COLOMBIA: The Food Basket Is Running Out
By Helda Martínez
TUTA, Boyacá, Colombia, Mar 18 (IPS) - Boyacá, known as the "food basket of Colombia", is currently the country’s second poorest province, and small farmers there say it is more expensive to raise crops than to buy pre-packaged food.
The government provides no incentives to raise food crops in Boyacá, and farmers lack the means of transportation necessary for marketing what they sell. At the same time, they must deal with the effects of Colombia’s four-decade old armed conflict.
In the municipality of Tuta, traditionally a vegetable and dairy farming centre, the government is pursuing a project with a foreign company to grow sugar beets for ethanol production.
"They are replacing milk for children with gasoline for cars," agronomist Fernando Fonseca commented to IPS.
Tuta is one of the 123 municipalities making up the province of Boyacá, which stretches northeast from the centre of the country to the Venezuelan border. The 2005 census placed the provincial population at 1.25 million, a figure estimated by the regional tourism authorities to have grown to 1.4 million today, out of a total national population of 43 million.
It is also estimated that 71.5 percent of the population lives in poverty, including 41.5 percent who live in extreme poverty, according to 2006 figures from the National Planning Department.
Roughly 18 percent of the people of Boyacá live in the departmental capital, Tunja, while another nine percent live in three cities of between 27,000 and 54,000 inhabitants each. The rest of the population, just over one million people, live scattered throughout the countryside and in municipal capitals with less than 10,000 inhabitants.
"The countryside is depopulated because the Colombian government isn’t interested in land for campesinos (peasant farmers)," said Fonseca.
The César Gaviria administration (1990-1994) opened up the agricultural market to foreign competition, which benefited from cuts in import tariffs.
"Every six-month period, seven million tons of food entered the country from abroad, while close to a million hectares of crops have disappeared, and the few programmes and resources devoted to the campesino economy have disappeared with them," said economist Alicia Duque from the non-governmental Institute of Studies for Development and Peace.
"Many countries consider it important to protect their sources of food, which is why they devote financial, industrial and government resources to farm subsidies. But in Colombia, resources earmarked for rural areas go to war and bureaucracy," said Fonseca.
"The government facilitates the import of the same products we grow, while our own crops are dying. It has become cheaper to buy than to produce. These are measures adopted in advance of the free trade agreement," he added. "Imagine what it will be like if they approve it!"
~snip~
"There are still a lot of after-effects of the violence," he added, prompting a group of women nearby to speak in whispers about the fear in which they lived. Some recalled cases of young men whom the leftwing guerrillas attempted to recruit, first with persuasion, then with threats. Others recalled the far-right paramilitaries who asked youngsters if they wanted to join them; if they said no, they were killed.
"They took them over there," said one woman, pointing to the heavily forested nearby hills. More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41635
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