FARC peace deal in Colombia sparked war on forests, report says

The 2016 peace deal that the Colombian government reached with the country’s largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was also heralded as being strikingly “green.” The agreement set out to correct unequal land use caused by internal displacement while also investing in the management of protected reserves.

But five years since the agreement’s signing, and seven years since the FARC first agreed to a cease-fire, deforestation continues to be exacerbated by violent internal conflicts. Now it even threatens Colombia’s 2030 zero-deforestation goal, according to a new report from the Crisis Group, an international peacekeeping organization.

“It’s unusual that we look at issues of the environment in this way,” said Bram Ebus, Crisis Group investigator. “But it’s becoming harder to ignore the fact that conflict and the environment and climate change are interrelated.”

Between 1964 and 2016, the FARC razed forests as a means of expanding territorial control, while also engaging in cattle ranching, mining and the cultivation of coca crops — all drivers of deforestation in their own right — in order to finance its operations.

Nevertheless, destruction of the rainforest appears to have worsened in the years since the guerrilla group disbanded, the report said. Deforestation rates rose in 2015 during the peace deal negotiations and have remained high ever since.

The report identifies several conflict-related factors that might explain this unexpected trend, including the government’s failure to implement parts of the peace deal and ongoing competition between non-state armed groups that have tried filling the power gap left by the FARC.