Resumen de Impacts of oil palm expansion in Colombia: What do socioeconomic indicators show?

Carmenza Castiblanco, Andres Etter, Alberto Ramírez González

• The impact of energy crops and biofuel production on development, social welfare and conservation of ecosystems and ecological services has constituted a heated debate. At the center of these controversies is the development of agro-industrial plantations, particularly oil palm. To contribute to a better informed debate, we use existing data to analyze the socioeconomic impacts of the expansion of oil palm plantations in Colombia, the major producer of Latin America. We used the official database of socioeconomic indicators of municipalities for the period 1993–2009, and apply several descriptive and multivariate analyses. The results of the study confirm several issues found in the international literature: oil palm municipalities present lower levels of unmet basic needs and bigger fiscal incomes in comparison to municipalities where this crop is not cultivated. However, in Colombia depending on the region and time period, violence and land tenure concentration are higher in oil palm municipalities, which may help to explain the persistence of inequity and poverty in some areas.