Petro’s Agrarian Policy for the Colombian Countryside: Continuity or rupture?
Farm workers Southern Colombia (Photo Gearóid Ó Loingsigh)
Gearóid Ó Loingsigh
(05/08/2024)
The agrarian question has always occupied a central key place in the Colombian economy and has supposedly been a central axis of state policies. A change in direction with the new Petro government was hoped for, new ideas, new policies to break with the past where the government only sought to favour landlords, multinational cash crop exporters and the regional and national elites. However, what is to be seen are continuations in policy with little real innovation, although they are a little more energetic in their application, or at least that is the image we get for the moment.
Under the new government they have promoted the recognition of the peasant as a political actor, and whilst it is important that the peasants be recognised as social and political actors that shouldn’t be the result of legislation that pushes the peasant to acting only within the norms and through state channels. In the large peasant strikes of the 90s, the peasant always had real recognition such as when in 1999, the peasants in the south west blocked the Panamerican Highway for a month, forcing the state to negotiate with them. Where they lost in that strike was during the negotiations and the model for solving the problems of the communities. Basically, the state announced that it would give money to the communities, but each community had to draw up projects, just as they do today with foreign aid funds, and the government would evaluate each project deciding which would be approved, pending agreement with the Interamerican Bank and other bodies i.e. the strike resulted in each community fighting with the others for state resources as if it was charity rather than their right.[1]
This model of resolving strikes has been put into action on repeated occasions since then. It wasn’t the lack of recognition of the peasants as political subjects that led to the defeat of those strikes, but rather the failure of the organisations to act as political subjects at all times. In the strike of 2013, when it came to negotiating with the state, once again they accepted the idea of putting forward project proposals and in the discussions each political current divided itself into its constituent organisations in a vain attempt to maximise the money they would receive, i.e. they denied they were a political current made up of political subjects but rather organisations fighting amongst themselves to see which would get the greater share of the state’s gravy train.
Many of the city-based advisors of those movements and some peasant leaders responsible for those defeats form part of the current government and influence the design of government policies. Other mobilisations, such as the Peasant Exodus of Southern Bolívar in 1998 reached much more political agreements, but they were defeated by an unprecedented paramilitary offensive and an offensive by foreign aid agencies which in practice forced them to sign up to begging for projects, community by community under pain of dying of hunger in the midst of a paramilitary siege of the region that blocked the entry of food and medicine.[2] And the projects financed at that time by the Programme for Development and Peace in Magadalena Medio (PDPMM) were almost all of a neoliberal genre, changing the production of food for cash crops. Francisco de Roux, the director of the PDPMM, made it clear what his vision was, a vision which is evidently shared by Petro today. In an interview with myself in 2002, he stated that,
The peasant has to get involved in large scale processes that make the land in Magdalena Medio interesting for large scale monetary investments. And those projects are those of permanent tropical products. If the peasant doesn’t get involved in that, he will leave the region.[3]
The indigenous are recognised in the 1991 Constitution and the black communities by Law 70 and that recognition hasn’t been much use to them. They are still poor, they are still murdered, they still have problems with delimiting their traditional territories and the community councils and every now and again they have to resort to strikes and protests.
But it is good that they rectify the exclusion of the peasantry from Petro’s beloved constitution that he defends so much, although neither he nor his people in M-19 did much to promote the idea when the new constitution was being discussed. On the contrary, the Constitution reduced the peasant to an agrarian worker without rights to the land and there is no obligation to include them in public policies in the same way that occurs with the indigenous and black communities.[4] However, to recognize the peasantry now, embedded in the neoliberal model is a pyrrhic victory. To be included as subjects with rights, but in the midst of the neoliberal barbarity that destroys the countryside does not favour them as much as some would like. And recognising them in that way is not new. The state has always been willing to recognise the peasant as an economic producer for the large companies. Once again, De Roux explains it well and it would seem to be also Petro’s view.
The most dangerous thing for the peasantry is an isolated peasant. A peasant that is in an area and the paramilitaries arrive and they attack him will leave as will all the peasants because they are not well connected.
If the peasant grows rubber or cocoa and is in a cooperative and has a contract… with the companies that use the product, they [the companies] will immediately react if they are attacked. If they have a loan with a private bank with just terms, the banks will immediately intervene if the peasants are attacked, because the banks will lose out if the peasants leave…. If anyone touches one of those peasants, they are not alone, they are well connected. There are political and social interest groups that support them. There are economic interests that support them.[5]
In other words, they only exist in as much as they contribute to the profits of the companies. Though the idea that the banks and the companies are going to intervene to save the peasants is delusional. They have never done it. In many cases it was those same economic interest groups that sent the paramilitaries to attack the communities.
So, the question is what is new in the current policies, whether they are promoting the idea of presenting individual projects as a solution or whether there is a more global national proposal and what exactly is it.
Opium Poppy, Nariño, Colombia (Photo Gearóid Ó Loingsigh)
The 1990s and the Uribe government
In the 1990s following the economic aperture, the Colombian countryside suffered serious problems with an increase in the planting of coca given the difficulties the peasants faced to support themselves and compete with imports. According to the US’s supposed anti-narcotics project, Plan Colombia, between 1995 and 1999 700,000 hectares of farming land were lost due to the economic aperture. They were conscious of what they were doing and they had a plan to recover that land, but not for the peasant, or at least not for the peasant that wanted to grow food crops, but rather to expand the growing of cash crops. In the 1990s, the governments spent a lot of time and money on promoting certain crops. Almost 60% of the laws in the agricultural sector were attempts to promote them and set up parafiscal funds to administer them. Amongst the laws passed we find funds for African palm, cocoa, cotton and cattle ranching amongst others.[6]
Plan Colombia itself considered this and pointed to African palm and cocoa as ideal crops.[7] When Uribe came to power, he intensified the agro-industrialisation of the countryside, which was increasingly emptied of its people by the paramilitary groups promoted by the same Colombian state, both before and after he came to power.
Without a doubt, Uribe was able to deepen the changes in the countryside promoting monocultures, a so called “cooperativism”, strategic alliances between the peasants and the large national companies or even multinationals. To this end he counted on the support of many NGOs, the World Bank and the European Union. The model promoted in Magdalena Medio in which the peasant signs a contract to grow a certain number of hectares of a crop, such as palm, covered all the costs by going into debt and is obliged to sell their products to certain companies only is now state agrarian policy. It is not a policy of the government in office, but is rather a state policy and does not change according to the changes in Congress nor whichever president is in power. Nowadays, almost all loans given to peasants are for cash crops, be it with private banks or the state.
Sugarcane worker, Cauca, Colombia (Photo Gearóid Ó Loingsigh)
Petro and the countryside
Petro’s election campaign received the support of large peasant organisations and the support of the left political currents that claim to defend the peasantry. It was seen as an opportunity to roll back the policies of Uribe, the paramilitary conquests and promote a new vision of the countryside different to those who had shaped the countryside chainsaw [favoured weapon to murder peasants] and gun in hand. But it was not to be. Those with the chainsaw won with Uribe, Santos and Duque and they weren’t going to lose now with Petro.
One of Petro’s first measures was to implement the supposed “agrarian reform” agreed to in the peace process with the FARC. I say supposed, because it only deals with three million hectares of the 45 million hectares the landlords have in farms larger than 500 hectares,[8] they are not the best lands, not even good lands as far as can be seen and moreover it is to be achieved through the property market i.e. those with the chainsaw in hand will be paid for the land they stole. Petro announced that he would buy three million hectares from the cattle ranchers through their criminal industry organisation FEDEGAN. Although to date the they have only bought 142,000 ha.[9] He promised the lands in question would not be stolen lands, but he lied. This year a scandal broke in the National Land Agency (ANT) around the purchase of inadequate lands for prices in excess of their value in the land registry[10] and in some cases they bought land from people under investigation for the crime of forced disappearance. One of the farms at the centre of the storm belonged to Juan Manuel Fernández de Castro del Castillo. The ANT denied there was any problem with the farm, however, on the 4th of September 2023 the Prosecutor’s Office had informed the ANT through Official Notice 1283 that “On the 23rd of January 2019, this Office received the criminal case against JUAN MANUEL FERNANDEZ DE CATASTRO DEL CASTILLO, for the crime of FORCED DISAPPEARANCE case file number 200016001231201000498000.”[11] Furthermore the ANT sacked a number of staff who were unwilling to sign off on such irregular procedures. The sacking of those who disagree with Petro is a practice that has followed him from his time in the Mayor’s Office in Bogotá and partly explains the high turnover of staff.
Petro continues to flirt with that sector and in July of this year, he begged the paramilitary group the Clan del Golfo to demobilise. This is not surprising but the reasons given are. According to Petro their demobilization would allow for the agro-industrialisation of the Colombian Caribbean coast. He stated in his Twitter account that “I propose to the Clan del Golfo turning our backs on the illicit economy and kick starting the agro-industrialisation of the Caribbean.”[12] In the video that accompanied the tweet he says “This means we have to have an agreement: we will not kill each other anymore, because in the midst of cemeteries you can’t build an interoceanic canal, nor any agro-industrial centre, nor wealth, just poverty and misery.”[13] It is striking that his priorities are an interoceanic canal and agro-industrial centres. In the 1990s all of the social organisations denounced that one of the reasons behind the paramilitary onslaught in the area was to clear the region in order to build an interoceanic canal and now Petro comes to ask the paramilitaries to let him fulfill their mission. The same project that was mandated in Law 53 of 1984 and that many organisations denounced as the reason for the bloodbath in the region. The canal was never built despite various initiatives of the government, the displacement of peasants by the state agency INDERENA (National Institute for Natural Resources) and paramilitary massacres. Now Petro champions the project as a left wing one and asks the paramilitaries for their cooperation in order to finish it. If the project was bad in 1984, it still is today. If what facilitated the project most was the bloodbath, Petro should acknowledge this and ask the victims of the project what they think about its implementation. His manner of asking the Clan del Golfo permission to bring forward the project is a recognition by the state (that he now represents in all senses of the word) that the massacres were necessary and even justifiable from their perspective.
All along the coast there are national and foreign agro-industrial companies and they are the same companies that financed groups such as the Clan del Golfo. Is Petro the only one in the country who is not aware of how Chiquita Brands financed those groups? It has been public knowledge for a long time, the company acknowledged it and paid a fine in the USA and later a Florida court ordered the company to pay $38 million dollars to eight families.[14] Does the president not read the press? His former peace commissioner Danilo Rueda came from an organisation that did most of the work in denouncing Chiquita, but it would seem Petro knows nothing about that.
The agro-industrial delirium of Uribe and others is to be seen in their statements. In 2006, the then governor of North Santander Luís Miguel Morelli Navia said the goal was to plant 200,000 hectares of palm in the department at a time when there wasn’t more than 350,000 hectares in all of the country.[15] Even military officers such as General Lozano Perea stated that they had “to go forward national programmes such as the palm crop”.[16] Even the paramilitary boss Vicente Castaño stated that “In Urabá we have palm crops. I got the businessmen myself to invest in those projects that are long lasting and productive.”[17] They all argued in favour of the agro-industrialisation and justified military and paramilitary operations under that economic logic.
The delirium was so acute that Uribe speaking at Fedepalma’s congress referred to the 100,000 ha in the department of Meta and said it wasn’t enough, “What one wants is to plant palm at an even greater speed.”[18] There were no limits to the delirium. In 2002, the Bank of the Republic published a text titled Palma Africana en la Costa Caribe: Un semillero de empresas solidarias [African Palm in the Caribbean Coast: A nursery of solidarity-based enterprises] in which María Aguilera Diaz pointed out that,
The country has 3,531,844 hectares for the plantation of that crop without any restrictions, of which 36% are to be found on the Caribbean Coast… By adding the areas with no restrictions to those with moderate restrictions there are in Colombia 9,665,225 hectares suitable for growing African palm…[19]
They never lived up to their expectations nor deliriums regarding palm, nor other crops such as cocoa and cotton, amongst others. For example, there are not 200,000 hectares in North Santander, rather in 2023 the area sown was 42,674 hectares. Though before the paramilitary onslaught the figure was less than 500 hectares and all of them in the municipality of Zulia. The bullet and the chainsaw pushed the planting of palm and the state and international aid bodies took charge of the rest of it, to such a extent that today the peasants don’t really have any alternative to that crop. Nationally, there are 596,217 and as much as Petro would like to say that he needs to agro-industrialise the Caribbean Coast, well it already has a lot of agro-industry and has had so for some time when those companies founded and financed the paramilitary groups. In 2023 there were 77,470 hectares in César, 36,150 in Magdalena, 36,028 in Bolívar, 4,870 in Córdoba and lesser quantities in Guajira, Sucre and Atlántico. A total of 76 municipalities in what Fedepalma calls the Northern Zone have palm plantations, far exceeding any other zone.[20]
In fact, even though Petro and the former advisers to peasant organisations find it difficult to believe, the country already has quite a lot of agro-industry and is going through a worrying concentration of crops. Nationally, 68.9% of the arable land is under just six crops, coffee (15.6%) rice (12.4%), palm (12.3%), corn (10.1%), sugarcane (9.7%) and plantains (8.8%).[21] This panorama is repeated the length and breadth of the country and in many municipalities just three or four crops dominate. The myth of a non agro-industrialised countryside is just that, a myth of right-wing landlords and multinational companies.
However, Petro’s project is to continue along that path and turn the countryside into a cash crop producer for the food industries of the USA and Europe. In his proposals for interoceanic canals, buying stolen land from cattle ranchers to set up agro-industries and asking paramilitaries for permission to bring their projects and those of the Colombian elites to fruition a continuity in agrarian policy can be seen starting with César Gaviria (1990-1994) and going through all of the other presidents. His agrarian policy is not one bit different, it is for the benefit of large scale economic interests as Francisco de Roux explained. It is a reactionary policy and we will have to wait for him to fail in his attempts due to incompetence or ineptitude, not to say the stupidity of his functionaries. No peasant organisation has broken with his government, they see in him a friend who should be subjected to friendly criticism, even when his government has the same policy as Uribe and Santos. Not even those politicians and peasant organisations that signed an open letter in 2017 against the agro-industrial policies of Santos raise their voices now, in fact they now support the same policies they once denounced.[22]
[1] See Ó Loingsigh, G. (2011) Una mirada desde el sur: Huellas de lucha y resistencia. Bogotá. CNA. pp 35-60 https://www.academia.edu/23969954/Una_mirada_desde_el_sur
[2] See Ó Loingsigh, G. (2002) La estrategia integral del paramilitarismo. España. Organizaciones Sociales. https://www.academia.edu/96631813/LA_ESTRATEGIA_INTEGRAL_DEL_PARAMILITARISMO_EN_EL_MAGDALENA_MEDIO_DE_COLOMBIA
[3] Interview with Francisco de Roux, 2002
[4] Rubio Serrano, R. (2002) Cuadernos de Tierra y Justicia No. 8. Actores políticos frente al agro colombiano. Bogotá. ILSA. pp 5-7
[5] Interview with De Roux op. cit.
[6] Rubio Serrano, R. (2002) Op. Cit. pp 14-17
[7] Plan Colombia (2000) Institutional Strenghtening And Social Development. Bogotá. Presidency of the Republic. p.15
[8] Oxfam (2017) A Snapshot of Inequality: What the latest agricultural census reveals about land distribution in Colombia https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/snapshot-inequality
[9] See La Agencia Nacional de Tierras mostró más resultados, en menos tiempo, que gobiernos anteriores. https://www.ant.gov.co/la-agencia-nacional-de-tierras-mostro-mas-resultados-en-menos-tiempo-que-gobiernos-anteriores/
[10] El Nuevo Siglo (18/06/2024) Escándalo en la Agencia Nacional de Tierras sería peor que el de Ungrd. https://www.elnuevosiglo.com.co/politica/escandalo-en-la-agencia-nacional-de-tierras-seria-peor-que-el-de-riesgo-y-desastres
[11] Electronic copy of the document.
[12] See https://x.com/petrogustavo/status/1809274494923546973
[13] Ibíd.,
[14] The Guardian (11/04/2024) US banana giant ordered to pay $38m to families of Colombian men killed by death squads. Luke Taylor. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/11/chiquita-banana-deaths-lawsuit-colombia
[15] Ó Loingsigh, G. (2007) El Catatumbo un reto por la verdad. Cisca. Bogotá. p.195 https://www.academia.edu/16951015/Catatumbo_Un_Reto_Por_La_Verdad
[16] Ibíd., p.196
[17] Ibíd.,
[18] Ibíd., 198
[19] Cited in Ibíd,, p.200 but original document is available at https://www.banrep.gov.co/sites/default/files/publicaciones/archivos/DTSER30-Palma-Africana.pdf
[20] Official figures from Fedepalma https://sispaplus.fedepalma.org/Reportes/Reporte/73
[21] See https://www.agronet.gov.co/DR/Paginas/EVANacional.aspx
[22] The signatories are Senator Iván Cepeda, Senator Alberto Castilla, , Representative Alirio Uribe, Representative Ángela María Robledo, Representative Víctor Correa and social organisations Fensuagro, Coordinación Étnica Nacional de Paz- Cenpaz, Comisión Colombiana de Paz, Grupo Género en la Paz , CINEP/Programa de Paz, Grupo Semillas, Corporación Jurídica Yira Castro.