The UN recognized in 2018 the peasantry as a subject of rights, but Colombia only adhered to it in 2022 with the arrival of the government of Gustavo Petro. This international framework today serves to advance the Agrarian Reform that is being carried out in the country.
Since 2022, Colombia has been leading a process of restitution of territorial, cultural, social, economic and symbolic rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant families in numerous departments of deep Colombia, which have historically been affected by state abandonment, extractivism and armed conflict.
Years later, the country opened the window to the possibility of Agrarian Reform, and last October alone, 50,000 hectares were already handed over to peasant and Indigenous communities throughout the country.
“Land is not simply to have it, as the feudal lords thought, it is not a symbol of power, but it is a common instrument to build, over the furrows and with human sweat, the reproduction of life itself,” said President Gustavo Petro during an event in San Sebastían, Magdalena.
The delivery of land to peasant and Indigenous communities was proposed in the form of a return to these territories, which are “inalienable and imprescriptible” according to the Constitutional Reform of 1991, which also recognizes them as territorial entities.
This means that the law grants the status of territorial entity to the constituted communities, with autonomy and the right to be governed by their own authorities, and with participation in the national revenues. In other words, the state is obliged to send budget allocations to these entities, as well as to the municipalities or provinces.
Colombia is strongly affected by its “peace” process, which society sees as a horizon in the face of so much political and armed conflict. “The new government thinks that this is the moment to return the land to the people. They are trying to build the Colombian context and the global context,” Anuka Da Silva told ARG Medíos, a leader of La Via Campesina in Sri Lanka.
La Via Campesina (LVC) has 16 hectares of land in Cundinamarca, three hours from Bogota, with 16 productive units between livestock and agriculture with coffee, sugar cane, fruit, yucca, potato and racacha crops. The land, soon to be handed over by President Petro, will be received by young people who are currently being trained at the Universidad Campesina.
“We think that more is needed,“ says Nury Martinez, LVC’s Colombian representative. ”We believe that there must be structural changes for a real agrarian reform, such as the strengthening of productive, commercialization and value-added networks,” she says.
Agrarian policy is defined at a global level
“When we talk about Agrarian Reform, we also talk about rural development, because we are on the other side of the model of land tenure for capital accumulation, but the work of it,” adds Da Silva, who assures that from Africa and Asia, they are also looking for new land reforms.
“In Asia, we also have problems with land because companies, landowners and heirs own their land, but as people and farmers, we do not have access to land in the laws,” explains Da Silva.
Sri Lanka began land reforms in the 1960s with the departure of the British Empire. But in many parts of the country, they remained unfinished. In Indonesia and Brazil, there were also major movements. In Cuba and Zimbabwe, land reforms were initiated during the 1980s.
“We have experience as an international peasant movement, and we believe that this reform is necessary to build food sovereignty,” says Da Silva.
The Agrarian Reform that Petro will carry out is limited to international legal tools that are above the Constitutions, such as the Free Trade Agreements, which are above Law 160 and the Peace Agreement, and allow the importation of food, which prevents peasants from competing with imported products such as potatoes from Ireland or bananas from Ecuador.
Or the Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which does not consider food as a human right, but as a commodity.
Since 1995, the entire common agricultural policy has been subject to the discipline of the WTO. “A legal basis at the global level that makes it impossible to advance food sovereignty and the recognition of food as a human right,” adds Nury Martinez, and admits that, “The Reform will be made with what the law allows.”
“Agrarian policy is defined from a global perspective. These are international debates,” Martinez explains. That is why at the COP16 on Biodiversity, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Martha Carvajalino, announced something historic for Colombia; the country will host the II International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development +20, the most important instance of dialogue that the peasant movement has at a global level.
The first and last conference on Agrarian Reform was held in 2006 in Brazil. The debate surrounded ending hunger, promoting sustainable agriculture, land governance, and democracy to access land. “The international peasantry has not come together for 20 years, what has happened during these last two decades?” asks Martinez.
For the 2026 Conference to be held in Colombia, the international peasantry has new tools, such as the declaration of the rights of peasants, and new topics that have become central to food production in recent years, such as agroecology, the right to land and the participation of women and young people.
No reform without agroecology
While the Agrarian Reform is being carried out in Colombia, peasants are advancing in strategies for the sustainability of their local economies. “By the time the land is handed over in Colombia, the peasantry must be offering a great diversity in their production,” says Martínez. “We can only achieve that with agroecology.”
But also with efficient marketing circuits for small farmer economies. La Via Campesina is working on local markets and marketing without intermediaries, in addition to value added and a strong revaluation of local production.
Agroecology in Colombia is an ancestral culture with which many producers grew up, but since the famous green revolution of the 1990s, the original techniques have been replaced by agrotoxins, technological packages and transgenic seeds. “Wherever you went, even if it was a small farm, there was monoculture,” says Nury Martínez.
Martínez’s father taught her and her siblings to produce without chemicals. “When we were going to pull up one yucca, we had to plant two,” recalls Nury. “As long as there is land, no one can go hungry, my father used to say.”
“Agroecology is much more than producing without chemicals. It is a dialogue with the land, its people and the territory,” says the farmer, ‘There are ecosystems where it is impossible to produce in any other way than agro-ecologically,’ she says. For example, the páramo is an ecosystem that produces 70% of the country’s water, which also reaches Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Colombia has the largest páramo in the world, and its trees have medicinal properties.
The páramos were endangered by the high mountain battalion during the Uribe era, a plan to persecute peasants living in the area with the aim of deforestation, and to wipe out the high mountain guerrilla groups. “The companies want these territories and we have not allowed it. That is why we peasants are the guardians of the territories,” said Martínez.
Alliance between producers and environmentalists
The Colombian peasantry constitutes 30% of the total population of the country, and although it is a strong movement, the Colombian researcher Oscar Forero considers that “the real struggle is in the articulation of the peasant-Indigenous movement with environmentalists,” one of the most important alliances in recent years and that allowed, in the case of this COP16, the creation of the subsidiary body of the 8J, an autonomous body of review and compliance with the article on digital genetic resources of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Today, many of the foods sold in supermarkets are manufactured completely in laboratories. This is part of the so-called “agriculture 4.0,” which consists of the digitization of varieties and species, and the creation of food in laboratories. “Many of the things that are being raised today at the COP we had already warned about, such as the manufacture of food in laboratories and the attempt to put an end to those who produce them,” warns Nury Martínez.
The growth of conscious consumption in societies and greater interest in knowing where food comes from has been one of the slogans that have brought together peasant, Indigenous and producer movements with consumers and environmentalists.
There are several examples of both coalitions. Consumer associations in alliance with producers have set up Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) to certify the quality of agroecological food production by producer organizations that are not currently recognized by the states with quality seals.
“One of the most advanced in this system is Brazil, where consumer associations have participated in the programming of plantings, in exchange for generating agreements with producers such as the substitution of seasonal foods, because there are foods that are not going to be there all year round,” explains Forero.
This article by Bianca Coleffi was first published on ARG Medios.
