Green multiculturalism: articulations of ethnic and environmental politics in a Colombian ‘black community’

Abstract

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’. Although these two developments can be read as contradictory – with ‘green grabs’ threatening ethnic groups’ territorial rights and multicultural reforms purportedly safeguarding them – I argue that, together, they produce a unique political articulation which I term ‘green multiculturalism’.

My analysis of oil-palm cultivation in a ‘black community’ in southwestern Colombia reveals three interrelated consequences. First, I suggest that green multiculturalism produces ‘black communities’ as ‘green’ collective subjects charged not only with being wardens of nature, but also bearers of the responsibility to right environmental wrongs. Second, I note that the agrarian practices associated with oil-palm cultivation act as disciplining technologies that seek to transform local rationalities into entrepreneurial ones. Finally, I contend that these initiatives are ‘landscaping projects’ that seek to transform forms of interspecies relating.

Keywords:

• black communities
• multiculturalism
• oil palm
• Colombia

Notes

I wish to thank the Land Deals Politics Initiative, the Pacific Rim Research Program and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for the funding that made this research possible. I am also particularly grateful to Diana Ojeda, Shane Greene, Eduardo Restrepo and Sonia Serna, who read and commented on prior versions of this article.¹I put this term in scare quotes here to highlight that this category was created to designate the collective units that benefitted from Law 70 and did not exist prior to 1993. Naturally, as land titling proceeded, these units became real in that they interpellated specific groups of people.

²I wish to make explicit the reasons behind my preference for the term, ‘black’, in this article. The term, Afro-Colombian, which is quite dominant today, gained currency in the context of the Durban conference and has become the most widely used (and politically correct) category of blackness in Colombia since then (cf Cárdenas, forthcoming, for an explanation of this shift). However, during the 1990s, when Law 70 and its land-titling project congealed, that term did not circulate the way it does today. In this article, I use Afro-Colombian whenever others explicitly use it in order to respect their term choice. However, in all other contexts, I prefer the term, black Colombians, because it is associated with the political project that resulted in the recognition of ‘black communities’.

³Colombian anthropologist Eduardo Restrepo has brilliantly outlined the process whereby black Colombians went from being fellow nationals to being ethnic others. Although I cannot outline that process in detail here, I wish to emphasize that the ethnicization of blackness was neither natural nor necessary (Restrepo 2004).

⁴I say this because since the passage of the law, more than four million Colombians have been forced to flee from their homes. By 2007, according to the National Association for Displaced Afro-Colombians (AFRODES), 93 percent of the population of the 50 municipalities of the Pacific, where collective territories had been titled, had fled the region (AFRODES, ORCONE, CNOA 2008). This scandalous figure is compounded by the fact that those who stay must learn to live amidst violent armed conflict, which profoundly erodes their ability to practice autonomous forms of territoriality (see Cárdenas Forthcoming).

⁵For a detailed history of this transformation, see Asher (2009).

⁶Although the black communities of the Lower Mira River are also inserted into these renewed geographies of violence, what is particularly interesting about the case that I present here is that unlike other cases on the Pacific, such as that of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó, for example, oil palm cultivation is not openly related to armed conflict in Tumaco. On the one hand, it predates it, and on the other, local palm growers have made a concerted effort to distance themselves from those well-documented cases of overt land grab by intimidation, abuse and even death. This is not to say that these forms of violence are absent on the Mira River, but rather, that there exist other less obvious mechanisms by which territorial autonomy is effectively undermined. Overall, my work has been centrally concerned with this violent transformation and the interruption of ethnic-territoriality that ensued (see Cárdenas Forthcoming). Also, there is a growing body of literature that deals with the various consequences of violence among black communities on the Pacific, which, unfortunately, I cannot fully engage with here (cf Hoffman 2002, Wouters 2002, Restrepo 2005, Oslender 2008, Ballvé 2011, Grajales 2011, Jaramillo Buenaventura 2009).

⁷This approach is heir to the work of other scholars of Colombia, who have also noted the curious ethno-eco articulation that emerged in the 1990s. I am referring specifically to Manuela Alvarez's, Peter Wade's and Astrid Ulloa's insightful works, which track the linkages between biodiversity and multiculturalism (Wade 2004, Ulloa 2001, Alvarez 2002).

⁸In fact, this insight has an older history that can be traced back to Christian Gros' work on the politics of ethnicity in Colombia (cf Gros 2000).

⁹This is not to say that predatory capitalism is a thing of the past. Clearly, extractive, industrial and highly destructive production practices are alive and well. The point is simply that alongside these practices (which are often greenwashed), green capitalism has also thrived.

¹⁰There is a robust body of work on multicultural recognition and rights in Latin America that I do not engage with directly here. In general, these works describe and analyze the shift from the ideologies of racial and cultural homogeneity embodied in the nationalist concept of mestizaje to the celebration, defense and even promotion of cultural difference, which has been termed (state) multiculturalism and which has taken place in the last two decades (cf Hale 2002, Van Cott 2000, Postero 2007, Offen 2003). A particularly interesting aspect of this multicultural turn is the fact that black Latin Americans have been included as cultural others in ways that they had not been prior to this (cf Restrepo 2004, Hooker 2005, Guss 2000, Wade 2005).

¹¹ Elaeis guineensis is commonly referred to as African oil palm, or palma Africana in Spanish. However, some of the black activists with whom I have collaborated refuse to call it African in order to avoid creating or reinforcing a negative association between African-ness and devastation. For this reason, they prefer the term, oil palm, or palma aceitera in Spanish.

¹²It is important to note that a significant change in oil palm cultivation practices is currently under way as a result of the global standards outlined by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which was created in 2004. As L. Silva Castañeda notes, the RSPO's espousal of market-based incentives make this initiative's environmental soundness dubious at best (Silva Castañeda 2011). However, despite these well-placed critiques, the RSPO's impact on the concrete practices of both large- and small-scale palm growers in Colombia cannot be ignored. For a detailed account of the RSPO, see Silva Castañeda 2011.

¹³The original citation, which was taken from the Presidency's Press Secretary's webpage, read: ‘Yo tengo el sueño de que Colombia se pueda llenar de plantas productoras de combustibles alternativos a partir de materias primas agrícolas y este es el principio de ese sueño’ (Presidencia de la República s.f.).

¹⁴For security reasons, I use a pseudonym to refer to most identifiable places and people. The exceptions are public figures and widely recognized geographic referents such as cities and rivers.

¹⁵I am aware that there is a vast literature that has critiqued the Marxist category of labor (notably feminists concerned with theorizing the labor that is done within the domestic sphere). I wish to make explicit the fact that although I believe that this revisionist work is extremely valuable, I do not engage with it directly here. Like all categories, ‘work’ and ‘labor’ are only meaningful insofar as what is being signified is made explicit. For the purpose of this article, the differences between the two hinge only on what I believe are two main kinds of relationships between humans and nature: symbiotic and alienated.

¹⁶Plan Colombia is a bilateral agreement between the US government and Colombia, which began in 2000 and still exists today. In essence, Plan Colombia provides US funding, which supports the military in the state's twin internal wars: ‘the war against drugs’ and ‘the war against terrorism’.

¹⁷Of course, this is not a uniform or uncontested process. As Bernstein points out in his insightful analysis of the political economy of small-scale farmers, some pequeños palmicultores are relatively successful at becoming small-scale capitalists, while others simply become petty commodity producers and/or wage laborers. The outcome, as Bernstein shows, depends on a number of factors, which include differential access to social, political and agricultural capital as well as the intersection of these class dynamics with other social cleavages such as race, ethnicity and gender (Bernstein 2010).

¹⁸MIDASi which stands for More Investment for Alternative Sustainable Development, is one of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID's) programs in Latin America.

¹⁹INCODER, the Colombian Institute of Rural Development, is the state agency in charge of executing agricultural policies and overseeing land tenure.

²⁰I could have simply translated Concertación as ‘Agreement’. However, its usage in Colombian Spanish (as well as its etymology) signals a process of consensus building – of bringing differing views ‘in concert’ with one another.

²¹Spanish speakers may be struck by the translation of perico, given that this word most generally refers to parrots or parakeets. However, in this area of Colombia, perico is used to refer to various species of sloths.

²²Cordeagropaz emerged in 1999 as Colombia's first Alianza Estratégica Productiva, a joint public-private business venture meant to foster economic development in rural areas. The initial thrust behind the alianzas estratégicas, which was to create productive alternatives for peasants who eradicated illicit crops under Plan Colombia, has been gradually molded under the fire of multicultural reform. What began as an effort to provide employment opportunities and social services to campesinos involved in coca cultivation was later articulated along with black and indigenous people's demands for state investment in economic development.

²³The notion of negro permitido is clearly heir to Hale's indio permitido, which describes a supple and docile indigenous subject whose cultural difference is therefore tolerated (Hale 2006).

²⁴ Cartilla de Capacitación.

²⁵‘[P]roteger la identidad cultural y los derechos [de los Afrocolombianos] como grupo étnico.’ Cartilla de Capacitación.

²⁶This is the term that Restrepo uses to describe the large extensions of oil palm plantations in the region (Restrepo 2004).

²⁷Although I have asked numerous people – ranging from local farmers to phytopathologists and from plantation owners to international aid officials – about the causes and nature of the epidemic, I have never gotten a consistent and straight answer. I have heard variously that the PC is a fungus, a bacteria and a virus, that it is caused and/or worsened by Tumaco's rain cycles, and people often told me – in hushed tones – that the disease ‘coincidentally’ spread in Tumaco precisely after the region was aerially sprayed with Roundup (glyphosate) when the Uribe government used Plan Colombia funds to eradicate coca. I dare say that much of the ‘mystery’ surrounding the origin and spread of the PC has been actively produced to muddle the situation and divert attention from the real culprits.

²⁸This is in essence what Du Toit has termed ‘adverse incorporation’, meaning that ‘poverty and disadvantage themselves can often flow not from exclusion, but from inclusion on disadvantageous terms' (Du Toit 2007, 2). For a detailed analysis of adverse incorporation in oil-palm cultivation, see McCarthy 2010 and Du Toit 2009.