5. Colombia

Foto: Claudio Ronchini

Colombia suffered an accelerated process of concentration of land into
the hand of large landlords. At the same time the area actually farmed fell drastically. According to a study by the Controller's Office of the Colombian Government, the Western region of the country has the highest degree of land concentration into large estates, with the Cauca Valley state experiencing the most intense process of concentration between 1985 and 1996, followed by Antioquía, Sucre and César.

The rural population grew from 6 million people in 1938 to 11.6 million in 1996. Over this period, the economically active population in agricultural activities grew from 1.9 to 2.7 million. The number of autonomous rural workers grew from 600,000 in 1938 to 700,000 in 1964 and 800,000 in 1993.

The Colombian peasantry is faced with, beyond the "via latifundiaria" (large estate model of land tenure), transnational capital and the accompanying model of economic globalization. This model requires the "cleansing" of "inefficient" producers from rural areas, and this cleansing has been carried out by war. As was said earlier, it is not so much that there are so many displaced people in Colombia because there is war, but rather that there is war precisely to displace people.

Historical Overview

Since the beginning of the 20th century there is a rich history of peasant organizations, as well of the struggles waged by indigenous peoples and by Afro-Colombians. In 1926 the peasant movement achieved a major victory with the passing of Law number 74, which recognizes the social function of landholdings, and authorizes the State to expropriate idle farmland and also creates other pro-peasant policies. In the period from 1934 to 1936 the popular movements reached their apogee, with important gains. Law number 200, passed in 1936, as a tentative first attempt at an agrarian reform, though based only simple schemes of parceling out plots. This period also saw the creation of the Land Mortgage Bank.

However, in 1944 the landlords managed to pass Law number 100, which delayed until 1956 the application of those parts of Law number 200 that favored the rights of sharecroppers and tenants and that would have used eminent domain to pass land being sharecropped over to those who till it. By delaying implementation, the landlords made violence inevitable.

At that time the peasantry was organized in the first national body, the National Peasant and Indigenous Peoples' Federation, founded on October 12, 1942. In 1947 it was to become the combative Peasant and Indigenous Confederation.

Beginning in 1946 there was a growing incidence of violence in Colombia. It was largely directed at the Confederation and eventually led to the assassination of the majority of its leaders. The violence liquidated the organization of peasants and indigenous people, and passed through its most cruel phase with the murder 200,000 peasants and the displacement of another 2 million from their land. This land was then used by the landlords to establish large-scale plantations of crops like cotton and sugarcane. This extreme repression of legal civic organizations naturally opened political space for the growth of guerilla movements in Colombia. The insurgents, as the guerillas are known, were born from the struggle for land. They consist of various organizations, though the best known is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

It would take until 1958 for peace agreements to be reached with the various guerilla organizations, which once again opened a path toward policies of agrarian reform and a new consolidation of the peasantry as a social class. But these policies failed. The nascent agrarian reform process was interrupted in 1962 by a political pact between landowner associations and mainstream political parties. The official death of the reform process came with Law number 4 in 1973, which liquated the agrarian reform. Since that time, the Colombian Land Reform Institute (INCORA) has been reduced to applying small fines to landowners, while implementing a variety of measures to impede the peasant struggle.

The Influence of the World Bank

Incidents of peasants occupying lands nominally belonging to large landlords peaked at 600 in 1961, and dropped to just 6 between 1978 and 1981. Meanwhile, the guerilla movement reappeared and grew in leaps and bounds. USD $27 million in World Bank credit was destined for the agricultural frontier, which consists of areas of peasant colonization. These are zones of proliferation of other "alternatives" to land reform: guerilla armies and narcotics plantations.

The current crisis in Colombia is derived from both a weak presence of the State and from the constant maneuvers of the landowning class to expand their holdings at the expense of rural workers, eliminating them as competitors in the market.

Following World Bank guidelines, the government of President César Gaviria proposed a "subsidized land market," based on the buying and selling of land. The original proposal came from the Bank and was created under Lay 170 in 1994. In June 1996, a "seed money" loan of US $1.82 million was granted, to finance pilot experiences and the creation of a technical unit to prepare a series of projects to support this version of "market-assisted land reform."

The program was announced with the stated goal of guaranteeing access to land and secure tenure to peasants, by eliminating state bureaucracy and intervention in the market. The program is currently in a state of crisis, due to elevated interest rates and subsequent failure of beneficiaries to keep up with their loan payments, and constant cutbacks in INCORA's budget for investing in land acquisition, which had originally been promised by the government as a their counterpart to the World Bank financing.

In 1997 the landlords offered 1,141,303 hectares of land for sale via INCORA, who was only able to actually subsidize the purchase 42,527 hectares, which is just 3.7% of the total, and benefited just 3,113 of the 38,451 families who signed up to get land. From that point on the program has been declining, with 1,767 families benefiting in 1998, 845 in 1999, and just 650 in 2000 and 2001. Over its entire lifespan, it has subsidized land purchases for 13,000 families.

In 1998 the proposal to redirect the funds earmarked for subsidizing land purchases by the poor, toward purchases by "producers with the capacity to invest" was but one small element in a larger move to reconcentrate land in Colombia. From that point on, the government of then President Andres Pastrana tried to replace the subsidized land market project with a program he called "strategic alliances," to promote partnerships between large and small landowners and businessmen. This fed into a World Bank program called "production associations," and rather than strengthen the peasant economy it was designed to subordinate peasants to, and put their land at the service of, large corporations.

On January 22, 2002, the Bank approved a loan of US $32 million to develop the production associations scheme to better link rural communities with the private sector and supposedly to dynamize the internal market, targeted at the land that had been purchased in the now failed subsidized land market project.

The new project emphasized African Oil Palm plantations. Three of the priority zones for the new program are the principal producers of oil palm. From an economic perspective, the program would function as a sort of subsidy to the large plantation owners to tide them over periods of low prices, and to assist them to expand their area by taking over the land of nearby smallholders. Here we see the World Bank acting directly contrary to land reform.

These "alliances" are a legal 'out' so that new "feudal lords" don't have to meet their obligations to displaced families. Tuning the land-poor peasants who are his workers into "partners," the plantation owner rents their lands, and uses the peasant as worker without paying any overtime or benefits. The idea is to have land and labor permanently available without having any traditional kind of "labor" relationship between the plantation owners and the peasants who work for them. This increases the supply of labor, which benefits the transnationals that process and market the palm oil.

We can also see that the Bank works contrary to true agrarian reform, in that all five priority zones are areas where processes of subordination of the peasantry are already underway, by means of violence at the hands of the army, and economic dependence. The Bank program reinforces these processes.

The Social Movements' Proposal

The Agrarian Coordination, which is made up of Colombia Peasant Action (ACC), the Unitary National Agricultural Labor Federation (FENSUAGRO), the Colombian National Indigenous Peoples' Organization (OINC), among others, called from the very beginning for a different set of laws. They argued that the governmental project, rather than countering the tendency for land prices to rise out of reach of the poor, was actually consolidating this trend, leaving both INCORA and the peasantry at the mercy of the landlords.

In 1999 the Agrarian Coordination became the National Peasant Coordination (CNC), with 11 member organizations. They have put forth a concrete agrarian proposal adapted to Colombian reality. On September 13, 2000, they carried out coordinated mass mobilizations in 13 regions of the country.

The CNC grew out of regional mobilizations of peasants, landless people and of local civic organizations that were demanding real solutions to the agrarian crisis. They created the CNC because they could never get an adequate response from pre-existing national organizations, which had been severely weakened by violence and the death or exile of most of their leadership. A key step was the founding of Coffee Unity (UC), which grouped together peasant and smallholder coffee farmers in the struggle to have their unpayable debts cancelled.

Out of the struggle to defend national farm production came the National Association for the Agricultural Salvation of Colombia (ANSAC), which led a national general strike in rural areas from July 31 to August 4, 2000, mobilizing 100,000 people in 27 separate street blockades. ANSAC held their first national congress in 2001, having incorporated affiliates in 17 states.

To transform current conditions, the social movements are calling for a comprehensive program of agrarian reform and the reconstruction of national agriculture. Among the specific actions they demand are subsidized interest rates for farm loans, changing trade policy to protect the domestic farm economy, and a strengthening of public sector services that assist farmers in the adoption of appropriate technologies.

They call for a solution based on inalienable "Peasant Reserve Areas," where land tenure arrangements guarantee long-term access to land for small farmers and their communities, and permit them to plan their own future development initiatives. If any such proposal were to be successful, they must be premised on the recognition that family farmers are a strategic economic sector, and they must be seen as true actors in development.

Text based on MONDRAGÓN, Hector - Colombia: land market or land reform?

6. Guatemala

7. India

8. Mexico

9. South Africa

10. Thailand

11. Zimbabwe

12. Positions of Via Campesina

13. Bibliography

14. Table of Contents