It depends on the will of many in Colombia to carry forward the Agrarian Reform and reverse the fact that 85% of the land is in the hands of 1% of the population. However, a ruling has become another obstacle to the Colombian government’s ability to carry out one of its flagship programmes.
Despite Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s stated willingness to speed up the handing over of land to peasants, the executive is currently facing more than one stumbling block that is delaying the implementation of the Agrarian Reform.
Recently, the Colombian Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional a part of Law 2294 of 2023, related to the recovery of unduly occupied wastelands, national boundaries and agrarian extinction.
This ruling constitutes a serious obstacle to the fulfilment of the first point of the Peace Agreement signed in 2016.
The Minister of Agriculture and Sustainable Development, Martha Carvajalino, made the same warning, as did the National Land Agency (ANT), which deplored the ruling, as it takes away the entity’s power to decide on land disputes when there is suspicion that the land is state-owned and illegally appropriated by private individuals.
Due to the ruling, these disputes will now have to be resolved by a judge, leaving some 20,000 agrarian processes in limbo, according to the president of the institution, Juan Felipe Harman.
Both the Agency and Minister Carvajalino announced that they will present a bill to recover the powers that ANT lost because of the Court’s ruling.
“Suspending the agrarian processes means suspending the possibility of feeding the National Land Fund, and with it, the fulfilment of the first point of the Final Peace Agreement,” he remarked.
Carvajalino has said that the national government will insist on proposing the necessary initiatives, before bodies such as the Congress of the Republic, so that there is a land administration in line with the principles of the agrarian regime and fair to the peasantry, and in accordance with the provisions of the Final Peace Agreement.
“We want the peasantry to count on this government [of President Gustavo Petro] to defend the necessary routes and make the countryside a just and peaceful countryside; a countryside that transforms Colombia into an agri-food power and a World Power of Life,” he said. On 24 July, a year passed since the approval of the constitutional reform that created the Agrarian Jurisdiction, and therefore the deadline given by the legislature itself for the regulation of the procedure expired, adding to the difficulties in this area.
The delay in the land handover process is worrying peasant collectives in Colombia, who regularly stage marches and protests in various parts of the country.
According to government figures, in the last two years 135,000 hectares of land have been purchased from large landowners for use in agrarian reform, only 4.5 per cent of the three million hectares established in the Peace Accord.
According to statements by the director of the ANT, this acquisition process is complicated by problems associated with the topographic survey of the different regions of Colombia, and the other has to do with owners whose legal tenure of the land is questionable because they lack papers to back it up.
The second element on which the government is seeking to make progress is formalisation.
The goal is to hand over titles to seven million hectares already occupied, but today in an irregular legal situation, of which only 1.3 million hectares have been completed.
It is against this backdrop that the government decided to present the ordinary bill on the Agrarian and Rural Jurisdiction, as announced by Minister Martha Carvajalino.
“We have no real instruments to carry out Agrarian Reform other than buying land through voluntary sale. This is a crucial issue for peace, for non-violence, for building a democratic and peaceful culture. The Congresses are not concentrating on studying whether it is good to obstruct social justice in the Colombian countryside”, he said. PL
(Translated by Cristina Popa – Email: gcpopa83@gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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