Go Green, Kill A Peasant

Palm oil: it's not just good for killing orangutans, its also good for eradicating peasants.

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for "green" fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia's population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world's worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.

Several companies were collaborating by falsifying deeds to claim ownership of the land, said Andres Castro, the general secretary of Fedepalma, the national federation of palm oil producers.

"As a consequence of the development of palm by secretive business practices and the use of threats, people have been displaced and [the businesses] have claimed land for themselves," he said. His claim was backed up by witnesses and groups such as Christian Aid and the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia.

The revelations tarnish what has been considered an economic and environmental success story. The fruit of the palm oil tree produces a vegetable oil also used in cooking, employs 80,000 people, and is increasingly being turned into biofuel.

"Four years ago Colombia had 172,000 hectares of palm oil," President Alvaro Uribe told the Guardian. "This year we expect to finish with nearly 400,000.".

This is from the Guardian, which has resumed its typical tilt to the left by blaming this on "rightwing" paramilitary groups – except for one little sentence buried in the depths of the story:

However the lawlessness created by four decades of insurgency in the countryside has enabled rightwing paramilitaries, and also possibly leftwing rebels, to join the boom.

You can bet the farm that the leftwing groups are as much to blame for the situation. Once again – this demonstrates the law of unintended consequences when a headlong rush to "do something" leads to bad policy. On top of the allegations of widespread fraud in the "carbon offset" ponzi scheme, it really is time to take a timeout in this headlong rush. Because something is very badly wrong here. The routine claims that the oil companies are evil and the "green" businesses are good and fluffy and lovable appears to be unraveling. The new boss is actually worse than the old boss. You could ask the orangutans and the peasants, but they're dead.