In Mingorance’s report, an overview of the violations of Colombian and international law in palm growing regions is provided, which is based on the accounts of the affected communities, social organisations, human rights groups and reports from Colombian government agencies. It is worth noting, however, that Mingorance does not quantify these violations and does not give the relevant chronology. Instead, Mingorance provides a list of violations committed in these palm growing regions, which are subsequently outlined on a map of Colombia.

  8. 8.

    Mingorance (2006) provides a slightly different model on page 24 of the same report, which instead encompasses four basic elements.

  9. 9.

    One event recorded by CINEP is excluded from the HRPV data used in this chapter, more specifically, a case of mass forced displacement perpetrated by the paramilitaries in 2002. This event – in which 6,000 people were displaced in Mapiripán – is excluded because (1) the event can skew the data in terms of the intensity and authors of HRPV during the 2000s and (2) the high number of IDPs in this event make it difficult to be precise with regard to those displaced in Meta and those displaced in the neighbouring department of Guaviare (see CINEP n.d.). Moreover, as an episode of mass forced displacement , this event should be captured in Acción Social’s data used in this chapter. It is also worth noting that, due to the problems noted in Chap. 4 regarding the recording of false positives, the false positive extrajudicial killings as recorded by the GOC are not directly included in the data employed in this chapter, especially due to potential overlap with CINEP’s data. Nevertheless, inclusion of the full 424 false positive victims recorded by the GOC in Meta would have a limited effect on the data, augmenting HRPV victims attributable to the public armed forces from 57 per cent to 61 per cent.

  10. 10.

    This trend is also consistent with longer-term patterns in Colombia’s conflict, whereby levels of violence vary across different periods (for instance, see data from UCDP 2013). Therefore, broader levels of HRPV in Meta (Fig. 5.3) could rise again.

  11. 11.

    More recent data were not available.

  12. 12.

    Official figures indicate that 100 hectares of land were cultivated for palm oil in Mapiripán in 2009; see Gobernación del Meta (2010). It may be the case, however, that cultivation increased during the 2010s, a trend that would not be captured in the data that were available and used in this chapter.

  13. 13.

    While there are other areas of palm oil cultivation in western Colombia, such as the department of Chocó, the Western Zone of African palm cultivation, as categorized by Fedepalma , includes only palm oil cultivation in Tumaco , Nariño (see Fedepalma 2007).

  14. 14.

    As noted in Chap. 4, following this analysis and at the time of writing, data on ethnicity and displacement were made unavailable by Acción Social/ GOC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lecturer in International Relations, University of Salford, Salford, UK

    David Maher

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  1. David Maher
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Maher, D. (2018). Rooted in Violence: The Expansion of Palm Oil in Meta. In: Civil War and Uncivil Development. Rethinking Political Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66580-1_5

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