Left-wing ex-guerrilla candidate for Columbia President Gustavo Petro, has indicated if elected, he will seek to end the country’s sugar and oil industries. In place of the petrochemical industry, he wants to transition the nation toward a green economy.
This would have substantial economic impact on the country, as crude oil and coal are the nation’s two main exports. Of the $32.2 billion in exports during 2020, $11.5 billion came from oil and coal. It is also a threat to the nation’s energy self-sufficiency, promising to double the average citizen’s fuel costs, and quintuple their natural gas bills.
So far, Gustavo Petro, a former member of the Marxist M19 guerrillas and former mayor of Bogota has won the first round of elections, sending him into the election next month on June 19th against one other candidate, businessman Rodolfo Hernández.
Petro has called the oil and coal industries, “poisons,” akin to cocaine and promised if elected, “the cessation of oil exploration contracting.”
Colombian state-run Ecopetrol SA oil company’s CEO, Felipe Bayón, has promised rigorous court challenges to any attack on the industry from the Presidency should Petro be elected. Bayón said, “So even if allegedly he can come in and change everything, there will be challenges in the legal system not only from us but many people.”
Colombia’s energy ministry halted all price increases in fuel for the month of May to help control inflation, freezing it at 9.03 Colombian pesos per gallon ($2.39).
According to the Colombian Petroleum Association, cessation of investment in the oil industry would have follow-on effects in the natural gas industry. By its calculations, if the oil industry were weakened by cutting investments, by 2026 the nation would need to import its natural gas by 2026, and it would begin importing oil by 2028. That would put 40,000 jobs at risk, and cause $77 billion in losses over the next decade. Presently, Columbia exports approximately 200,000 barrels of oil per day to the United States, a number expected to rise to 240,000 barrels by the end of 2022. So this would also affect the price of oil in the United States.
Petro has received support in his war against Columbia’s energy industry, such as in an open letter published to him, and signed by leftist celebrities such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein.
Petro said in an interview with Bloomberg in January he wants to create an “anti-oil bloc,” hopefully with Chilean President Gabriel Boric, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, should he win the Brazilian election for President later this year. The bloc would work toward replacing Columbia’s oil economy with “economies that are decarbonized, productive and based on knowledge.”
Petro also wants to expropriate the land and facilities in use by the sugar industry, and give it to farmers. In his attacks, Petro has described sugar as more dangerous than cocaine. On Twitter, he wrote, “Did you know that sugar is a much more harmful drug than marijuana or cocaine? We have 250,000 hectares planted to produce one of the worst drugs in the history of mankind: sugar.”
This provoked an angry response from the sugar industry, where Colombia’s union leaders responded, “Comparing sugar with marijuana or cocaine and saying that the granules are more harmful than those psychoactive substances is absurd and also disrespectful.” In Columbia, the sugar industry employs over 300,000 jobs.
Petro responded by calling sugar “the most dangerous drug in history” on June 10, 2019.
Colombia exported to the United States 56,750 metric tons (MT) of sugar in 2021 according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture.
