2024-07-14 11:00:00
Historians often say in their lectures that the problem of land is also the problem of violence in Colombia. And this week, the government of President Gustavo Petro was a hot potato which the leaders have tried to control since 1936.
On the morning of July 8, a group of 250 farmers – who traveled from regions such as Tolima, Cauca, Atlantico and Antioquia – took over the headquarters of the National Land Agency (ANT) in Bogotá. They set up tents and made sancochos inside the entity.
The protesters, which were replicated in various parts of the country, expressed their dissatisfaction with the minimal progress made on agrarian reform.
Until 2018, an Oxfam analysis showed that in Colombia 1% of farms had monopolized 81% of the productive land. In addition, 99% of the farmers shared 19% of the remaining clods
For this reason, the 2016 Peace Agreement established in its first point the need for agricultural reform. So that farmers would have guaranteed access to a piece of land to cultivate and, therefore, open the door to rural development.
When President Gustavo Petro came to power, he took upon himself the banners of agricultural reform and included them in his Development Plan. 707 days have passed since the mandate and little progress has been made.
“There is a very low level of buying and when this happens there is very little award. There is a huge delay in the formation of the property, which is an Agreement signed in Havana and collected by the Government of President Gustavo Petro and placed in the National Development Plan,” said Carlos Jerez, spokesperson for the National Peasant Work Program. in dialogue with EL COLOMBIANO.
The Government promised to buy a million hectares during its mandate and so far the figures show that this process barely reaches the 104,000 hectares that were purchased. Although in the Department of Córdoba alone there are 160,922 requests from farmers asking for land allocation (see graph).
“The fact that only 100,000 hectares were purchased indicates significant under-execution. The ANT only has a billion dollar budget for this year. This delay makes it even more difficult to donate the land to the farmers with deeds,” Jerez added.
Why are land purchase indicators red?
President Petro insisted that agrarian reform is one of the pillars of his Government and this is evidenced by the fact that he granted a budget of 4.8 billion pesos to the SANT. But the entity was slow to execute (see infographic).
Carlos Duarte, professor at the Institute of Intercultural Studies and the Earth Observatory at the University of Javeriana Cali, attributes the delay – despite the huge budget – to two reasons.
“It took a lot of time to adjust the huge commercial appraisal methodologies and, of course, it will be necessary to continue debugging mechanisms to prevent inflationary phenomena on land prices when the prospect of a state purchase is created,” explained Professor Duarte.
In October last year, the Government reached an agreement with Fedegan to buy up to three million hectares that would be allocated to landless farmers. This process is also going at a slow pace.
For Professor Duarte, in areas such as the Colombian Caribbean this agreement is a bit wrong. According to him, the land there is very well equipped with livestock infrastructure and, therefore, its costs are so high that they make their purchase unfeasible.
“And on the other hand, because the peasants, as a force of mobilization and demand for land, are not in these regions, after they have been eliminated or displaced by the armed conflict in recent years towards the colonized areas and the agricultural frontier .” Duarte added.
These cases add to the apparent air of corruption that has shaken the entity during these two years.
Gerardo Vega, the former director of the ANT, left the office last February after a complaint emerged in which he offered an exaggerated price for Cesar’s farm where 32% of its land was barren.
It happened on the La Grosería farm in Chimichagua (Cesar). ANT officials relied on similar offers – made on e-commerce pages – to determine the property’s price. They assumed that the property was worth between 1,000 and 4,800 million pesos. However, they closed the purchase for 5,000 million pesos. Because of these events, the Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation and the SANT stopped the disbursement to the owner of “La Grosería.”
On June 17, the Attorney General’s Office released a 100-page report in which it issued a series of warnings regarding the agrarian reform and the progress made by the SANT regarding land purchases.
In one of the points, the Office of the Attorney General discovered that almost 136,911 million pesos in the ANT would be at risk due to alleged administrative irregularities in the purchase of at least 288 properties.
“In order to make an estimated calculation of the values put at risk by such actions, the prices of the properties considered for payment were taken as a basis according to the information in the purchase files and the values paid by the appraisers in the cases where it is indicated that they should not be ordered. In summary, the value at risk is 136,911,777,315 pesos,” the report reads.
The Attorney General’s Office also warned that there would be irregularities in some processes due to insufficient technical and operational rules, deficiencies in title studies, problems in promising sales contracts, deficiencies in technical concepts, properties without relevant delivery certificates, appraisals. without technical concepts and inconsistencies in resource management to purchase land.
Felipe Harman, the current director of the ANT, confirmed that the entity has stopped the disbursements of all the processes that would be subject to irregularities and that these resources will reach 90,000 million pesos.
“We decided to adopt a purchase manual that ensures an agronomic visit to the property because, through indirect methods, we cannot assess the agronomic potential of a property and in the cases cited by the Attorney General’s Office we limit payments for those properties,” he said Harman.
In any case, the Government has two years and 24 days left to live up to its promise and buy almost the 900,000 hectares it is missing.
President’s Plan B
During the President’s visit to the UN Security Council, he declared that he will recommend to Congress and the High Courts that the mechanism of the quick way to speed up some of his reforms. One seeks to execute an “express purchase of land”.
The Government declared that this initiative seeks to speed up administrative and judicial processes in relation to the purchase and delivery of the property promised to the farmers. They also said that this would solve the country’s urban planning, coexistence and production problems.
However, there are doubts about the express purchase of land. Cecilia López, Petro’s first Minister of Agriculture, warned that the mechanism revives the specter of expropriation.
“It’s just a new name for the same, already famous, express little eviction article. To put an end to the word eviction that worries him, when the express word is scary,” said former Minister López.
60%
that peasants do not have titles that confirm them as the owners of the land
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