COMMISSIONS: The Curse of Palm Oil in Guatemala: 16-20180213palm0203

IZABAL, GUATEMALA. February 13, 2018 – Marta Julio, 42, right, opened her restaurant to cater to environmental defenders, NGOs, and palm workers. "My restaurant helps pay for my son's private school tuition."  

Indigenous Maya Q'eqchi communities such as Chapin Abajo .along Lake Izabal in eastern Guatemala, have no state presence. There is no police. Only a palm oil company provides jobs and health services. In the last 20 years, palm oil plantations in the region replaced former cattle ranches but it has exacerbated the struggle for land rights in the Polochic Valley.  

In Guatemala, only four percent of producers control 80 percent of the land. Approximately 60 percent of citizens live in poverty but rises to 80 percent among the indigenous communities. "The indigenous population was always seen as cheap labor and this persists to this day," said Alvaro Pop, Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. "They are seen as a tool and are not the focus of public policies.” 

According to a 2006 UN report on "The right to food,” Guatemala’s land policies were deliberately designed to create cheap labour forces by reducing the land available for indigenous people's own subsistence activities. The country has a long history of exclusionary development that has left indigenous communities without land or labour rights and subject to pervasive racial discrimination, the report said.