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Note: This article in Truthout came about with the assistance of Jeff Conant, GJEP’s then-Communications Director.  GJEP ED Anne Petermann is quoted below.  The article follows up on an investigation GJEP undertook in the region in March and April of 2011, where we helped expose the social and ecological impacts of the California-Chiapas  forest carbon offset scheme.

–The GJEP Team

By Daniel C Marotta and Jennifer Coute-Marotta, 13 January 2013. Source: Truthout

Biofuel refinery in new industrial zone in Tapachula, an exporting city on the coast of Chiapas. With plans for expansion, there is a coffee plant to its left and an oil refinery being built on its right. Mexico is currently laying the foundation of a biofuel exporting industry. (Photo: Jennifer Coute-Marotta)

All names are fictitious as sources requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Anonymity and people’s  requests that no pictures be taken were prerequisites for attaining interviews.  No one wanted to go on record in connection to a new, politically charged, government program. 

Consuela’s identity, like most indigenous farmers of the Americas, is strongly connected to the heirloom maize seeds her family plants on their milpas every year. She is from one of the most isolated parts of Mexico, called Marques de Comillas, within the state of Chiapas. It is bordered to the northwest by the Montes Azules, or Blue Mountains, and by the Guatemalan border on the other three sides. It is a low-lying area dominated by wetlands, tropical forests and mosquitoes and gives way to the Peten rainforest as it sprawls out across Guatemala and northward into the Yucatan Peninsula. Truthout interviewed Consuela as part of an investigation into the growing biofuel industry, and she talked with dignity and defiance about the reasons why she and her village refuse to plant African Palms for biofuels on their land.

Biofuels are fuels derived from plants, with African Palm and Jatropha the two main biofuel crops in Chiapas. African Palm is a plant used widely as a foodstuff, especially in the developing world, while Jatropha is not. While the use of food crops for biofuels has been connected to increases in food prices and shortages, non-foodstuff biofuels should be implicated, too. Productive agricultural land is a scarce resource, and the more humanity relegates to biofuels, the less goes to the cultivation of food.

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