In this article we will find the rural and the Colombian peasant culture, the one that teaches us dignity in the simplicity of their lives in what we call "the countryside".

PEASANT WOMEN OF COLOMBIA ARE STORIES OF RESISTANCE, PERSISTENCE AND DIGNITY IN RURAL TERRITORIES

^{Diagram 1. Peasants of Colombia. Own authorship}

In the midst of a context of inequality, historical debts and marked by systematic violence, the 11 million that make up the Colombian peasant population have developed their culture and identity, always concerned with producing healthy food, preserving nature and historical memory. More than 70% of food in Colombia comes from peasant agriculture, demonstrating the importance of this activity for the country's food security. However, in general, rural territories and their inhabitants have been lagging behind urban territories for decades in terms of human development and well-being, among others due to premises derived from modernity and its development paradigm, which situates the rural as that as opposed to the backward, traditional, agricultural, rustic, Wild, resistant to change.

However, new paradigms emerge and from a more complex and evidence-based vision, the rural is beginning to be assumed as a space crossed by profound transformations and fundamentally characterized by a diversification of economic activities, not only agricultural or agricultural, with strong links and interactions of all kinds, with the urban (economic, social, cultural). and with a peasant population that is not culturally alien to urban, "local and global" paradigms, due to the expansion of physical roads and communication technologies, especially among young people (Berdegué, J. A. and A. Favareto 2019).

Approaching the rural requires understanding that the rural territories affected by peasants express multifunctionality, multi-activities and multiculturalism from synergies and/or conflicts derived from the multi-ethnic and multicultural character that characterizes it. Additionally, it leads to understanding that the basic notion of argumentation can NOT be exclusively the land but the Territory, in its multidimensions, environmental, market, financial, sociocultural (ontological, spiritual, material) and influenced by legal and illicit global economies.

It is urgent to incorporate into the policy that the rural is not exclusively agricultural because the productive economic base is not only agricultural or primary and the understanding that in the rural area multifactorial territorial processes are expressed that emerge on a geographical scale of permanent interaction between the urban and the rural for the implementation of agro-industrial projects. food security, ecological habitat, marketing, educational tourism, conservation, management and use of resources, waste disposal, research, technological innovations, job creation, etc.

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS IN LAND TENURE AND USE IN COLOMBIA

Inequality in Access to Land and Means of Production 

• 77% of the land is in the hands of 13% of landowners
• 63% of the country's properties are “microfundios” with less than three hectares.
  
   
• 806,622 rural households, equivalent to 53% of those engaged in agricultural activities, have never owned land
  
   
• Women have only 26% ownership of land

Photo 1. Lucía Vásquez Celis and peasant women from Boyacá

WHY IS IT PROFITABLE TO ACCUMULATE LAND IN COLOMBIA AND PERPETUATE INEQUALITY?
 

Agrarian property, in addition to being undervalued, pays very little of the wealth tax that tax reforms impose from time to time, always temporarily. The low level of taxation supports the storage of capital in land to valorize without paying social opportunity costs for the use of it and due to structural failures of the instruments of land policy that facilitate concentration and inequality.

Structural failures of land policy instruments

• 28% percent of the national territory does not have cadastral information (IGAC)
• Only 6% of Colombian municipalities have a land formality of more than 75%
• 63.9% of Colombian municipalities have cadastral but outdated information.
• The distance between material possession and legal ownership: 50% in informality
• The lack of a registry of vacant lands that makes it possible to manage them
  The absence of an agrarian jurisdiction and the apposition of elites to create it
• The dominance of civil law over agrarian law
  The subordination of the “catastro” to the registry (DNP)
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CONFLICTS ARISING FROM INAPPROPRIATE LAND USE

The concentration and inequality in access to land and means of production are closely related to the expansion of models of extensive livestock production systems, monoculture (agro-industrial and crops for illicit use) based on the use of fertilizers and pesticides of chemical synthesis from which processes of contamination of bodies of water and soil and the emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) are derived. as well as with the prioritization of mining, production and extractive models that do not respect the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems, their carrying capacity, or their landscape architecture and exacerbate impacts related to climate change.

Colombia has a lot of cattle ranching: of 41.5 million hectares destined for the agricultural sector, today 34.4 million hectares are used for livestock, only 21 million are suitable for it. Livestock usurps 13.4 million hectares from agriculture. It is estimated that 2.5% of the land suitable for agriculture is planted with biofuels such as sugarcane and palm.
5.8 million hectares (more than there is sown in food) have been granted within the 9,000 mining titles in force and there are 20,000 new applications
Colombia has 6.6 million hectares of irrigable land, but only 12.8% of these have improved irrigation and drainage (DANE 2018 and https://especiales.semana.com/especiales/pilares-tierra/asi-es-la-colombia-rural.html)

Colombia consolidated in 2018 as one of the countries most affected by deforestation. Data collected by the Operational and Analytical Program of the Latin America and Caribbean Region, of the World Bank, in around 800 municipalities of Colombia, show that high inequality in land tenure is associated with a greater expansion of livestock farming towards ecologically fragile areas and not suitable for agricultural activities. and with the underutilization of agricultural land, notoriously affecting food production.

PEASANTS RECOGNIZED AS SUBJECTS OF RIGHTS

Through Legislative Act number 01 of 2023, the Peasantry is recognized as a Subject of Special Constitutional Protection, Article 64 of the Political Constitution of Colombia is modified, establishing that it is the duty of the State to promote progressive access to land ownership for peasants and agricultural workers, individually or associatively.

The State recognizes the economic, social, cultural, political and environmental dimensions of the peasantry, as well as those that are recognized for it, and will ensure the protection, respect and guarantee of their individual and collective rights, with the aim of achieving material equality from a gender, age and territorial perspective, access to goods and rights as well as to quality education with relevance, housing, health, domestic public services, tertiary roads, land, territory, a healthy environment, access to and exchange of seeds, natural resources and biological diversity, water, reinforced participation, digital connectivity: the improvement of rural infrastructure, agricultural and business extension, technical and technological assistance to generate added value and means of marketing for their products.

HOPEFULLY ARTICLE 64 WILL BE A POSSIBILITY TO ADVANCE IN THE REPARATION OF THE HISTORICAL DEBT TO THE PEASANTRY IN COLOMBIA