“Land ownership in Colombia. The case of Bioenergy”, 30^th October 2019

…Indepaz and SOMO focus on the Altillanura region, a sub-region of the Orinoquía, bordering on Venezuela and Brazil. This part of Colombia has been hard hit by the armed conflict, but was also singled out by the administrations of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) and Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) as the region that would help Colombia to become a major producer of food and biofuels.

Here, both national and foreign companies requiring many hectares of land for the production of palm oil, sugarcane and other crops have used various mechanisms to avoid the restrictions and conditions imposed by Colombia’s agrarian law (Law 160 of 1994) on the allocation and acquisition of agrarian lands. Colombia’s agrarian law was adopted to put legal limits on excessive land concentration and to promote access to land for both male and female smallholder farmers with limited resources, and for Afro-descendent and indigenous communities.

Instead of holding companies accountable for these practices, the governments of Uribe Vélez and Santos have promoted policies aimed at removing the restrictions imposed by the agrarian law on land accumulation. In their latest report, Indepaz and SOMO have analysed these dynamics of land concentration and accumulation through a detailed analysis of the land acquisitions of ethanol producer Bioenergy, a subsidiary of Ecopetrol, in which the Colombian state is a majority shareholder…