Contemporary land grabbing in Colombia: the role of the state, ethnicity and violence

This paper emerges from a concern with the relationship between African oil palm agro-industrial expansion in Afro-Colombian territories and the subsequent appalling forced displacement and land grabbing of Afro Colombians. In spite of the favorable reports of enhanced security and political stability, there were between 3.3 and 4.9 million internally displaced people as of January 2010. According to government figures (Acción Social 2010), over 2.5 million people were forcefully displaced during former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez’s time in office alone (from 2002 to 2009), and about 8 million hectares of land were abandoned (Gonzalez 2011). Although, forced displacement and land dispossession are not new phenomena—in fact, it can even be said that it is a historical outcome of the long durée of agrarian tensions and political violence that result, at the same time, from the skewed distribution and high concentration of land that characterized Colombia-they have increased ever since the second half of the 1990s. Many of the stories of displacement and land grabbing are associated to the fast spreading agro-industrial global project on biofuels— which in Colombia takes the form of extensive monocultures of African palm oil-and connected to paramilitary violence. What about the role of the state and state-led agribusiness projects such as African oil palm? To what extent development “green” projects like oil palm for biofuels may interplay with, influence, or complement these violent dynamics of displacement and land grabbing?