Beyond property: Rural politics and land‐use change in the Colombian sugarcane landscape

Abstract

Analysing the sugarcane landscape in the flat valley of the Cauca River (Colombia) reveals that agricultural industrialization in the region required the concentration of land use by regional industrialists and the corresponding exclusion of landowners and poor peasants from territorial decision‐making processes. The analytical lens used in this article, based on the use and control over land and land‐based natural commons, allows for the characterization of three periods in a non‐linear process of articulation and dispute between poor peasant and capitalist agents in the expansion of the sugarcane monoculture during the 20th century. The different constellations of social agents, governmental nexus, and capital enclosures have enacted through mechanisms that, beyond concentrating land property, have managed to deprive rural ethnic communities from their cultural and environmental heritage, traditional economies, and possible futures.

The effect of habitat transformation on a twig epiphytic orchid: Evidence from population dynamics

“…Although the coffee landscape is increasing in agricultural intensity, to the detriment of biodiversity (Armbrecht, 2003;Philpott et al, 2008;Harvey et al, 2021), it continues to host more diversity as an agroecosystem (Letourneau et al, 2011) than extensive monocultures such as the sugar cane and cattle ranching model in the Valle del Cauca department to the north (Marull et al, 2018;Sardi et al, 2018). In the latter, we find a few isolated forests in a predominantly pasture matrix, where the landscape and biodiversity has been dramatically affected (Torres et al, 2012;Vélez-Torres et al, 2019).…”

Afrocolombian Struggles for Food, Land, and Culture: The Case of El Tiple

“…The social mapping technique provides an opportunity to investigate the community representations of space, but at the same time, the execution of this technique is in itself an exercise of empowerment (Moore and Garzón, 2010 ). Therefore, we applied social cartography with a dual purpose: (i) to understand the distribution and spatial segregation of the communities that inhabit the towns embedded within the sugarcane plantation in relationship with their access to water and food and (ii) to create a collective reflection on the territorial transformations that came with the expansion of the sugarcane agribusiness since the late 1970s (Vélez-Torres et al , 2019a ).…”

“…The region's agroindustrial growth has brought about the monopolization of precious land. Concretely, this is the ecologically wealthier and geographically best-located land in the flat valley of the Cauca River (Vélez-Torres et al , 2019a ). Ironically, the local rural communities have suffered an increasing shortage of water and food, directly proportional to the monoculture expansion (Arias, 2017 ).…”

Rural precarity: relational autonomy, ecological dependence and political immobilisation in the agro-industrial margin

“…In the first half of the 1900s, sugarcane expanded partly through government-supported research and infrastructure resulting in further dispossession as increased inflow of foreign capital incited peasants to grow cash-crops, trapping them in debt relations and forcing them to (re)turn to haciendas as wageworkers (Mina 1975 ; Rojas Guerra 1983 ). During the second half of the twentieth century, the old landed elites and the sugarcane entrepreneurs dispossessed much of the remaining peasantry through the elite capture of a land reform and large-scale landscape interventions, such as draining wetlands and flooding low-lying peasant lands (Vélez-Torres and Varela 2014 ; Vélez-Torres et al 2019 ). The emergent agro-industrial production model was highly dependent on cheap labour, which was supplied by dispossessed peasants and migrant labourers from neighbouring regions (Achinte 1999 ; Knight 1972 ).…”