Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Oil palm is the most consumed oil in the world and its production affects the lives of thousands of farmers around the world. My paper addresses the possibilities that small-scale farmers have for confronting the conditions that limit their livelihood possibilities under efforts to integrate them as suppliers of this global value chain. It focuses on the participation of small-scale farmers as growers of oil palm in Northeast Colombia. Oil palm causes ecological damage that affects the long-term sustainability of the soil and has caused violent displacement to small-scale farmers in Colombia. Yet, 70% of oil palm growers in the country are small-scale farmers. A story about local organizing traditions, agroecological knowledge, and national and international NGOs explains the unlikely persistence of these farmers through oil palm crops. My research suggests that the mobilization of local knowledge and practices by small-scale farming communities has been an effective tool to confront the economic and environmental risks posed by global value chains. Peasant social movements and the protection of peasant farming by regional and transnational NGOs, as well as the State, has been crucial to ensure this outcome. Engaging with agrarian change and post-development perspectives, this research reveals that the focus of agrarian studies on the possibilities of peasant persistence in the context of the adverse conditions posed by capitalist markets ignores the possibilities that peasant farming holds for transcending the very contradictions of capitalist agriculture and global value chains that make it so difficult to engage in peasant farming nowadays.