This is an edited excerpt from María Arango’s interview on the Land and Climate Podcast, which was recorded at the close of the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Cali, Colombia: listen here.
In the last century, sugarcane monoculture plantations have invaded the Cauca Valley near Cali, in Colombia. The region is largely populated by Afro-descendant people as it was close to Popayán, once a prominent city of the transatlantic slave-trade. During this period , enslaved people were brought to the the city before being sent to plantations and mines on the Pacific coast.
The Pacific coast of Colombia is a biodiversity hotspot. When slaves fled the mines and the plantations, the dry tropical forest around the valley provided protection. Over time, they learned how to live with the forest: to work in it, to protect it, and to get food from it. Afro-Colombians created an economy and society of freedom that they now call the ancestral farm, because it’s a system that allowed them, for one century, to live in freedom, and this freedom was in peace with the nature. The rivers near the Cauca Valley are protected because of the knowledge of the Afro-Colombian descendants and their effective control over the land.
It was like that until sugar cane expansion started after the Cuban revolution, when Cuba no longer sold sugar to the US. This was also the time of the Green Revolution, when seeds were modified and chemically enhanced to expand monocultures here.
Visitors today can’t miss the fact that the whole valley is now sugarcane. There’s no biodiversity. This is why the Afro-descendant peoples who are keeping these small farms want to show the harm they have suffered because of the sugarcane plantations. They want to show how rivers have been destroyed, how the riverside has been dispossessed, and to show how they have the knowledge and the solutions to restore the Cauca Valley.
Greenwashing has helped the expansion of monocultures. Now not only sugar is sold, but also energy, plastics, and paper, all made from sugar cane. In the early 2000s, in order to reduce fossil fuels, a law was passed that mandated mixing diesel with biofuels, and the sugar cane industry found a market with guaranteed buyers. That was the precise moment that sugar cane intensified again in the valley. But it’s not true that biofuels and do not pollute. Rivers have been destroyed. Human rights have been violated here. Nobody seems to ask about that because the industry is presented as a green solution.
This is what our report, The Green Illusion, is calling for. We have seen how these solutions that are presented as green have not changed the way they do business. They have not changed the way they engage with communities. They are still polluting rivers, and drying wetlands which were essential for biodiverse ecosystems.
One of the main barriers we found in our research was the access to basic supply chain information. If we found a sugar plantation had transgressed a colonial river protection law, we would be unable to link that fact with what consumers think they are buying overseas. There is no information about who the suppliers are and to whom they are selling.
If the business model does not change, and we just change fossil fuels for environmentally damaging monocultures, our energy will not be clean. It’s not clean from pollution. It’s not clean from human rights regulations because they are still implementing the same business practices. The Palenke Alto Cauca of the Black Communities Process, Enramada: spaces for action, and the Forest Peoples Programme, spoke out about this at the UN Convention on Biological Diveristy’s COP16 and will continue to speak out against the destruction of biodiversity in the Cauca Valley. And we and they will be heard.
As told to Bertie Harrison-Broninski, with additional editing by Anna Spree.
Views expressed in this article belong to the author, and do not necessarily reflect editorial views at Land and Climate Review. You can read more about the Forest Peoples Programme here.
María Arango is a lawyer and project manager in the Colombian division of the international human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme.
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