Hanneke Mol’s research while affiliated with Northumbria University and other places

Este libro nació como respuesta a la comprensión crítica de que si bien la criminología verde ha crecido en cuanto a su ámbito de interés y orientación, el campo de la criminología verde (si de hecho se puede hablar de un campo) todavía está restringido en su alcance y potencial de colaboración y discusión, pues es principalmente practicada por estudiosos en Australia, Europa y América del Norte, y sus publicaciones están escritas casi exclusivamente en inglés. Por esta razón, durante el congreso anual de la Sociedad Americana de Criminología (asc, por sus siglas en inglés), en noviembre de 2014, en San Francisco, varios miembros del Grupo Internacional de Trabajo en Criminología Verde (igcwg, por sus siglas en inglés) discutieron las limitaciones inherentes a una criminología verde que no es bien conocida en América Latina ni en los países hispanoparlantes en general. Por tanto, este libro tiene el objetivo de presentar la criminología verde al mundo de habla española como un intento de impulsar el establecimiento de un diálogo amplio con un número extenso de académicos internacionales y así crear nuevas vías de colaboración internacional. Junto a este libro, un texto en inglés (Goyes, Mol, Brisman y South, 2017), titulado Environmental crime in Latin America: The theft of nature and poisoning of the land [Crimen ambiental en América Latina: el robo de la naturaleza y el envenenamiento de la tierra], constituye otro proyecto que busca resaltar los problemas ambientales sufridos en América Latina y hacer hincapié en la necesidad de escuchar y aprender de las voces, conocimientos, perspectivas y cosmovisiones de las comunidades locales afectadas a lo largo de América Latina por la degradación ambiental.

Over the last 25 years, Green Criminology has developed into a fertile area of study that now attracts scholars from around the world with a wide range of research interests and theoretical orientations. It spans the micro to the macro–from work on individual-level environmental harms to business/corporate crimes to state transgressions–and includes research conducted from both mainstream and critical theoretical perspectives, as well as arising from interdisciplinary efforts. Nonetheless—and in line with the proposal for a Southern Criminology put forward by Carrington and colleagues (2016)—it is still the case that much work needs to be done to ensure that the environmental crimes and harms affecting the lands and peoples of the Global South are brought to the forefront of a truly transnational Green Criminology. This volume makes a contribution to this process as the first text to focus specifically on examples from Latin America.

In order to open up new terrains to capital accumulation, agro-industries expand into, transform, and, in the process, frequently destroy socio-natural spaces where a noncapitalist logic of production and subsistence hitherto predominated. The expropriations upon which such capital accumulation rests have more often than not been of a forcible and violent character. Marx, writing about the “primitive accumulation” that separates producers from the means of production (1990, p. 875), noted that what he viewed as the prehistory of capital is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Harvey (2003), among others, has pointed to the continuity of the features of expropriation described by Marx as primitive accumulation, coining the term “accumulation by dispossession” to refer to this (see also Gutiérrez-Gomez, this volume).

Many of the adverse social and environmental impacts associated with the palm oil industry that were mentioned in the previous chapter exceed strictly legalistic definitions of crime.

As mentioned previously, the principal focus of this study lies on the social and environmental harms associated with the operations of the palm oil industry in the Pacific coast region of Colombia.

In the previous chapter, I sketched the broader context within which to consider the operations of the palm oil industry, and the corresponding politics of harm, in the Colombian Pacific coast region.

Towards the end of August 2016, a peace agreement between the government of President Santos and the FARC was reached but when put to the Colombian people for approval in a referendum held on October 2, 2016, the agreement was rejected with a slight majority of votes.

In sharp contrast to government and industry depictions of palm oil as a source of progress and prosperity, for many inhabitants of Colombia’s Pacific coast palm oil is not considered to generate the conditions for a better tomorrow.

In industry discourse, oil palm is praised as a “social and ecological crop” (La agroindustria de la palma de aceite en Colombia, Fedepalma, Bogotá, 2006). Whether palm oil production is really all that social and ecological differs greatly according to what, and whose, criteria are followed.

This book examines the politics of harm in the context of palm oil production in Colombia, with a primary focus on the Pacific coast region. Globally, the palm oil industry is associated with practices that fit the most conventional definitions and perceptions of crime, but also crucially, forms of social and environmental harm that do not fit strictly legalistic definitions and understandings of crime. Drawing on rich field-based data from the region, Mol contributes empirically to an awareness of the constructions, practices, and the lived and perceived realities of harm related to palm oil production. She advances criminological debate around ‘harm’ by putting forward a theoretical and analytical approach that redirects the debate from a central concern with the academic contestedness of harm within criminology, towards a focus on the ‘on-the-ground’ contestedness of palm oil-related harm in Colombia. Detailed analysis and arresting conclusions ensure this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of Green and Critical Criminology, Environmental Sociology, and International and Critical Development Studies.