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
|