Colombian economy

socioeconomic and cultural situation. Historically, times of negative politicaleconomic circumstances have seen peasants leave for urban centers in hopes of a better life.

The peasant is not bound to the land to the same extent as his counterparts in certain other Latin American countries. The limitation is almost solely economic; in general, and increasingly during the last twenty years, the farm worker and smallholder readily abandons the land whenever opportunity presents itself of transferring to an urban activity.

(Galbraith, 1953: 88)

There clearly was a significant out-migration of peasants from the countryside throughout the 1950s to 1970s, which continues to this day, but it has been argued that there were also growing numbers of small producers. Mike Davis’s important work in Planet of Slums (2007) contextualizes the ever-increasing rates of peasant immigration to urban centers, but some sectors of Colombia’s countryside have witnessed an increase in their peasant population. Labor organizers, social movements, and human rights organizations have detailed that campesinos have remained and raised families in the countryside even when their situation there was dire (Díaz Montes, 2005). Mondragón (2006) found that alongside a very real exodus from the countryside there has been an influx in the number of rural producers in Colombia. While not a new phenomenon, this marks an important distinction in the context of rural production and socioeconomic identity throughout Latin America.

The most evident impact of capitalism, both rural and urban, has been the high rate of farm-to-city migration that has taken pace in Colombia since the 1950s. Pushed out by worsening conditions in the rural economy and attracted by the possibility of high-wage industrial jobs in the urban centers, rural migrants contributed to urban growth rates that were on the order of 6 percent per year by the 1960s. Notwithstanding these high rates of

Table 4.5 The declining importance of conventional agriculture in the Colombian economy

A: Drop in agriculture’s proportion of in GDP since the implementation of neoliberalism Average decade Industry 1980 1990 1999 reduction percentage Agriculture 22% 19% 13% 5

B: Decline in annual growth of the rural economy per decade

Industry 1980–89 1990–99 Decade reduction percentage Agricultural 2.9% -2.6% 5.5%

Sources: Adapted from Avilés, 2006: 58, 118; Richani, 2005a: 117-118; 2002a: 141; Decker and Duran, 1982: 29.

migration, the density of the rural population increased from 80 persons per square kilometer in 1960 to 98 persons in 1970. Undoubtedly, this concentration is higher on the farms under 10 hectares. (de Janvry, 1981: 135)

More recently, there has been comparative population growth in the Colombian countryside, even when weighed against the emigration of rural producers to urban centers.

Although the rural population has dropped in relative terms, it has continued to increase in absolute terms from 6 million people in 1938 to 11.6 million in 1993. A similar dynamic occurred with the economically active population in the farming sector, which went from 1.9 million in 1938 to 2.7 million in 1993. Moreover, “self-employed workers” in the sector (medium scale campesinos) went from 600,000 in 1938 to 700,000 in 1964 and to 800,000 in 1993.

(Mondragón, 2006: 165)

One of the ways rural producers found to remain in the countryside and respond to the land question was, again, by migrating to and colonizing less fertile lands in remote regions. Because of the deep concentration of fertile arable land in the hands of large landholders, many peasant families came to inhabit the mountainside, literally. Even though the practice became illegal in 1951, some “decided” to remain in the countryside by living on and farming incredibly dangerous inclined slopes throughout the three mountain ranges of south-central and southwestern Colombia (Palacios, 2006: 225; Gomez, 1972: 250; Smith, 1970: 165; Rogers, 1969: 384n.3; Thayer, 1963: 143; Galbraith, 1953: 88). Another avenue enabling many campesinos to remain in the countryside was to increase activity in the informal sector. Over the last two decades, roughly 500,000 peasants have begun to directly cultivate coca, while an approximate 1 million turned to the coca industry as a marginal source of socioeconomic security (Richani, 2002a: 97, 75). These figures are significant particularly because of their parallels with the once-strong coffee industry. As noted, prior to neoliberalism coffee provided an estimated 300,000 to 350,000 small producers with a form of livelihood (O’Shaughnessy and Branford, 2005: 29; Harding, 1996: 40). By the 1980s, roughly 300,000 were directly involved in the coca industry as a means of subsistence (Felbab-Brown, 2005: 112; see also Schulte-Bockholt, 2006: 98). As neoliberalism increasingly disenfranchised peasant producers, coca cultivation quickly doubled in Colombia during the mid to late 1990s (Leech, 2002a: 43).49 It seems evident that former coffee growers have shifted to coca (Peceny and Durnan, 2006: 109; O’Shaughnessy and Branford, 2005: 29). Peasant producers derive several benefits from growing coca. The crop has partially if not fully eliminated “the high transaction costs otherwise incurred by transporting legal crops to markets in areas with very poor transportation systems,” of which there are many in rural Colombia, (Felbab-Brown, 2005:

108–9; see also Richani, 2002a: 71). Coca remained one of the only crops that could be grown in the poor lands inhabited by many peasants, which could keep “the campesinos’ heads above water” (Goff, 2004: 33; see also Castaño, 2006; Rochlin, 2003: 135–6). For many, the crop enables families to receive a “small portion of the profit from the cocaine market, the illegality of coca means that they reap substantially more than producing this commodity than from any other crop” (Peceny and Durnan, 2006: 99).50

This livelihood [illicit crop cultivation] is not only stable, but also far more comfortable than the alternatives open to poor, minimally-mobile peasants. The price that traffickers can offer for coca leaves surpasses the price peasants can get for cocoa pods by between two and eight times, for rubber by four times, and for maize by more than 40 times. (Felbab-Brown, 2005: 108)

By 2000, coffee only accounted for 13.4 percent of Colombia’s exports because tariff reductions had flooded the global market with cheap and excessive product (Ramirez-Vallejo, 2003). As a result of the fall in coffee returns, “many small farmers were forced off the land through bad debts. Some of the displaced families moved south and began to cultivate coca” (O’Shaughnessy and Branford, 2005: 29). While cultivating coca does not make a small producer wealthy, it does guarantee an income based not on speculation but on material production and delivery (Castaño, 2006; Richani, 2002a: 111). Much of this chapter has demonstrated how the state and capitalist class monopolized land and capital and how this disenfranchised the peasantry. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the growth and expansion of the coca industry has not been based solely on the increased concentration of land and inequitable distribution of income. Such conditions are simply subcategories of a larger problem within the national economy, which exists amidst a globalized capitalist reality centered on the centralized accumulation of wealth. Many small producers I interviewed believed that as the state increasingly adopts neoliberal economic patterns of perceived development, worse days are sure to be on the horizon. Stemming from this critique, it is now important to see what relation the FARC-EP has had to coca, and how and to what extent the insurgency is connected to the industry today.