“In 10 years from now all this will simply be a myth”: impacts and mechanisms of agro-industry expansion

• In Event: The Theft of Nature: Perspectives from Green Criminology

Abstract

Expanding industries for agricultural commodities pose major threats to highly biodiverse, complex ecosystems and corresponding land-based social and socio-ecological relations. In order to open up new terrains to capital accumulation, agro-industry expands into, transforms, and frequently destroys existing sociocultural and ecological dynamics of territories where hitherto a non-capitalist logic of production and subsistence often predominated. This paper reflects on the specifics of such processes in the case of palm oil production in Colombia. Whereas critics of palm oil-related crime and harm denounce the Colombian palm oil industry—most of all for the latter’s link to (often brutal) cases of forced displacement and violent land grab—the range of mechanisms of industry expansion, land transfer and land use-change associated with the palm oil industry in Colombia does not rely exclusively on the exercise of direct violence and coercion. As such, this paper examines the array of legal and illegal mechanisms of industry expansion, land transfer and land use-change, emphasizing in particular more subtle operations of power in the transformation of land-based social and socio-ecological relations. The implications of this for the theorization of harm in (green) criminology are also discussed.

Author

• Hanneke Mol, University of Kent (UK) / Utrecht University (Netherlands)