PEASANT MOBILIZATIONS, PUBLIC POLICY AND THE TRANSITIONS TO AGROECOLOGY IN COLOMBIA, 1990-2018

Abstract

Background: In recent years, especially since the beginning of the Peace Process between the Colombian government and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, an increase in peasant, indigenous and Afro-descendant mobilizations throughout the territory has become visible. national. Within this context, the place that agroecology has begun to occupy as an important element of the different repertoires of popular mobilization deserves to be analyzed. Objective: To analyze the nature of the relationship between peasant mobilizations and agroecology in a critical period in the country's history in which rural communities have had to face the economic, environmental and political crisis generated by the agrarian development model. that is imposed within a context of violence to help understand the possibilities that agroecology brings with it in the construction of technical, economic, political and cultural alternatives to the dominant political regime in Colombia. Hypothesis: Agroecology is rooted in the environmental, economic and sociocultural logic of traditional Colombian communities, where it reappears today as a practice and a living discourse to maintain and strengthen their historical ways of life. Methodology: the study is based on primary, spatial, quantitative and qualitative information that allows identifying the place that the country's peasants have given to agroecology within their discourses in the search for a dignified life, and therefore for a decent agriculture. and a fairer society. Results: The incipient formation of a social mobilization in favor of agroecology in Colombia that, in coordination with other actors from the academy, NGOs, and even State institutions, is configured with the purpose of transforming the historical obstacles for the positioning of agroecology in the different territories. Implications: The approaches of agroecology offer peasant organizations an ideological and discursive platform that maintains identity with the different types of struggles that peasants must undertake in defense of their territories. Conclusions: There is an unprecedented and diverse social process in Colombia in which agroecology begins to position itself on the public agenda hand in hand with a series of public policy proposals that are built through the various peasant mobilizations.