Violent palm oil land grab hits poorest

Hired thugs working for a palm oil corporation stormed villages in Indonesia to force people off their land earlier this month so that PT Asiatic Persada could take up a government concession. It was a dramatic example of an often violent international land grab at work.

Nearly 150 homes were destroyed in the latest incident in a long standing conflict, where the Indonesian government is sacrificing the lives and of thousands of forest dwelling people to the god of growth. The army was present at the destruction of the Padang Salak hamlet in a dispersed village called Bunku in Sumatra.

On December 10 police opened fire on anti-palm oil protestors in Pujehun province, Sierra Leone. People were protesting about the activities of international agro-investor Socfin. They say they were lied to about leases and conned into allowing Socfin to move in for just $5 an acre.

After years of civil war, the Sierra Leone government has used a period of relative stability to invite the corporations in. It has signed a $1.3 billion deal with China Hainan Rubber Industry Group and Addax Bioenergy, a Swiss biofuel company, has leased 14,300 hectares in Tonkolili district for the production of sugar cane.

Another country emerging from years of civil war is Liberia, and the corporations are beating a path to the government's door. Equatorial Palm Oil has its eye on almost 170,000 hectares of land for plantations. The same story is repeated in Mozambique and Cameroon.

Local people are being bullied by their governments into leasing out land for tiny returns and for periods so long, they have in effect lost it for ever.

Claims that the corporations contribute jobs and welfare for people in areas where they work are a complete fraud. People are never consulted about roads or buildings, and few jobs are created.

And the claim that the corporations will help by paying tax to African governments is even more fraudulent. The charity Action Aid revealed a document from accountants Deloitte advising clients how to avoid paying tax in Africa. For example, by channelling funds through Mauritius they could avoid capital gains tax altogether in Mozambique, one of earth's poorest countries where life expectancy is just 49.

Fifty years ago palm oil was a minor product, but its property of staying solid at relatively high temperatures makes it useful for highly processed foods. It is present in half of all supermarket products though it may not be listed on the label other than as vegetable oil. The growing popularity of palm oil with the food processors has not reduced soya oil production; it continues to expand with an eye to the biofuels market.

The supermarket giants claim processing food into ready meals or snack products adds value. But in the UK more than 60% of adults are overweight or obese as are more than 30% of children. There is an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes and obese individuals have a 50% greater chance of dying early.

People in Africa, Indonesia and Latin America were never consulted about the vegetable oil giants moving on to their land. And people in the West were never consulted about the introduction of a diet driven by the profit margins of the supermarkets and endorsed by their friends in government.

The corporations are entities that float above society, not subject to any control, indifferent to the health and wellbeing of people or nature as a whole, and using their power to subvert any semblance of democracy. A united front of people's across the globe is needed to challenge both ends of this destructive food chain.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Biofuels land grab a 'recipe for mass hunger'

A few months ago, representatives of nine villages in Madagascar held a press conference in the city of Antananarivo to denounce the Italian company Tozzi Renewable Energy for taking away their lands as part of a 100,000 hectare jatropha plantation that the company is building.

"We small peasants are forced to leave because men armed with guns have come to throw us off our lands," they told reporters. In Sierra Leona, Zainab Kamara is one of several thousand farmers in whose lands have been taken over by the Swiss company Addax Bioenergy for a 10,000 hectare sugar cane plantation to produce ethanol.

"Now I don’t have a farm. Starvation is killing people. We have to buy rice to survive because we don't grow our own now," she says. This one sugar cane project will use 26% percent of Sierra Leone’s largest river flow during the driest months, February to April. In neighbouring Guinea, the government has sold 700,000 hectares to another European firm to grow jatropha. It’s a story repeated in South America, especially in Brazil.

These are just some examples of the havoc wreaked by an unprecedented land grab with the purpose of producing biofuels from raw materials. Europe is one of the centres of this monstrous trade, with purpose-built facilities in the port of Rotterdam part of a frenzy that resembles the ruthless colonialism of the 19th century.

Neste Oil, the state-owned Finnish oil company, has a renewable diesel plant in Rotterdam that will churn out over 900 million litres a year, using palm oil for at least 50% of its raw materials. The firm owns the world’s largest plant in Singapore, which also converts palm oil to diesel for export to Europe.

Next door to Neste Oil's Rotterdam operation is a massive ethanol plant owned by the Spanish energy company Abengoa. Swiss-based Glencore, Europe's second largest agricultural commodities trading house, owns two biodiesel plants in Rotterdam, with a combined capacity of 740 million litres per year

According to a new report from GRAIN, Europe's biofuel companies are increasingly looking for full control over production, right down to the crops. “Shell and BP, for instance, have spent hundreds of millions of euros buying up sugar cane plantations and mills in Brazil to produce ethanol. French commodities giant Louis Dreyfus is also buying up farmland and sugar plantations in South America to feed its ethanol and biodiesel plants.”

European companies are responsible for a third of all the biofuel land grabs that have been reported since 2002, with over 290 seizures totalling 19 million hectares. The forecast is that the global demand for biofuels will more than double by 2020. The additional land required is equivalent to about 80% of the total land mass of Spain.

GRAIN acknowledges that campaigns, negotiations and criticism of the European Union-driven biofuels mania have had little effect. Recent changes to its policy of encouraging biofuels are minimal. “The EU has made only symbolic gestures to add a green veneer to the brutal global land grab that has resulted,” the sustainable farming campaign says

Of the three major markets for biofuels – the US and Brazil are the others - the EU is the only one that relies heavily on imports, both for feedstock (the crops used for biofuel production) and for food to replace European crops diverted to biofuel production. Biofuels eat up over a third of coarse grain production in the US, the world’s largest exporter.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) calls biofuels “the largest source of new demand for agricultural production in the past decade” and says that they represent a new “market fundamental” affecting prices for all cereals”. In plain language, the market says that biofuels is more profitable than food, while the prices of basic necessities soar.

Add in the growing impact of climate change and the separate land grab by sovereign wealth funds to produce food in poor countries for export, you have what GRAIN calls a “a recipe for mass hunger”. As the campaign points out: “These communities and the food systems they sustain are not renewable.”

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Palm oil forests good for business, bad for the planet

The Adam Smith Institute has stepped in to the palm oil plantation debate with an astonishing report suggesting that bio-fuels should be welcomed by those concerned about the planet’s future.

In what amounts to a press release on behalf of the multi-million dollar Malaysian palm oil industry, the institute claims that bio-fuels can replace fossil fuels to keep the wheels of industry turning.

But whatever these free booting, free marketeers claim, the reality is that the development of the bio-fuel industry is a potential disaster for the eco-system, including human beings.

Far from being a way of reducing greenhouse emissions, this profit-driven agri-business is increasing them. Every hectare of primary rainforest cleared and replaced with oil palms releases around 65 times as much carbon into the atmosphere as can be saved annually by using the palm oil as a biofuel.

The clearing of forests to plant palm oil is itself a major source of emissions. It is estimated that up to 15% of all global CO2 emissions come from Indonesia's peat fires when the forest substructure starts to burn. Satellite images have shown that 75% of the fire hotspots are on plantation land, which largely grow palm oil.

The Malay peninsula produces more than ten million tonnes of palm oil per year, over half of the world's supply. In the last 30 years, palm oil has grown to be the second biggest vegetable oil behind soybean, and increasing demand will soon put it in first place.

Malaysian estates yield up to 5 tonnes of oil per hectare every year, more than double the yield of any other oil crop under intensive cultivation. This is done through effective plant breeding but also by heavy application of pesticides and fertiliser – made from oil!

And just as with any other intensively-farmed crop, biodiversity is reduced throughout the area of cultivation.

The Adam Smith Institute report focuses a great deal on campaigns to save the orangutan from extinction in its last fastnesses of Borneo and Sumatra.

They make the astonishing claim that the campaign is misplaced in the case of Malaysia, as there are no orangutans in the main palm oil producing areas on the Malay peninsula.

This is a typical neo-classical economic argument, where everything is taken out of both its historic and economic context and viewed in isolation. Because if there are no orang-utans in those areas, it is because they have already been wiped out – they were formerly common.

In fact, there are orangutans in the Malaysian provinces on the island of Borneo and the government helps fund a rescue centre for those displaced by forest clearing. And on the Indonesian part of the island, a whole eco-system of unique plants and animals are under threat.

Why is the ASI rushing to the defence of palm oil interests? Could it be because this is the fastest growing, most potentially profitable commodity in the capitalist marketplace? The biodiesel and ethanol markets could be worth as much as $247 billion by 2020, up from $76 billion in 2010.

Not only palm oil, but the pushing of so-called marginal lands into intensive growing of plants to provide ‘bio-mass’ for burning, is driving the planet towards some dangerous tipping points in terms of sustainable bio-diversity – as well as increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Only a system as reckless as capitalism could respond to the existential crises of climate change and peak oil with a profit-driven business initiative that will make the situation even worse.

As a certain Adam Smith once said of the capitalist system whose early days he was recording: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”

At Saturday’s Beyond Resistance teach-in – Kicking Capitalism’s Growth Habit - we will be discussing how we can stop addressing ourselves to the butcher, and instead bring about democratic control of resources, and urgent responses to climate change that will tackle the problem, not just boost markets and profit at our and the planet’s expense.

Penny Cole

Environment editor