Elaeis guineensis (oil palm) is native to the Gulf of Guinea, where humans have harvested its fruits for sustenance for millennia. In Latin America, palm oil seeds planted by enslaved Black people have provided an alternative source of sustenance and became a symbol of resistance. In contrast to these past contributions to autonomy, today the palm oil industry is known for its effects on environmental destruction and social dispossession. How did oil palm crops become such a destructive force? Who, and through which practices, can change this? To explore these questions, I conduct a multispecies and ethnographic value chain analysis of palm oil, with a focus on Colombia — the fourth largest producer in the world. Among the top producers, Colombia is characterized by the high participation of relatively independent small-scale farmers as suppliers of oil palm fruit. The participation of these farmers in the industry reveals key relations of power that have transformed oil palm production from a subsistence activity into an extractive activity. I argue that palm oil corporations have become powerful economic actors that produce the most consumed oil in the world by performing material transformations, rooted in colonial knowledge, to oil palm trees and using state and class violence against small-scale farmers and other farmworkers. Through these transformations and violence, palm oil corporations have produced controllable landscapes and impoverished workers that they can strategically exploit to extract palm oil on the most favorable terms for these corporations. My dissertation also finds that, despite this context, some small-scale farmers in northeast Colombia have been able to forge alternative forms of production, building on agroecological knowledge and support from organizations at national and transnational scales. Through a dialogue between literatures on Global Value Chains (GVC), multispecies studies, and critical agrarian studies, this dissertation contributes to the sociological inquiry of how global economic relations produce local inequalities and how to forge alternative futures in food systems. It offers an alternative to the GVC literature’s focus on intra-firm relations for conceptualizing forms of industrial organization, provides concrete tools for environmental sociology to study how social inequality shapes and is shaped by material transformations in ecosystems, and illustrates how the sociology of agriculture can identify possibilities of transition towards more sustainable and equitable food systems. The experiences of small-scale oil palm growers in Colombia illustrate how contemporary agriculture has become destructive for people and ecosystems around the world and provides clues about how to transform it.