Biodiesel push blamed for violations of rights

The Colombian government is stepping up production of biofuels amidst an unstable mix of a boom in clean energy technologies, the advance of monoculture and the stripping of indigenous and black communities of their land. By 2008, Colombia is projected to produce 645,000 tons a year of biodiesel, a cleaner alternative source of energy that is drawing ever-increasing global interest. African oil palms, grown in Colombia since the mid-1960s, are the main crop used in the production of biodiesel. There are now over 704,000 acres of oil palm trees in Colombia, up from 290,000 in 2003, and President Alvaro Uribe has proposed to increase that total to almost two-and-a-half million acres over the next four years. The expansion, fomented by a bill on rural development, is coming with a heavy environmental and social cost. An Agriculture Ministry investigation in April of this year found that a significant amount of land that had been protected as forest reserves, or had been awarded to black and indigenous peoples were illegally acquired by private interests for oil palm plantations. "The purchase of enormous extensions of land has begun quietly, and the phenomenon has reached widely dispersed, isolated indigenous communities that have no means of communication and information. They are visited by foreign companies that paint castles in the sky and have them sign documents, but the indigenous communities have no idea what is really going on," researcher Darío Mejía, with the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, told IPS. In Mejía's view, the impacts of monoculture in general, and oil palm plantations in particular, are not only environmental, but political and cultural as well. "This kind of megaproject aggravates the concentration of land in a few hands and foments the loss of land that indigenous communities have suffered continuously since the time of the so-called Spanish 'conquest,'" he said.