Agricultura, campesinos y alimentos en Colombia (1980-2010). Seríe I Cuadernos del CIDS

The formation of the Colombian rural world has included a set of peasant agriculture, particularly food producers, as well as a business community that generates exportable agricultural goods and raw materials for agroindustries. This process has been influenced by state policies for access to land, fundamentally favorable to large property, as well as measures that fostered technological transfers to the different sectors linked to the production of exportables and raw materials, and to a lesser extent, to the food producers.

The intertwining of confrontations over the appropriation of land with partisan confrontations led to one of the longest armed social conflicts in the history of Latin America, which has had international reach as it converged with the Cold War. In this context, the proposal for an agrarian reform arose as a solution to the political and economic problems derived from the concentration of property. The leading sectors have exercised a resounding opposition to the redistribution of land, opting for colonization of the edges of the agrarian frontier. Colonizations, without effective support from the State, facilitated the linking of the country to the booming international drug trafficking economy, thanks to policies aimed at controlling anti-war social movements.

The expansion of the production and marketing of psychotropics encouraged the conflicts already existing in the countryside and led to a war that would result in the consolidation of the concentration of agrarian property at the cost of the exodus of more than seven million peasants. Their expulsion, in addition to affecting food production, has contributed to the informalization and precariousness of employment. These social sectors, despite the restrictions that affected them, had achieved high levels of participation in the country's food satisfaction, but these achievements were violated by the implementation of trade liberalization policies, which would have their most complete expression in the free trade agreements, in full development at the beginning of the 2010s, marking a profound deterioration in the country's food production.