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Climate Change Battle Could Spell New Disasters    [

    Massacres and Paramilitary Land Seizures Behind the Biofuel Revolution
    By Oliver Balch and Rory Carroll
    The Guardian UK

    Tuesday 05 June 2007

Colombian farmers driven out as armed groups profit. Lucrative "green" crop less risky to grow than coca.

    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."

    "Four years ago Colombia didn't produce a litre of biofuel. Today, because of our administration, Colombia produces 1.2m litres per day." Investment in new installations would continue to boost production, he added.

    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. Unlike coca, the armed groups' main income source, palm oil is a legal crop and therefore safe from state-backed eradication efforts.

    Farmers who have been forced off their land at gunpoint say that in many cases their banana groves and cattle grazing fields were turned into palm oil plantations. Luis Hernandez (not his real name) fled his 170-hectare plot outside the town of Mutata in Antioquia province nine years ago after his father-in-law and several neighbours were gunned down. When he and other survivors were able to return recently, they found the land was in the hands of a local palm producer.

    "The company tells me that it has legal papers for the land, but I don't know how that can be, as I have land titles dating back 20 years," said Mr Hernandez. He suspects palm companies collaborated with the paramilitaries. "I don't know if there was an official agreement between them, but a relationship of some sort definitely exists."

    A government investigation reportedly found irregularities in 80% of palm oil land titles in some areas. "If there have been abuses and the titles are shown to be false, then the land needs to be returned and all the weight of the law needs to be brought down on those that are responsible," said Dr Castro, of the producers' association.

    Christian Aid is funding an effort to protect peasants who are trying to reclaim land from the paramilitaries, said Dominic Nutt, who has visited the plantations. "It is the dark side of biofuel."

    The paramilitary groups, first formed in the 80s by businessmen, landowners and drug lords to fend off guerrillas, became a powerful illegal army which stole land, sold drugs and massacred civilians. Under a peace deal with the government they have officially disbanded but many observers say remnants remain active.

    Displacement continues, with an average of 200,000 cases registered every year over the past four years, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, with most coming from palm oil-growing areas on the Caribbean coast. "We can't keep up, they just keep coming," said Ludiz Ruda, of the Hijos de Maria school in a shantytown outside the coastal city of Cartagena. Since opening last year it had been swamped with impoverished newcomers, she said. "More than 80% are refugees."

    Cocaine Output Rises Regardless

    Coca production in Colombia has surged despite US-funded eradication efforts, according to an estimate that casts fresh doubt on Washington's "war on drugs". Satellite imagery collated by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy survey suggests that cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, jumped 8% last year to 156,000 hectares.

    The estimate was made public before a trip to Washington this week by President Alvaro Uribe. If confirmed, it would be the third consecutive rise in production, and a blow to the US strategy of bolstering Colombia's security forces to help them destroy the crops.

    Under its Plan Colombia project, Washington has funnelled more than $5bn (£2.5bn) in mostly military aid to its South American ally since 2000 - its biggest aid project outside Afghanistan and the Middle East. The Democrats say the security forces are accused of human rights abuses and complicity with traffickers.

    Mr Uribe revealed the unpublished findings in an effort to get the bad news out of the way before he started lobbying Congress; the White House did not immediately respond.

    "They told me they were worried about revealing this number because of my upcoming trip to the United States - that the Americans should reveal it," he said. "But that's why I'm revealing it. We're not trying to put makeup on what is a serious matter."

    Plan Colombia began in 1999 and was supposed to halve production of coca within five years, using sprayer planes and officers on the ground. But the latest estimate suggests that since then it has risen 27%.

    Last month Mr Uribe trumpeted a UN report that said cultivation was down to 79,000 hectares. The conflicting figures were incomprehensible and disorienting, said the president: "Could it be we've worked in vain? That all our work hasn't produced the desired results?"

 

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    Go to Original

    Climate Change Battle Could Spell New Disasters
    By Gerard Wynn
    Reuters

    Tuesday 05 June 2007

    Rich countries meeting in Germany this week will agree that they need to confront climate change, but unpleasant tradeoffs are already emerging.

    Unless properly managed, a rush to reshape the world's economy to arrest climate change could end up trampling the lifestyles of the rich, the livelihoods of the rural poor, and the earth's most vulnerable habitats.

    A tequila shortage is perhaps one of the least-expected results of planting lucrative, "climate-friendly" biofuels - as Mexican farmers set ablaze their fields of cactus-like agave to make way for corn, a feedstock for ethanol. Biofuels are also blamed for raising food prices and destroying forests.

    The result of misguided climate policies could be to undermine public support for action and discourage businesses from buying in.

    "Definitely there'll be tradeoffs between climate change and the local environment, and with energy security," said Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises rich countries.

    "We are not in the luxury of being able to choose from hundreds of energy types."

    Just how mankind plans to battle climate change is still sketchy, but one buzz word is "scaling up" - for example by boosting research into and deployment of clean energy technologies like wind and nuclear power and biofuels.

    Urgency has been spurred by a series of U.N. climate reports this year confirming threats like desertification, droughts and rising seas and calling for action now to cut the long-term cost.

    But evidence is emerging of the repercussions. British charity Christian Aid says Colombian rebel groups are forcing poor people off their land to grow lucrative palm oil for biodiesel, likening it to diamonds financing African wars.

    "You could have blood biofuels in the same way as blood diamonds. It's a classic case of exploiting natural resources behind the veil of conflict," said Christian Aid climate policy analyst Andrew Pendleton.

    "Unscrupulous private sector operators, rebel groups, are keen to make a fast buck."

    Poor

    Biofuels already occupy an area equal to all of the arable land in France, says the IEA, and they are blamed for raising the cost of corn, sugar and other foods they compete with for land.

    But negative repercussions are hard to prove.

    A hike in the price of tortillas, a Mexican staple, was blamed on biofuels and sparked riots, but may have more to do with the monopoly power of dominant tortilla producers, says Annie Dufey, research associate at Britain's International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

    Such fears risk fatalism and favor the status quo, said Bert Metz, chair of a major U.N. report published last month on policy options.

    "Problems of land ownership and poor people are there, let's do something about it, but not blame it on climate change," he said.

    "There's no basis for supposing climate policies will create more problems than they solve, provided they're put in place wisely. I'd view that as another excuse for doing nothing."

    The report did not weigh the cost and benefit of the recent consumer fad of boycotting air freight and travel to reduce carbon emissions, which could inadvertently hurt African exports and tourism.

    "It's inequitable, tokenism," said the IIED's Bill Vorley of such consumer concerns.

    Fresh fruit and vegetable exports from sub-Saharan Africa accounted for less than 0.1 percent of total British greenhouse gas emissions, but supported more than one million people, the IIED estimates.

    Small Is Beautiful

    On energy supply, a focus on small-scale distribution is the answer to fighting climate change and poverty both at once, say non-governmental and U.N. organizations.

    In an interview with Reuters, Clemens Betzel, the president of Cardiff-based solar power company G24 Innovations, put on a table a bendy, solar power generator the size of a sheet of paper.

    It produces enough power to run a mobile phone or light bulb, but there's plenty of demand for that, he said.

    "People sit on a street corner selling power from a car battery. They're paying $60 to a $100 a year for kerosene to light their home," said Betzel, who said he could market his product for

    $20.

    "We're Going Into Africa, India, China."

    Small-scale biomass and solar power projects could also work in rich countries, reducing the need to switch to big, low-carbon alternatives like nuclear, hydroelectric and wind power, all of which face some opposition.

    Environmental group Greenpeace says that a renewed focus on nuclear energy could divert political and financial capital from longer-term, renewable energy alternatives, although operators such as France's EDF point to affordability..

    Meanwhile, hydropower could itself become a victim of global warming as rainfall patterns change, while it brings old problems of obliterating homes and wildlife. On June 1, a Brazilian court allowed the Estreito hydroelectric power project to move forward, over the opposition of indigenous and other groups.

    Similarly, projects like burying greenhouse gases underground - so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) - could simply delay the phase-out of coal and its associated effects on human health and the landscape.

    "The biggest negative spin-off is that people continue to mine coal, so if you happen to live in Kentucky they'll strip-mine your backyard," said Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology at Edinburgh University.

    The worry that CO2 could leak from underground and asphyxiate people above was almost unfounded, however, he added.

    Another proposal, installing mirrors or other reflective objects in the earth's atmosphere to reflect the sun's light and heat back into space draws short shrift from critics for its excessive complexity.

    That would be like calming a rocking boat by rocking the sea, said clean energy entrepreneur Bill Joy.