Socio-Environmental
Conflicts Caused by Palm Oil Farming: The Case of María La Baja in Montes De
María[1]
Alen Castaño
Anthropologist
and sociologist. Researcher and member of the Interculturality, State and Society Research Group of the Institute
of Intercultural Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cali.
Colombia.
Email: alencastano@gmail.com / alencastano@yahoo.com.
ORCID
ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2803-8839
Resumen[2]
El presente texto analiza cómo la implementación del
proyecto agroindustrial de la palma aceitera en el municipio de María La Baja,
ha generado conflictos territoriales en la región de Montes de María durante
los últimos años. Del mismo modo, se identifican dinámicas de poder y
marginalización social desarrolladas por los procesos de configuración
territorial que trae consigo este proyecto neoliberal, frente a las lógicas de
resistencia social por parte de los habitantes de María La Baja.
Palabras Clave: Palma Aceitera;
María La Baja; Conflicto Socioambiental; Territorio; Montes de María.
The present text analyzes how the
implementation of the palm oil agro-industrial project in the municipality of
María La Baja, has generated territorial conflicts in the Montes de María
region in recent years. Power dynamics and social marginalization associated
with the processes of territorial configuration of this neoliberal project are
also identified, an contrasted with the logic of social resistance on the part
of the inhabitants of María La Baja.
Keywords:
Palm Oil; María La Baja; Socioenvironmental Conflict; Territory; Montes de
María.
Tipología: Reporte de caso
Recibido: 26//07/2017
Evaluado: 23/10/2017
Aceptado: 29/11/2017
Traducido: 26/09/2018
Disponible en
línea:
28/09/2018
Como citar
este artículo: Castaño, A. (2018). Socio-Environmental
Conflicts Caused by Palm Oil Farming: The Case of María La Baja in Montes De
María. Jangwa Pana, 17 (2), XX-XX.
Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.21676/16574923.2388
Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.21676/16574923.2388
Introduction
The primary objective of this text is to
analyze socio-environmental conflicts through a specific case study, which
relates to the establishment of oil palms as a large-scale productive project
in the municipality of María La Baja, in the region of Montes de María. In
order to realize this objective, the process of implementing this
agro-industrial model within the municipality is described, exploring the
economic, social and territorial consequences faced by the communities residing
in this geographical space; as well as the strategies of resistance against
these capitalist logics employed by the social communities. The elements
identified are addressed through an interpretative framework that focuses on
the study of environmental conflicts, which allows us to understand the
structural conditions that have helped to shape such agro-industrial processes
in the region.
First, the theoretical framework that supports
this study is explained detail. Specifically, the article defines a social
conflict of an environmental nature, some notions about distributive justice,
environmental racism, social metabolism and its implications in the territory;
as well as the conception of economic rationality and the duality of
denaturalization of the nature / naturalization of the commodification of
nature.
Second, the main aspects that make it possible
to understand how the palm oil project was implemented in the territory under
study are described. This process involves questioning the logic of oil palms
as a constituent element of the neo-extractivist paradigm; then the power
dynamics that are generated by an agro-industrial territorialization in Montes
de María are addressed, and finally, what happens inside the municipality
concerning oil palms will be examined in detail.
Theoretical considerations facing socio-environmental conflicts
According to Homer-Dixon (1994), social
conflicts of an environmental nature commonly occur in poor and marginalized
societies, which have little capacity to cushion themselves both from environmental
scarcity and from social crises. Such conditions contribute to the constitution
of a direct relationship between violence and environmental scarcity, a
conflict that is fomented in those geographical spaces where the population
lives with scarce resources. This generates not only a social marginalization
(growth/displacement of the population, unequal access to natural resources,
social inequality, etc.) through parameters of ecological and environmental
impact (ecological deterioration, scarcity of resources, unsustainable
agricultural practices) but also marginalization based on the notion of
distributive justice.
According to John Rawls (1986), distributive
justice refers to an assignment that does not necessarily coincide with the
paradigm of a strict egalitarianism[3]
that, by developing dynamics of inequality, the effect of distributive justice
makes the least advantaged within a society, in material terms, better off than
one of strict egalitarianism. In this model, the distribution of goods and
services is made among the members of society at a specific time, determining
the acceptability of the resulting conditions.
Based on the above, the term justice is
addressed not only through the notion of recognition or under the logic of the
distribution of goods; but through the dynamics of participation and the
development of capacities that individuals can generate within society.
Therefore, the term justice constitutes a basic tool that allows society to
access diverse social, economic, political and cultural scenarios that help to
confront the multiple logics of inequality present in society (Schlosberg,
2007).
Considering the above, it is important to
clarify two elements: the first is that, when speaking about distributive
justice, one should not fall into material reductionism, but rather enter into
the field of the symbolic and the intangible. In this case, the social, the
cultural and the symbolic are a fundamental part of the notion of distribution
within the term of justice; and this holistic notion of the concept can deal
with the different relations of domination and oppression that are woven and
institutionalized in any society (Schlosberg, 2007). The second precision
revolves around the need to acknowledge that the environmental conflict in
distributive justice should not be seen only from a negative perspective, as it
may also have positive aspects from a society. In this case, when confronted
with the problem of scarcity, awareness can be generated in the society which
allows the increase of demands or the struggle for an institutional change
(Homer-Dixon, 1994).
The problem of environmental racism, according
to Bullard (1995), refers to the problematic conditions that are directly
related to the areas where marginal societies are geographically located
(ethnicity, color, socioeconomic strata, etc.). That is, this problem is
directly linked to a problem of economic and environmental inequality, in
strategically selected geographical places for the implementation of a
capitalist logic. According to this perspective, the institutionalization of a
fair and sustainable environment is questioned where there are practices that
meet human needs without sacrificing the ecological integrity of the land or
threatening the social and territorial rights of certain social groups.
Part of this understanding involves the
questioning of those appreciations of economic sustainability due to
environmental impacts in specific regions where capitalist and neoliberal
actions are implemented. In this case, Martínez-Alier (2004) proposes
considering those indicators or fixed indexes of (un) sustainability that
examine the economy as a form of "environmental metabolism." A social
metabolism that increasingly consumes raw materials due to the logic of social and
economic growth worldwide, which, due to their rational of configuration and
consumption, generates uneven dynamics in the economic, political and social
scenarios.
This notion of environmental metabolism of
Martínez-Alier (2004) is strongly related to that of the economic rationality
of Leff (2005), which refers to the continuum of economic progress that, when
combined with the current globalization dynamics, generates affectations in the
natural world. That is, everything related to those economic questions about
the natural, where the externalities of the contemporary metabolism have taken
nature to its limits.
It is from this economic rationality where
logics of homogenization are generated in the patterns of production and
consumption, which undermines sustainability at the local, regional and global
levels, and are based on the practices of ecological and cultural diversity. In
this way, nature is becoming a "natural capital," in new forms of
economic valorization; that generates a rational-economic paradigm, new
geopolitics where nature is denaturalized by inserting it into discourses of
ecological (un) sustainability that make it a commercial figure for the logic
of global capital. Under this interpretive framework of economic rationality,
two different but complementary processes are established: the denaturalization
of nature and the naturalization of the commodification of nature (Leff, 2005).
Based on the above, both in Martínez-Alier
(2004) and Leff (2005), a study is begun on the dynamics of distribution (very
similar to the judgments on distributive justice), where not only the economic
but also the ecological components are taken into account, highlighting the
valuations and assignments of natural resources and environmental services within
societies, especially those in developing countries. As a result,
Martínez-Alier (2004) proposes that in cases of ecological distributive
conflicts, decision-making within those contexts where socio-environmental
conflicts are present should form part of the analysis. That is, the analysis
of both incommensurable values (issues that cannot be measured in economic
terms) and irresolvable uncertainties that can lead to the implementation of a
capitalist economy in the interior of a given territory.
Accordingly, the patterns of use of resources
could be understood not only through an analysis of the implementation of a
capitalist economy but also from the different power relations and income
distribution present within that territory. Thus, an unequal ecological
distribution can be understood, where power relations can be changed through
institutional and social strengthening.
To conclude, we want to clarify that all these
new geopolitical configurations that awaken new economic and ecological forms
of the environmental and the social, are manifested in the territory where
spaces are politicized according to a revaluation of the habited space (Leff,
2005). An example of a politicized territory that has been shaped as an
essential geopolitical space is the municipality of María La Baja in the Montes
de María region. A municipality that during the last decades has been fighting
against the propagation of vast expanses of oil palms in its territory.
The oil palms: constituent link of a neo-extractivist chain
For some decades, the neo-extractivist
paradigm in Latin America has been characterized by interdependencies between
national and global transformation processes. Within this paradigm one could
locate the agro-industrial dynamics that revolve around the global demand for
raw and agricultural materials, and that are subject to prices set in the
worldwide market.
The production of biofuels in Latin America
has increased as a result of the adoption large scale single crop farming, of
crops such as sugarcane, soybeans and oil palms. This model brings with it the
transformation of the territory historically constructed in the regions, into
socio-productive spaces that depend not only on the international market, but
also national policies and price volatility.
Gudynas (2009) argues that the
neo-extractivist development model has had significant impacts on territories
in those areas that have remained in situations of marginality in relation to
the advance of capital; succeeding in imposing, at the same time, new geography
based on extractivist practices or agro-industrial production. This is the case
of the municipality of María La Baja, in the Montes de María region. A region
that in recent decades has been in a situation of economic, political and
social vulnerability, due to structural conditions such as violence, poverty,
and state absence.
Palm oil is produced mainly in vast
monocultures, and its life cycle revolves around 25 to 30 years. Accordingly,
its implementation is linked to the long-term transformation of the territory,
where new logics on the control and land use are constructed based on the
institutionalization of private property rights (Peluso and Lund, 2011).
From the implementation of agro-industrial
activities, in this case, the oil palm, new logics of nature are created that
are configured according to a capitalist valorization and new localities that,
in turn, alter and generate new representations and territorial structures. In
this way, such practices in a territory could be classified as an environmental
conflict or as a conflict over land use based on what Bebbington (2007)
describes, since these:
…are also conflicts about the production of
the territory; about the type of relationship between society and the
environment that should prevail in a territory; on how these territories should
be governed and by whom; about the meaning that these spaces should have; and
about the types of ties that these territories should have with others
(Bebbington, 2007, p.33).
Power and agro-industrial territorialization in Montes de María
Located within one of the six major regions
that make up the Colombian geography (the Caribbean), the Montes de María are
composed of 15 municipalities belonging to 2 different departments. In the
Department of Bolívar there are the municipalities of Córdoba, El Carmen de
Bolívar, María La Baja, San Jacinto, San Juan Nepomuceno, and Zambrano; while
the municipalities of Chalán, Colosó, Los Palmitos, Morroa, Ovejas, San Antonio
de Palmito, San Onofre, Tolúviejo and Corozal are located in the department of
Sucre. 396,000 hectares (3,960 km2) is the total area of the municipalities
corresponding to the Department of Bolívar, while the municipalities in Sucre
form an area of 284,800 hectares (2,848 km2) (Rodríguez, 2016). Therefore, the
total geographical area that comprises this territory is 680,800 hectares
(6,808 km2).
This region was marked by the dynamics of
violence which developed within the territory. The presence of multiple illegal
armed actors generated large waves of forced displacement, due to the attacks
and massacres of the population. As a result, dynamics of abandonment and
dispossession of the lands developed in the region. In the municipalities of
Montes de María that correspond to the department of Sucre[4], 4,172 hectares were
identified in Ovejas and 3,018 hectares in San Onofre, with a total of 7,190
hectares; while in the municipalities corresponding to Bolívar, 71,862 hectares
were abandoned. With the municipalities of El Carmen de Bolívar with 54,312 hectares,
San Jacinto with 4,758 hectares, Zambrano with 3,713 hectares and San Juan
Nepomuceno with 2,683 hectares (Reyes, 2009).
Regarding the municipality of María La Baja,
we should highlight the great violations of human rights that have occurred in
recent years. This municipality is socio-demographically afro-descendent, where
more than 90% of the population identifies as having African ancestry.
According to Victorino (2011), in 2010, after the consolidation phase of
paramilitary groups, 17,680 displaced persons were registered in this
municipality; a significant number when one considers that Maria La Baja had at
the time a little more than 45,000 inhabitants.
As a result of this intense process of forced
displacement, considerable impacts can be observed in the use and access of
rural lands in the municipality of María La Baja. According to the Single
Registry of Abandoned Land and Territory (RUPTA, Spanish acronym), 21,785
hectares of the 54,700 hectares in the municipality were abandoned. This dynamic
of land abandonment allowed the legalization and normalization of territorial
dispossession based on administrative and judicial procedures. The
aforementioned affected the concentration of land just at the time when there
is evidence of greater displacement and abandonment of land by the peasant
population of the municipality.
Likewise, there is evidence of a relationship
between the massive purchases of land and the era of violence in the region.
Lands that are currently dedicated to the establishment of agro-industrial
projects, as is the case of those purchased by the "Friends of the Montes
de María Corporation," a group of businessmen from Antioquia that has
purchased approximately more than 60,000 hectares in recent years (León, 2009).
Purchases of lands that, despite having been made in a context of systematic
displacement and violence, enjoy legal sanction, due to their registration
through the official procedures defined by the authorities.
Oil palm in María La Baja
According to CEPAL (2007), the large areas of
land destined for the production of energy crops generate significant changes
both in the productive agricultural structure and the concentration of
production, land tenure, social and institutional configuration from the
appearance of new actors and powers. The previous processes of territorial
transformation in the means of production and the rural economic structure are
evident in the incursion of oil palms in the municipality of María La Baja.
According to Fedepalma (2011), by the
beginning of the second decade of this millennium, there were approximately
427,368 hectares in rural areas of Colombia with oil palm crops. Of this
amount, 124,340 hectares were registered in the northern area of the country,
representing 29.1% of the total planted palms nationwide (Páez-Redondo,
Blanco-Muñoz, and Ospino-Castro, 2013).
The oil palm arrived in the territory of
Montes de María in 1998, when the irrigation districts of the region were
facing a profound crisis summarized in decline in the production of rice and
plantain, which generated a generalized bankruptcy due to the underutilization
of the soils and the indebtedness after a long period of failed crops
(Aguilera, 2013). During that period, oil palm was inserted in María La Baja
through Hacienda Las Flores[5],
where an agreement was made to implement a pilot plan, in association with the
farmers, to plant 100 hectares of palm (Rivera, 2011).
During the presidential terms of Álvaro Uribe
Vélez (2002-2006 and 2006-2010), there was strong support for this
agro-industrial project through the National Development Plans (in rural and
agricultural areas), where the planting of crops was encouraged to produce
fuels from organic matter, favoring sugarcane and palm oil for the biodiesel
(INDEPAZ, 2013). This can be seen in the extension dedicated to the production
of oil palm in María La Baja between 2001 and 2012, with a registered increase
of 1,358%, from a total of 570 hectares in 2001, to 8,310 hectares in 2012
(Ministry of Agriculture, 2012).
In this way, between 1998 and 2015, the palm
industry in María La Baja was consolidated through the so-called productive
alliances. The business expansion of oil palm cultivation is based on the
integration of the peasant economy to industrial development. In this case, the
regional farmers had land and labor available, and the business community
supported the financing of the project (Ávila, 2015).
According to INDEPAZ (2013), in 2009, 30% of
the palm plantations in María La Baja were part of productive alliances. Such a figure allowed the configuration of a
concentration of land and asymmetric relations between the owners of the land
and the entrepreneurs. According to this report, the area planted by small
producers has decreased by 40%, the area cultivated by medium producers has
reduced by 80%; while for large producers it has increased by 98%.
This is how a change in tenure and land use in
María La Baja can be demonstrated. A territory where, before the incursion of
the oil palm, 59.7% of the farms were dedicated to the production of crops,
while 38.7% was used for livestock activities and 1.6% for
production/conservation of forests and stubbles. Thus, between 2001 and 2012,
it is estimated that approximately 4,961 hectares of agricultural land moved to
palm oil production (Herrera and Cumplido, 2015).
The configuration of resistance dynamics
In the territory some logics of resistance to
the dynamics of dispossession have and land grabbing by the palm oil industry
have developed in María La Baja. The community of San José del Playón, which is
articulated to the Montes de Maria Interlocution and Concertation Table,
entered into a project of debate and construction of new forms of rural
development from the peasant bases, committed to strengthening of agriculture
family, diversified food production and the implementation of agroecological
systems (Ávila, 2015).
It is essential to take into account the
different protection and land use planning figures that can be established in Montes
de María by the ethnic-rural communities, and that would serve as control
strategies and resistance to the opening of the agricultural frontier for the
implementation of vast oil palm crops in the region. The aforementioned makes
reference to the collective land titles for the afro-descendant communities
(two collective titles in the municipality of San Jacinto led by the Community
Council of Paraíso and the Community Council of San Cristóbal) and the peasant
reserve areas for the peasants (two geographical polygons that cover the
majority of the territory of the region) that community have been attempting to
be implement in the rural areas of Montes de María over the last few years.
The Decree 1745 of 1995 gives afro-descendant
communities in Colombia access to specific territories when they comply with
the following characteristics: an ancestral occupation of such lands, a common
history of settlement, that the afro-descendant population is residing in
untitled lands or areas reserved by the State, whether in public ownership with
or without rights of collective use and enjoyment; that they have lands of
private property or other forms of property, that there is a self-recognition
as a afro-descendant community and that it is led under the organizational
process of a community council.
On the other hand, Law 160 of 1994 in Article
80 presents the Peasant Reserve Zones as a figure "for the land use,
social and cultural planning of property, for the stabilization and
consolidation of the peasant economy." Similarly, Article 1 of Decree 1777
of 1996 ensures that the areas of application of this figure are
"geographical areas whose agro-ecological and socioeconomic
characteristics require regulation, limitation, and use of the ownership of
rural properties".
Given the legal and normative characteristics
for its applicability in the territory, both the collective titles and the zone
of peasant reserve that could be established in Montes de María, would affect
the territorial and geographical logic of the region since, when considered as
figures of territorial, ecological, social and cultural conservation, they
would be capable of resisting the expansion of oil palm cultivation.
Concluding remarks
Based on the above, it could be considered
that the project of large-scale implementation of oil palm in the municipality
of María La Baja, in the Montes de María region, is a clear reflection of a
social conflict with an environmental character. This is because there is
evidence of potentiation of such conflicts in geographical areas where the
population lives with scarce resources and, at the same time, generate dynamics
of social marginalization through logics of ecological and environmental impact
(Homer-Dixon, 1994).
In this case there is a clear example of an
unequal environmental distribution (Schlosberg, 2007) not only in terms of
acquisition and hoarding of the assets, which in this case is expressed under
the logic of the land; but also, the entire social and agricultural structure
that has been constructed historically in the territory is affected. Therefore,
all the social practices of sovereignty and rural culture of the communities of
this municipality are being affected, as they are fragmented by the
implementation of this neoliberal model of the oil palms.
Based on the previous assertions, one can
catalogue the neo-extractivist practices of oil palms in the territory as a
result of an "environmental metabolism," which depends on the logic
of consumption given by the social and economic dynamics worldwide
(Martínez-Alier, 2004). This "environmental metabolism" generates
practices of homogenization in the patterns of production and consumption,
attacking the logic of sustainability in the region, as is the case with the
vulnerability existing in the scenario of food sovereignty in the region; since
they have diminished the crops and products for their subsistence and the
capacity to trade these goods.
Through this process, the territory of María
La Baja has gradually become a "natural capital", where the land has
been configured as an element of merely economic value, where a new economic
and geopolitical rationality is expressed that denatures nature to be able to
insert it into the logic of global capital (Leff, 2005). That is to say, a
marketization of nature is prevailing in this municipality by implementing, in
a veracious way, the indiscriminate sowing of oil palms, without taking into
account not only the environmental consequences in the territory, but also its
social and cultural ones.
In the same way, it is also evident in the
case of the oil palm in the municipality of María La Baja a clear process of
environmental racism (Bullard, 1995), since problems of hoarding and
territorial dispossession are identified through dynamics of violence for land
grabbing and the implementation of neo-extractivist projects, not only in rural
areas of Colombia which have been historically characterized by the absence of
the State, but also because it is observed that such projects are implemented
in territories where ethnic communities reside, in this case, afro-descendant
populations.
Although this population is an ethnic minority
and has historically been characterized by being in conditions of social,
political and economic marginalization by the Colombian national state, there
is an awakening and awareness on the part of these communities regarding the
affectations of oil palms in the territory (Homer-Dixon, 1994). An example of
this is the organizational processes designed to cope with the expansion of the
agricultural frontier for the planting of more palm crops in the municipality.
Through this process, we can highlight this positive aspect around an
environmental conflict given by dynamics of distributive (in) justice.
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[1] This paper was part of an
investigation carried out in 2016, to approve a course on Socio-environmental
Conflicts in the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences - FLACSO [by its
acronym in Spanish] (Ecuador).
[2] I am grateful to the editorial team
from the Universidad de Magdalena for the translation of the article to
english, as well as to Grace Boffey, PhD Political Science and International
Relations, University of Western Australia, researcher at the Intercultural
Studies Institute (Javeriana Cali University), for her helpful revision of the
translation.
[3] The principle of strict
egalitarianism has as a general principle of the allocation of an equal amount
of material goods to each of the members that are part of a particular society.
[4] There are multiple territorial
conceptions about which are the municipalities that make up the Montes de María
region. For this study, the municipalities were chosen that in general terms
coincide with these conceptions and, in turn, those are where it is pretended
to apply the ethnic-rural planning figures of interest for this research.
[5] Property of the former minister of
agriculture and former president of Fedepalma, Carlos Murgas Guerrero.