Pollution and deforestation, risks of oil palm expansion

Cindy Celedón remembers that until 25 years ago, her community had a special relationship with the forest, the river and the different species that inhabited the area. But everything changed two decades ago when the oil palm crop arrived.

“When the palm tree came in, it cut down every tree that was there. It destroyed the kapok, the white kapok, the black kapok, the guarumo, and every kind of native tree in our area,” he said.

He lives in the rural community of Conrado de la Cruz, near Pacific beaches and an hour from downtown Suchitepéquez, Santo Domingo. He said that as monocultures expand, not only are trees being cut down, but rivers and lagoons are drying up.

“Before, in the summer, we would go to the river to bathe and fish. (But) this year, 2023, a lagoon one cavaleria long has dried up because of the water extracted by palm trees, which water it day and night,” he protested.

The community is connected to the city by a 33-kilometer dirt road and is currently surrounded by palm trees, rubber and sugarcane crops that almost hug each other and block the passage of sunlight.

Celedón’s experience is very similar to other communities in different parts of the country that have established a monoculture model of oil production. In the words of community members, this solution includes deforestation, polluted rivers and abuse of plantation labor.

Against these complaints, palm growers boast that they inject the equivalent of 1.6% of GDP into the national economy, create 30,103 direct jobs and invest in the communities where they operate.

Currently, the country has more than 180,614 hectares of palm tree plantations, planted in the south (San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Retalhuleu, Suchitepéquez and Escuintla), the northeast (Izabal and Alta Verapaz) and the north (South Petén, North Alta Verapaz and Northeast Quiché).

However, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food (MAGA), there are three times more soils whose characteristics are conducive to expanding this monoculture. But what would be the benefit to the country of tripling the area under oil palm cultivation? What would be the environmental cost?

Expanding Crops

Palm trees began to expand across the country in the early 2000s. Area under crop cultivation tripled from 51,000 hectares in 2003 to more than 183,000 hectares in 2020, according to plant cover and land use maps compiled by Maga that year.

The crop produces oil that is exported and used in the manufacture of butter, dressings, tooth cleaning products, moisturizers, deodorants, cosmetics, and cereals, among other things.

On March 1, José Santiago Molina, president of the Guatemalan Palm Growers Association (Grepalma), explain Freedom of the Press Maga’s research shows there is an opportunity to expand the area under cultivation to 800,000 hectares, and if this expansion were achieved, the contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) “would be much greater”.

Molina was referring to a map of areas suitable for oil palm cultivation prepared by the Makati Geographic, Strategic Information and Risk Management Authority. The analysis concluded that 667,638 hectares of land in the country have characteristics conducive to the cultivation of this monocrop.

Of this, 105,146 hectares (15.7%) are currently occupied by broadleaf forests, which would have to be cleared if palm expansion is planned, and another 97,290 hectares (14.5%) are currently used for the cultivation of maize and beans.Unlike palm oil, which is exported and consumed in foreign markets, the cultivation of basic cereals is considered subsistence agriculture as it aims to meet the basic needs of the farmer’s family and their community.

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El Maga clarified that the information is intended for internal and external users, but “has not yet been contacted with the Palm Growers Union to promote the expansion of the crop across the country.”

While not the 800,000 hectares mentioned by Molina, an expansion of this size would mean tripling the current area planted, which is concentrated in Alta Verapaz, Quiché and Escuintla.

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Gray Palma did not clarify if there are any expansion plans for monoculture. He simply told Plaza Pública via email that “since 2020, the area cultivated with palm has remained at 180,614 hectares, representing 1.6% of the national territory.”

Furthermore, he boasted that “sustainable palm cultivation in Guatemala follows strict standards for new plantings and regeneration, ensuring that primary forests or areas with high carbon stocks are not affected.”

But the latter has been questioned by various studies measuring the industry’s impact over the past decade.

cost

With more than 180,000 hectares of plantations in Grepalma, Guatemala is the sixth largest palm oil producer in the world and the second largest in Latin America.
Last year alone, the industry produced nearly a million tonnes of crude oil.

Grepalma insists that its union commitments “involve compliance with current national legislation and strict international standards prohibiting the conversion of primary forests and areas rich in biodiversity.”

But history shows the opposite. Between 2010 and 2020 alone, 15,187 hectares of forest were cleared throughout the country, which were later converted to land for palm crop cultivation, as evidenced by the report “Analysis of the expansion dynamics of Elaeis guineensis cultivation in Guatemala 2010-2020”, from the Institute of Natural Sciences and Technology (Iarna) of the Rafael Landivar University.

(PDF: Download the report here Analysis of the dynamics of palm oil plantation expansion in Guatemala, Africa, 2010-2020）

Another 7,208 hectares of deforested forests were natural or undergrowth. Most of the land where plantations were established during this decade was previously pasture.

“I have a picture of a farm called El Conacaste when the palm trees were felled. It was called that because there was a lot of Concaste wood there, but it’s gone now. (Before) it looked green, you watched the birds singing among the trees. There were birds, forests, fauna, but with the palm trees coming, they took everything from us,” said Celedon. His community is located on fertile land on the south coast that has been fully exploited by palm trees and other monoculture crops.

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Claudia Gordillo, a researcher at Iarna, explains that the loss of forests has several consequences, such as changes in the water cycle, the death of different species that inhabit the forests, and rising temperatures.

«(With the loss of forests) the carbon cycle changes. Forests play a major role because they capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere produced by industry and return it to the atmosphere in the form of oxygen. “They are like lungs,” Gordillo said.

This explains, for example, why lowland communities in the north, where palm plantations are concentrated, saw temperatures last summer as high as 42 degrees, with heat sensations as high as 45 degrees.

“Forests help regulate temperature and climate because they are important in the hydrological cycle. When you go into a forest, you experience a different climate than in a city, where there is no forest cover, because forests, through evaporation, help regulate the climate of an area and generate more precipitation,” he stressed.

In addition to forests, a study aims to measure water quality in rivers near palm plantations. Another study by Iarna, entitled “Protection and respect for water and environmental rights in the Northern Lowlands of Guatemala (TBN),” assesses the Chisec, Raxruhá, Cobán and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas rivers in the Alta Verapaz department; Ixcán in Quiché and Sayaxché in Petén.

（PDF: Download Final Water Quality Report）

The analysis concluded that herbicides such as glyphosate are present in rivers that pass through or near palm plantations, and exposure to these herbicides has been linked to diseases such as cancer, respiratory diseases, skin diseases, and may cause spontaneous abortions.

Although the study did not pinpoint the cause of this pollution, it concluded that water quality in rivers near palm plantations was worse than that in rivers in forested areas.

“While low concentrations of pesticides and glyphosate were found, the presence of pesticides alone suggests these types of compounds are being used in crops around the river, which could be harmful to people’s health,” the study said.

Monoculture of basic grains, an unfavorable change

According to Grepalma, the agro-processing industry created 30,103 direct jobs and 150,600 indirect jobs in 2023, in addition to contributing 12.661 billion quetzales to the national economy.

Yet while those jobs number in the thousands, an Iarna study titled “Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Latin America: A Case Study of Achieving Energy Justice in Guatemala” concluded that crops such as corn and beans generate three times as much social benefits in employment and wages per unit of energy (one unit of energy is equivalent to one terajoule, the international standard for calculating energy, heat and work) allocated to the country’s production system compared to palm monoculture.

“In other words, when the country uses its energy resources across all the production chains systematically activated in the production of beans and maize, compared to palm, the social benefits generated are more than three times greater,” explains Byron, an expert in political ecology and one of the authors of the study.

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This finding becomes even more significant if one considers the potential area under palm cultivation in the coming years, with nearly 100,000 hectares of land currently cultivated with basic cereals maize and beans that could be replaced with this monoculture.

If this happens, the expert believes, it would be a mistake for the country to invest its energy resources in industries that will produce little social benefit.

“Replacing pulse and maize crops with African palm will not only have negative consequences for national food security and the regional environment, but will also lead to a significant reduction in employment and wages along the value chain of these crops, and waste energy in producing these specific social benefits,” he insisted.

“While the country’s economic growth has been driven more by palm oil than by beans and corn, this growth does not represent development or social well-being,” Galvez concluded.
The above “demystifies monocultures such as palm, emphasizes social welfare based on the wages and jobs generated, and changes the paradigm perspective for evaluating a country’s socioeconomic performance. Although the country’s economic growth is more due to palm cultivation than to beans and corn cultivation, this growth does not represent development or social well-being,” Galvez concluded.