Agrarian Change and Rural Poverty in Colombia

This paper presents an analysis of rural poverty in Colombia from a ‘relational approach’; studying the agrarian transformation that is taking place in the country, and its relation with the persistence of rural poverty. This transformation, shaped by liberalization and privatization; the minimization of the state in social services and productive activities; and by the type of integration of Latin America into the globalized economy; has had profound effects on the rural society and economy. In particular, the expansion of non-traditional agricultural exports at expense of production for the domestic market is deteriorating food security; and the modernization of agriculture together with a flexibilization of the labour market has lead to a process of semi-proletarianization and ‘pauperization of rural employment’. The unregulated working of the market and the preference of public policies to explicitly benefit capital over labour, and protect almost exclusively the interests of capitalist agriculture, is polarizing even more the Colombian rural sector and it is re-creating the conditions that maintain large part of the peasantry in poverty.