‘A Gift from the Tropics to the World’: Power, Harm, and Palm Oil

Abstract

In the context of a professed energy crisis and a climate crisis spiralling out of control, highly biodiverse natural and sociocultural environments are giving way to vast monocultures of presumably carbonneutral energy crops. One such crop is the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis).¹ In Colombia, the largest producer of palm oil in the Americas, the official narrative of the National Federation of Oil Palm Growers describes ‘the world of the oil palm’ as

A warm and humid one, of shades of green, inhabited by hundreds of animal and plant species. But it is also a world of human relations and labour, where the rural and the urban, the national and the international, agricultural, extractive and industrial activities meet. It is a world where diverse and complementary endeavours merge to form a chain of production, generating wealth and fomenting social development. (Fedepalma, 2006: 2)

This image of palm oil as a social and ecological crop is consistent with the global depiction of biofuels — or, more aptly, of agrofuels — as social, environmental, and economically beneficent ways of greening patterns of (excessive) energy consumption. Yet these liquid fuels derived from plant biomass are mired in paradoxes. This chapter, as such, has its basis in ongoing research into the social and environmental harms associated with palm oil production in Colombia’s South Pacific region.