Guatemala's palm industry leaves locals contemplating an uncertain future

Myles Estey in the povermatters blog at Guardian (UK): ...A dozen dirt-floored homes dot Semochán, in the northern Guatemalan state of Petén. The predominantly indigenous Q'eqchi residents harvest maize and beans from small plots of family-owned land. But over the past decade, the semi-tropical climate and flat terrain has attracted the interest of palm growers. Hoping to cash in on the growing global demand for palm oil (used mainly in commercial baked goods), they have reportedly bought more than 20,000 hectares of arable land in the region.

"They have encircled us and we no longer have the right to cross our community," says Sandra*, who – since former neighbours sold the plots between her own and the town itself – must cross an oil palm plantation in order to reach the land she legally owns. An agreement has been reached to allow her access, but she fears the plantation workers, far from honouring it, will continue to intimidate both her and other women in the community with threats of eviction.

"They came on my parcel, and they asked me: 'Are you going to sell your land?' I told them I wouldn't," she said of her latest conversation. "They told me that, someday, I would find myself not enjoying my land any more, no matter what. That is how things were left." Residents in several nearby villages are uneasy about the future of their land, with many worried that the environmental side-effects associated with the palm plantations will render it worthless.

Santos Natalio Chic, an investigator with the national commission on displaced people in Guatemala, believes that – beyond the intimidation – company representatives have intentionally misled residents, whether by claiming that floods will render their land useless or offering spurious guarantees of lifelong employment. "You never see their promises," says Chic. "They say: 'This will bring development to the communities,' when really what it means is more poverty."...

Patchwork of cultivated fields on mountain slope in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Shot by the pink slip, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

AAAS board defends climate scientists

Janet Raloff in Science News reports on a recent response by a major scientific body fighting back against the virulent bullying and intimidation that marks this phase of climate controversies: “AAAS vigorously opposes attacks on researchers that question their personal and professional integrity or threaten their safety based on displeasure with their scientific conclusions.” This declaration was contained in a 400-word denunciation of attacks on climate scientists and the politicization of climate science that was issued June 29 by the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The board is not objecting to people voicing opinions about climate data, explains AAAS board member Raymond L. Orbach, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute. “This is about an attack on people. And that’s an important distinction,” the physicist emphasizes. The concern, he says, is that these attacks can have “a chilling effect on scientists’ ability to present facts.”

Attacking the messenger can discourage researchers from publishing data they fear might lead to intimidating phone calls — even death threats, he says. And that would jeopardize public access to important data on which public decisionmaking should be based, he argues, “which is just pernicious.”

...Together with marine scientist Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, in Washington D.C., Orbach introduced a resolution at the May board meeting of the AAAS asking for a formal condemnation of the public intimidation of climate researchers. When I asked him what had triggered the move, he pointed to a succession of events in recent years, including:

• a campaign by Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli to obtain access to research data by former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann (now at Penn State). Cuccinelli said he wanted to prosecute Mann or his university under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act for misuse of state funds
• a petition by the American Tradition Institute (ATI) — a “free-market”-based think tank — demanding that the University of Virginia turn over thousands of e-mails and documents written by Mann
• ATI’s January 19, 2011, filing of a Freedom of Information Act request for NASA to hand over documents detailing “whether and how ‘global warming’ activist Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has complied with applicable federal ethics and financial disclosure laws and regulations, and NASA Rules of Behavior”
• and news accounts of climate researchers receiving death threats in response to reports of their findings.

Mary Pickford in the 1917 version of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm