March 10, 2011
Trade Pact Threatens Further Havoc
Colombia Slips Into the Abyss
By DAN KOVALICK
While little attention has been paid by the press, Colombia just reached an ignominious benchmark – it is now the country with the largest population of internally displaced persons in the world, surpassing The Sudan which had held this position for the past several years. Colombia, with a population of around 44 million, now has 5.2 million internally displaced persons, meaning that almost 12% of its population is displaced – most of them by violence, and a disproportionate number Afro-Colombians and indigenous.
As a report by the Colombian human rights group CODHES notes, half of the 5.2 internally displaced were displaced during the presidential term of Alvaro Uribe, and as a direct consequence of his "counterinsurgency program" – a program funded in large measure by the U.S. As CODHES noted, in a significant proportion of the municipalities impacted by this program, there has been large-scale mining and cultivation of oil palm and biofuel. CODHES is clear that this production is directly responsible for the violent displacement of persons from their land Indeed, it appears that the "counterinsurgency program," as many of us has said for years, was in fact largely intended to make Colombia safe for multi-national exploitation of the land at the very expense of the people the program was claimed to be helping.
The proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is also intended to do the very same – to protect the rights of multi-national corporations over the basic human rights of the Colombian people. For example, the Colombia FTA would privilege the very palm oil production which is leading to the mass displacement of people. Even more frightening, as The Nation Magazine explained in a detailed article, entitled, "The Dark Side of Plan Colombia," around half of the palm oil companies are actually owned and controlled by paramilitary groups, meaning that the FTA will directly aid these groups by incentivizing their crops
As the Washington Office on Latin America recently noted, the FTA's agricultural provisions will also undermine the livelihood of Colombia's rural inhabitants who will not be able to compete with the subsidized, cheap food stuffs which will be able to flood the Colombian markets duty-free under the FTA. Indeed, we have seen this before, in Mexico where NAFTA led to the impoverishment and displacement of 1.3 million small farmers, and in Haiti which lost its ability to feed its own people with its rice production after Clinton's free trade policies with that country.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/kovalick03102011.html
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