In Colombia, a cow has more land to graze than a farmer has to feed his family. The Minister of Agriculture, Cecilia Lopez, has just reminded us of this. Extensive livestock farming extends over 39 million hectares, agriculture – industrial and peasant – occupies only seven million. And, according to official sources, 1% of farms monopolize 80% of the country’s cultivable land. In power since early August, the country’s first left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, is convinced that this very great inequity is at the heart of the country’s problems, and of its violence. The promised land reform is beginning to take shape. It inevitably worries the big landowners.
Land is a sensitive subject in a country where the army, guerrillas and paramilitaries have long disputed control of the territory. The rise of drug traffickers in the 1990s fueled armed conflict while accelerating concentration and land speculation. Some eight million peasants – adults and children – have been driven from their land. Most never came back.
Know who owns what
Dedicated to the agrarian question, the first chapter of the peace agreement signed in 2016 with the great guerrilla movement of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) provided for the distribution of three million hectares. But the right-wing government of Ivan Duque (2018-2022) scuttled its implementation. Gustavo Petro intends to respect the commitments made by the State. Agrarian reform is the condition of “total peace” that the new president has the firm intention of implementing.
In this territory twice the size of France and fractured by three imposing mountain ranges, get an idea of the state of the cadastre is the first of the challenges. According to an official estimate, 65% of land has no formal title deed. That is to say that “the state largely ignores who owns, owns or occupies the country’s land”remember the director of the National Lands Agency, Gerardo Vega. The government has promised to “formalize” 700,000 hectares this year and seven million hectares in four years. Issuing title deeds to the peasant, Indian or Afro-descendant communities that occupy them is a technically complex and costly operation.
In addition, the government has undertaken to buy three million hectares of arable land. An agreement to this effect was concluded at the beginning of October with the powerful Breeders’ Federation (Fedegan). The text had the effect of a bomb. For the first time, it is the large landowners who undertake to “facilitate a process that should lead to integral agrarian reform”, rejoiced left-wing senator Ivan Cepeda. The photo of Gustavo Petro and the president of Fedegan, José Felix Lafaurie, initialing the document, had symbolic value: the first began his career in the guerrillas, the second is suspected of having had acquaintances in the past with the militias of ‘far right. Mr. Lafaurie also welcomed the agreement “which will bring great tranquility to the rural world”. During the electoral campaign, Gustavo Petro had promised not to carry out any expropriation.
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