Access to land and the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil in Colombia

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the 2008 triple crisis (finance, food, environment), large-scale land investments raised concerns about their negative impacts on local populations. To counter risks to agribusiness’ reputation, sustainability certifications legitimize investments fulfilling certain production criteria. But do such certifications ensure local populations’ land access? This paper investigates the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and argues that its definition of sustainability fails to ensure such land access for two reasons: (1) It refers to land rights instead of recognizing the human right to land (2) It promotes contract farming as win-win. By focusing on local contexts and practices in Colombia, field research provides evidence that to ensure local populations’ land access, the RSPO should opt for a human rights approach. For the Colombian peace process, this result means that the RSPO’s current definition of sustainability is not in line with the integral rural reform planned in the peace agreement.

KEYWORDS:

• Land grabbing
• palm oil
• Colombia
• post-conflict
• practices
• human rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a critical perspective on the concept of post-conflict, see Grajales (2016).

For a discussion on the various meanings of the concept of territorial peace, see Cairo et al. (2018).

2 In Colombia, the term campesinos relates to peasants which production unit is mainly dedicated to the personal consumption of the family or the community. This production differs from the capitalist entrepreneur, which production is dedicated to profit (Forero Alvarez, 2003). In this article, the terms ‘campesino’ and ‘peasant’ are used interchangeably and shall be considered as synonyms. The term ‘farmer’ has a close meaning.

3 President Santos signed the peace agreement with the FARC and received the Peace Nobel Price for this in 2016.

4 In addition, in 2016, President Santos approved the Zonas de Interés de Desarrollo Rural Económico y Social (Zidres), areas where companies can take advantage of a legal framework designed to promote economic development. In these areas, companies are allowed to accumulate much more public land than one Unidad Agrícola Familiar (UAF) stipulated by law 160 of 1994. For a critique, see Bodensiek (2016, https://lasillavacia.com/node/55142).

5 According to the RSPO, the certification allows peasants to access news markets and thus raise their income. https://rspo.org/smallholders (accessed April 2019).

6 Land grabbing, land rush, land deals, large-scale land acquisitions, loss of land control, land transactions, and land investment – there is no unanimity in the academic literature on a concept comprehensively defining this evolving phenomenon, one that covers a myriad of different situations, processes, and actors (Oya, 2013). Here, we use a broad definition of land grabbing as the:’ Capturing control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms that involve large-scale capital that often shifts resource use orientation into extractive character, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperatives, and demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital (Borras, Franco, Gómez, Kay, & Spoor, 2012, p. 851).

7 The practice turn in international relations embraces a diversity of studies with ‘a performative understanding of the world’ (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018, p. 29). Here, we follow Adler and Pouliot (2015): a key added value of practice theory is that it considers practices not simply as explanandum, but also as explanans. Practices thus produce social effects.

8 On the relationship between forced displacement, land grabbing and paramilitaries, see Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica (2016).

9 Baldíos are public land aimed at being distributed among peasant families in accordance with the specific terms established in Law 160, 1994 (https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/relatoria/1995/C-595-95.htm).

10 Fedepalma website (accessed April 2019).

11 For example, according to the World Forest Movement, sustainability certifications such as the RSPO play a role in facilitating the continued expansion of land grabbing by calling it ‘sustainable’. https://wrm.org.uy/articles-from-the-wrm-bulletin/section1/why-the-rspo-facilitates-land-grabs-for-palm-oil/ (accessed April 2019). For an analysis of the RSPO legitimization process see Schouten & Glasbergen (2011) and Marin-Burgos et al. (2015).

12 For more on the diversity of contract farming and the related problems with excessive generalizations, see Oya (2012).

13 In this article, while speaking about the RSPO, we will refer to both, companies that are only members of the RSPO without having obtained the certification yet, as well as members that have already obtained the certification. Both categories are relevant for our analysis because ‘As members, they have a say in the RSPO's decision-making, shaping efforts to make sustainable palm oil the norm’ https://rspo.org/members (accessed April 2019).

14 Other cases in Colombia meet either criterion, for example, Tumaco, Bajo Atrato, Montes de María and Catatumbo. However, here we choose to focus on cases that meet both criteria.

15 It has not obtained the certification yet.

16 https://iachr.lls.edu/sites/default/files/iachr/Cases/Mapiripan_Massacre_v_Colombia/ogden_mapiripan_massacre_v._colombia.pdf (accessed 2018).

17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q2RU_8RRTc (accessed 2018).

18 For the full report, see Comisión lntereclesial de Justicia y Paz (2015).

19 van Dorp et al. (2015) and Verdad Abierta (2015), https://verdadabierta.com/lupa-a-la-multinacional-poligrow-que-opera-en-mapiripan-meta/.

20 Escobar Moreno (2017), https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/judicial/carlo-vigna-taglianti-director-de-la-multinacional-poligrow-va-juicio-articulo-692613.

21 Syal (2010), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/oct/03/body-shop-palm-oil-supplier and Syal and Brodzinsky (2009), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/13/body-shop-colombia-evictions.

22 La Silla Vacia (2016), https://lasillavacia.com/historia/las-pavas-la-prueba-acida-para-santos-con-la-restitucion-de-tierras-52820.

23 Verdad Abierta (2017), https://verdadabierta.com/otro-capitulo-del-caso-bellacruz-que-hay-detras/.

24 Verdad Abierta (2016), https://verdadabierta.com/campesinos-ganan-la-batalla-por-la-bellacruz-en-la-corte/.

25 More information on ‘false claimants’ is provided p. 17.

26 In the following paragraphs, the references to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are our addition.

27 In annex, the RSPO also refers to the ILO Convention 169 (1989) on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples as well as to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), but these two regulations only apply to this specific category and not to peasants.

28 see footnote 3 on ZIDRES law.

29 For details on the shortcomings of the Colombian NIP’s consultation process, see Seeboldt and Abdala (2010).

30 FPIC is ‘(…) a specific right that pertains to Indigenous Peoples and is recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. It allows them to give or withhold consent to a project that may affect them or their territories’ (FAO, 2016).

31 https://web.fedepalma.org/sostenibilidad-social-alianzas-estrategicas (accessed May 2019).

32 https://agronegocios.uniandes.edu.co/2016/04/26/una-historia-sobre-el-grande-de-la-palma-colombiana-oleoflores/ (accessed May 2019).

33 El Espectador (2017), https://www.elespectador.com/economia/con-513-alianzas-productivas-se-espera-reactivar-la-economia-de-zonas-de-posconflicto-articulo-707166.

34 https://rspo.org/smallholders/rspo-certification-by-the-number (accessed May 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christelle Genoud

Christelle Genoud is a PhD candidate at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research is on the relationship between finance and human rights. She focuses, among others, on the financialization of agriculture, with a case study on the production of palm oil in Colombia. She is currently working as Human Security Advisor at the Embassy of Switzerland in Beijing. Previously, she worked as an Associate Expert in Human Rights at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva. In 2016 and 2017, she has been a visiting scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada and at los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia.