Eradicating poverty in Colombian agriculture, a critical step for attaining peace

Colombia is a country with a territory almost twice the size of France, which it has never been able/wanted to control, as we all know and as Daniel Pecaut has crudely emphasized to us. That is one of the indirect sources of violence in Colombia.

While 51 million Colombians live in 1/3rd of the country on the mountain ranges and in the valleys between them in the west and center of the country, 15 million of them (28% of the population) live in their countryside within the agricultural frontier; they are grouped into some 2.7 million family agricultural units that cultivate the top 10 crops: fruits and vegetables, meat, milk, corn, rice, potatoes, cassava, palm, cocoa and banana. Their agricultural GDP does not exceed 8% of the national GDP, indirectly generating a gross net income per person much less than half of the income of the rest of the Colombian mostly urban population.

The absence of state presence indirectly promotes violence, but the lack of real and outstanding economic opportunities for farmers is a critical factor as well. Peasants in general live in subsistence and poverty with less than 2/3 of a minimum wage. Guaranteeing a transformation of their farms to be able to exceed the 1.43 minimum wages that take them out of monetary poverty must be a national priority. Even in the processes of disarmament of armed groups and the abandonment of illegal crops for traditional, legal and profitable crops is an element without which this objective would not be achieved.

Let’s take 3 crops that could make a big difference in reducing poverty in Colombia: coffee, cocoa and milk, lifting a total of 3.3 million people out of poverty, about 80% of the rural poor in Colombia, with a total produce of €5.6 Billion of total income.

In the case of cocoa, which I would take as an example, last year produced 60,000 tons in 160,000 hectares of 50,000 families, who exported between grain and value added a value of €$150M, leaving them less than a minimum subsistence wage. If Colombia were to plant 1 million additional hectares of cocoa, the income of the more than 250,000 additional families that would do so would grow to €2B gross counting slightly higher prices and big improvements in productivity, that is, leaving more than €466 net income per family per month, lifting over a million people out of poverty … Of course, undoubtedly agrarian reform is needed to reach that one million hectares of cocoa planted, which is almost 66% of the budgeted area for the entire 4 years of the present government (the goal of the peace process signed in Havana was 3 million hectares).

o see our potential in the Orinoquia in the east with 14 million hectares of agricultural frontier, which only planted in 2022 6% of it with just one million hectares. In another exercise of prospection, 13 million hectares could produce a total of 36 million tons of agricultural and livestock products for an additional ‘gross’ GDP of an additional €34B, bring an additional 8% more to the national GDP, 1.5 times more than the current agricultural GDP. With the €5.6B mentioned above, the agricultural GDP would exceed 17%.

If we were to take the same exercise for tobacco, potatoes, cassava and other tubers, rice, fruits, avocado, artisanal corn and vegetables, we could surely have a picture, a resource budget and horizons to eliminate rural poverty in Colombia; thus Colombia would surpass the 20% of the agricultural GDP that Brazil has in its national accounts. Thus, the gross income of peasants could start to reach a similar income level to the rest of their compatriots.

Peace would be at last on the horizon, at least in the economic eyes of the 15 million Colombian peasants.