Agrarian reform remains stagnant despite Petro’s political will

Although President Gustavo Petro has held the banner of agrarian reform close to his political heart for many years, and as president he designated the highest budget in history to fulfill his dream —9.2 billion pesos to the Ministry of Agriculture, of which three billion are for the acquisition of land—, this banner remains one of his pending promises.

Colombia is the country with the highest rate of land ownership concentration in Latin America. Only 1% of the largest farms account for 81% of the total productive hectares, according to the most recent analysis by Oxfam. This concentration, one of the causes of inequality and poverty, has also been a driving force of the armed conflict, which in the last 50 years has caused more than 250,000 deaths. For this reason, the first point of the peace agreement signed with the extinct FARC guerrilla group in 2016 was comprehensive rural reform. A horizon of action was established there in which the State agreed to formalize seven million hectares and buy three million fertile hectares to distribute among landless peasants. President Gustavo Petro came to power with the aim of fulfilling this agreement. His main campaign promise, in addition to health, labor and pension reforms, was agrarian reform. But the latter did not need to be approved by Congress and could begin to be implemented immediately with political will and a budget. The budget exists, and so does the will. And yet, agrarian reform remains stalled.

At the beginning of his government, for example, Petro reached a historic agreement with the Federation of Cattle Ranchers of Colombia (Fedegan) for the voluntary purchase and sale of the three million hectares agreed upon with the FARC. The president, however, recognized very early on that achieving this in four years was going to be impossible and established a more viable goal: 1.5 million hectares. Unfortunately, the real progress of that commitment has been much slower than expected. Today, after two years of government, only 112,000 hectares of land have been purchased, less than 10% of the goal. Of those, only 86,000 hectares have been given to farmers, according to data provided this week by the outgoing Minister of Agriculture, Jhenifer Mojica, in an interview on Blu Radio.

The formalization of lands has not advanced at the required speed either. The National Land Agency states that 1,101,680 hectares have been formalized, of which 800,000 began the process under previous governments and only 200,000 under the Petro government. The Ministry of Agriculture says that far fewer have actually been formalized.

The president is aware that his agrarian reform is stalled and that the peasant, indigenous and Afro movements that supported him are dissatisfied with the results. In fact, the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC) and other social organizations had announced a mobilization for next weekend in protest of the low compliance and poor quality of the lands handed over. This Tuesday, President Petro got ahead of the marches and announced changes in the agricultural portfolio.

The new minister will be Martha Carvajalino Villegas, who served as Deputy Minister of Rural Development from June 2023 to January 2024. The main mission of Carvajalino, a lawyer, specialist in Constitutional Law and Master of Law with more than 17 years in agrarian and environmental issues, will be to expedite the purchase and formalization of land.

In order to achieve the goal in the two years remaining to the president, the new minister must work hand in hand with the National Land Agency, now headed by the former mayor of Villavicencio Juan Felipe Harman, to speed up the land purchase processes. The goal for this year is to obtain at least 500,000 hectares and to reach the remaining million during 2025 and 2026. The strategy to achieve this is clear: purchases must concentrate on farms with large extensions of fertile land, located mainly on the Caribbean Coast and in the Middle Magdalena. The outgoing minister explained this week that there is already a plan to prioritize 200 properties of large landowners. In addition to the voluntary purchase, the Government also hopes to have hundreds of thousands of hectares returned by the paramilitaries that are currently managed by the Victims’ Reparation Unit, and the lands seized from the mafia that are in the hands of the Special Assets Society (SAE).

Another urgent action to comply with the agrarian reform is to advance the agreement with the ranchers. According to an article in the newspaper TimeAs of July 2, Fedegan members have made 1,412 offers for an area of ​​599,876 hectares, but the Government has only purchased 33 properties for an area of ​​10,328 hectares. “Meta is the department where the most have been acquired (6,617 hectares), followed by Vichada (1,109),” the article says.

In the last two weeks, the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Land Agency have undertaken “the largest marathon of land distribution in the Government’s history,” according to the director of the National Land Agency. Last Thursday, the first of 8,000 hectares were delivered in simultaneous events in Caucasia and Yondó (Antioquia), Chimichagua (Cesar), Ayapel and Pueblo Nuevo (Córdoba), Baraya (Huila) and Fonseca (La Guajira). During the event, the outgoing Minister of Agriculture said that agrarian reform was continuing in all regions of the country. “This reform is not an invention, nor a utopia, much less a whim of President Gustavo Petro. This reform belongs to the peasantry and more than ever it must be done,” said Mojica.

With this “marathon” 23,000 hectares have been handed over in less than a month and a half. The new pace of land purchases and handovers and the arrival of Carvajalino, who is very close to the peasant movements, could unblock Petro’s agrarian reform. So far, neither the president nor the new minister have opened the door to the expropriation of land as an option to advance more quickly towards the goal of three million hectares, as the opposition fears. They are sticking to an agrarian reform that emulates the South Korean model, with voluntary purchases from large landowners and agreements with the private sector, always with the objective of generating economic growth and social development. They have two more years to prove whether it will be possible.

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