Tackling Inequality through Land Redistribution: Lessons from Colombia Reflections from the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing.

The decision to host the conference in Colombia - a country still reeling from over 50 years of conflict that saw between 4 to 5 million peasants and rural households dispossessed of their lands and around 20% of the population displaced – proved to be prescient. The country has one of the highest degrees of land inequality anywhere in the world with 80% of the land controlled by about 14 percent of landowners, according to some estimates. Colombia also highlighted, in our current moment marked by spiralling wars, the agrarian roots of conflict. 

In Colombia, these roots trace back to peasant communities organising self-defence forces to assert land claims in the face of harsh exploitation by landlords and successive governments that monopolised the best lands in a continuance of the colonial era latifundia system. The extreme state repression that followed and the splintering of (armed) resistance into various paramilitary groups, who financed their activities in part through cocaine trafficking, is partly responsible for the decades long pattern of violence in the country.

Following earlier failed attempts, the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the government and the largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo, FARC), was thus truly a historic moment. Land is a key pillar of the Peace Agreement with the first point of the Agreement including provisions for the allocation of 3 million hectares of land to landless peasants and the titling of 7 million hectares. This is to proceed, in part, by expanding the three types of protected lands currently recognised under Colombian law including: 1) Territory for indigenous populations; 2) Community councils for Afro-Colombians; and 3) ‘Peasant reserve zones’ – lands given over to peasant cooperatives. 

Critiques rightly point out that fulfilment of the peace agreement has been very slow. The Peace Process initially excluded a specific point on access to land for ex-combatants. There are issues around land fragmentation – land being subdivided into unusably small plots - as well as concentration. The ‘foreignisation’ of land, with up to 1 million hectares registered under foreign ownership, has been raised as a point of concern. Difficulties are encountered in finding suitable land available for redistribution. Ongoing violence and a lack security guarantees remain alarming.

Perhaps most challenging is how to respond to demands from rural working people for land redistribution linked to a popular programme of food sovereignty and comprehensive agrarian reform – an agenda that will require a full-scale restructuring of neoliberal economic policies pursued by successive Colombian governments that are centred on exports, large-scale mining, agro-industrial projects and energy extraction. 

There is however cautious optimism that agrarian and land reform will accelerate with the new administration. In 2019, Colombia elected a left-wing government for the first time in three decades under the leadership of Gustavo Petro. The government has committed 5 billion pesos to buy land through the National Land Agency to facilitate access to land for peasant communities. Under the policy of ‘Paz Total’ (‘Total Peace’), the government plans to accelerate access to land to those that lay down arms in addition to the priority groups identified such as landless and displaced populations. 

I was able to witness what this means in practice as part of two days of fieldtrips linked to the conference. Traveling by bus about 5 hours outside of Bogotá in to the countryside, we arrived at a 156 hectare farm, complete with villa and swimming pool. While the estate looked like something out of a scene from ‘Narcos’ (the popular Netflix show about the notorious Colombian druglord, Pablo Escobar), we were greeted instead by members of a peasant cooperative. As they prepared lunch for us, it was explained by a representative of the SAE, the Special Assetholding Agency of the Colombian government, that the property and land had belonged to a former narcotraficante but had been seized by the state under a special policy known as ‘Land for Peace’ which sees confiscated assets redistributed to victims of the armed conflict, women, young people, and landless groups who have been signatories of the peace agreement. Last year, SAE distributed 40,000 hectares to cooperatives under this policy. 

The following day, we were shuttled high up to over 3000 metres to visit the Peasant Reserve Zone of Venecia in the Sumapaz highlands. Here, around 600 peasants have formed an association known as “Agua Campesina” (Peasant Waters) partly in tribute to the 270 waterfalls that cover the approx. 8,500 hectare reserve that was officially recognised by the government in December.[1] Growing amongst other things, tree tomatoes (tamarillo), blackberries, lettuce, cape gooseberry, corn, peas, avocado and managing a range of livestock (cows, goats, sheep, pigs and poultry), the Association has formulated a Sustainable Development Plan to encourage environmental conservation, schooling, road infrastructure, food production, agroecology and peasant cultural life. It is now seeking further support to put this Plan into action.

Significant challenges remain around access to credit, technical assistance, markets and basic public amenities such as water, housing and schooling that can increase the economic sustainability for those living on newly redistributed lands. More broadly, the need to build broader society wide alliances and between society and sympathetic elements of the state to maintain support for the land reform agenda will be important in the face of potential shifts in electoral politics, counter-movements, and the backlash by big capital interests.