Capitalism Spoils Everything

How an Irish company destroyed ecosystems and local economies in Colombia

The history of Popayan, Colombia, is a colonial one. Known as the white city, the Spanish slaveowner who founded it when the conquistadors arrived in Latin America buried a local indigenous temple with earth, creating a mound upon which he placed a statue of himself. It was only toppled a few years ago. But his legacy lives on. To this day, much of Popayan’s land is owned by foreigners, who extract riches from the soil while the locals are forced into lives of subsistence, uprooted from their cultures and histories. We are investigating how communities are reclaiming land from one such company for Planet: Coordinate, and while that project focuses on what to do, the story behind it is emblematic of everything that has gone wrong.

Land ownership is deeply unequal in Colombia. 14% of landowners own 80% of the land, making it the 11th worst nation in the world for land distribution. This is more than just a hangover from the era of slavery and conquistadors as land ownership became even more concentrated over the past half century as legacy families scored even more territory to add to their portfolio, no doubt aided and abetted by the global neoliberal fiscal reforms which shook the wealth from the pockets of the most needy into the plump palms of the world’s richest. In the 50s and 60s, local peasants still produced a huge amount of food in what is called “fincas”, small agro-ecological farms. Many of them were coerced into handing over their land in what is known locally in the region of Cali as the first “green transition”. They were pressured, through misinformation campaigns about the benefits, to hand over their farms to huge sugar cane companies who promised they would get much more from their land by ditching their historical practices and selling or leasing to big enterprises practicing monoculture. And so the food sovereignty and local economies which had been supported by fincas disappeared, along with healthy soils and even small rivers.

“Land back” campaigns were organised, in which peasants and indigenous populations occupied territory which had historically belonged to them. Near Popayan, one local landowner realised the dairy cows she was raising on some of her land was particularly vulnerable, as the grassy plains were perfect for growing food on. Rather than hand back her land, she leased it to a foreign multinational which produces cardboard and paper. She was not the only wealthy landowner who turned to this company for help, and some of them sit on the board of Smurfit Kappa, an Irish firm. This was a way of holding onto their land and the profits coming in from it, and stemming the tide of the land back movement. Whereas grassy plains are easy to occupy, the Irish multinational plants pine and eucalyptus to feed its wood chippers, making the terrain inhospitable to food systems—especially given pine and eucalyptus are invasive species in Colombia.

Smurfit Kappa now has more than 67,000 hectares in Colombia. In the 4000 hectares they operate in Popayan, the locals talk of how some of it was primary tropical forest which was razed to the ground in order to plant these trees. Primary forest is a classification for forests that are old and untouched, that have never been logged. They are healthy and complex and diverse. They were cut down to produce cardboard.

It’s certainly bizarre to wander through a pine plantation under the heat of the Colombian sun. This is a tree of my homeland, uprooted from its home soils and thrust into an environment which does not welcome it. Everything feels uncanny. The pine needles fall thick onto the plantation floor amongst bright blue berries which look like cats’ eyes; the tall trunks proudly sporting straight branches thrust high into an azure sky. And in the pockets of the plantation that artificial insemination cannot reach, close to the banks of a small but deep river, the jungle returns. The air is moist as the soil and giant green leaves on giant green stalks caress one another, creating a seemingly endless depth which plantations can only dream of. This is the natural ecosystem, just paces from a plantation of trees which sickens the very earth. Despite this, Smurfit Kappa claims: “Our products, which are 100% renewable and produced sustainably, improve the environmental footprint of our customers.”

Is it sustainable to grow an invasive species just to send them to sawdust? Species which destroy the local soils and kill off their neighbours to the extent that rivers dry up? Is it sustainable to lock local communities out of their historic land? Or to operate “46,000 employees in over 350 production sites across 36 countries and with revenue of €8.5 billion in 2020” by producing cardboard for consumer products? Is it sustainable to kill people?

A few years ago, a young man working with the community to claim back land from this company was trapped when private security came to evict him. They killed him in the process. And all for what? So that wealthy citizens in the Global North can receive their goods in plastic-free packaging and feel better about their choices? Neoliberal capitalism has a way of making money out of madness, of finding the silver lining in a bullet casing.

As if to prove the point, the paramilitary force which identifies as Marxist-Leninist is allegedly on the company’s payroll as informal security. What was once an armed group focused on liberation has descended into young men making TikTok videos waving their guns in the air. With a few thousand people to feed and arm, these so-called revolutionaries have become dependent on the very system they claim to fight against. If they had land they could provide for themselves. Without it, they need revenue streams. And so a politics of collective liberation by the masses reclaiming the means of reproduction becomes detached from reality, seemingly forced to fight over the scraps of what is left to survive.

Here’s the reality, in all its cold glory: An Irish multinational raking in billions every year pays a former armed resistance movement to protect their Colombian plantations of invasive species from local agrarian communities who want their land back to grow food, all while claiming to be part of a green transition of sustainability. This region has already been through one green transition to find out it was only the wealthy who gained at the expense of the farmers, peasants, waterways and ecosystems. So far, nothing proves that this green transition will be any different here. Not while land ownership remains so unequal and the earth itself is treated as a lifeless machine of production, forced to endlessly birth goods while fat cats in foreign lands count the spoils.

The etymology of the word “spoil” is revealing. The noun comes from the Latin “spolium”. In Roman law, spolium refers to something that was taken from an enemy during a war or stolen from a fellow citizen. The verb derives from the Latin “spoliare” which meant to “strip, uncover, lay bare; strip of clothing, rob, plunder, pillage”. The spoils of capitalism — profit — is rooted in the violent plundering of both people and planet.

On Thursday, I’m joined by economist Grace Blakeley to discuss exactly that.

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