"There must be some way out of here," "the hour is getting late" in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief

“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

Re:LODE Radio chooses to use the art of Sassetta to capture the atmosphere of Bob Dylan's song All Along the Watchtower. This song is open to multiple interpretations, and so this is just one among many. 

The image above is a detail from The Mystic Marriage of St. Francis,  a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Sassetta, now in the Musée Condé of Chantilly, France.

It portrays St. Francis of Assisi while ideally marrying the three Theological Virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, through the donation of a ring to them. The three virtues have differently coloured dresses: red for Charity, green for Hope and white for Faith; they are also depicted on the left while flying to heaven with sticks in their hands. Behind St. Francis, who wears his traditional brown monk habit, is his companion Fra' Leone.

The scene is set in an idyllic landscape, between hills, castles and cultivated fields, without any attention to perspective and realism as in other Renaissance works. Sassetta was in fact one of the last painters of the Sienese Gothic school, as shown by the use of elongated figures, the delicate colors and the courtly atmosphere.

"Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth"

This line from Bob Dylan's song from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, All Along the Watchtower is followed by:

"None of them along the line know what any of it is worth” 

Unfortunately, capitalists know the value of land, in terms of scale and profit, but not the value of sustainability and the role that small farmers play in the present climate crisis. The trouble is that "Business as Usual" is responsible for an ongoing and significant rise in land inequality, with farmland increasingly dominated by a few major companies. Jonathan Watts, Global environment editor for the Guardian, reports in the print edition of the newspaper today, Wednesday 26 November 2020, under the headline: 

Small farmers squeezed out as global land inequality adds to climate crisis

Jonathan Watts reports (Tue 24 Nov 2020) under the subheading: 

Researchers warn land inequality is rising with farmland increasingly dominated by a few major companies

One per cent of the world’s farms operate 70% of crop fields, ranches and orchards, according to a report that highlights the impact of land inequality on the climate and nature crises.

Since the 1980s, researchers found control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings.

Taking the rising value of property and the growth of landless populations into account for the first time, the report calculates land inequality is 41% higher than previously believed.

The authors said the trend was driven by short-term financial instruments, which increasingly shape the global environment and human health.

“In the past, these instruments were only of concern to the markets. They didn’t affect us individually. But now they touch every aspect of our lives because they are linked to the environmental crisis and the pandemic,” said Ward Anseeuw, senior technical specialist at the International Land Coalition, which led the research along with a group of partners including Oxfam and the World Inequality Lab.

The study published on Tuesday, is based on 17 new research papers as well as analysis of existing data and literature.

It says previous calculations of land inequality were based exclusively on ownership and the size of individual farms. On this basis, land inequality narrowed until the 1980s, after which it became wider.

That trend is more pronounced under the new methodology, which takes additional factors into account, such as multiple ownership, the quality and value of land, and the number of landless people.

Landlessness was lowest in China and Vietnam, and highest in Latin America, where the poorest 50% of people owned just 1% of the land.

Asia and Africa have the highest levels of smallholdings, where human input tends to be higher than chemical and mechanical factors, and where time frames are more likely to be for generations rather than 10-year investment cycles. Worldwide, between 80% and 90% of farms are family or smallholder-owned. But they cover only a small and shrinking part of the land and commercial production.

Over the past four decades, the biggest shift from small to big was in the United States and Europe, where ownership is in fewer hands and even individual farmers work under strict contracts for retailers, trading conglomerates and investment funds.

Ward said these financial arrangements are now spreading to the developing world, which is accelerating the decline of soil quality, the overuse of water resources, and the pace of deforestation.

“The concentration of ownership and control results in a greater push for monocultures and more intensive agriculture as investment funds tend to work on 10-year cycles to generate returns,” he said.

This is also connected to social problems, including poverty, migration, conflict and the spread of zoonotic diseases like Covid-19.

To address this, the report recommends greater regulation and oversight of opaque land ownership systems, a shift in tax regimes to support smallholders and better environmental management, and great support for the land-rights of communities.

“Smallholder farmers, family farmers, indigenous people and small communities are much more cautious with use of land. It’s not just about return on investment; it’s about culture, identity and leaving something for the next generation. They take much more care and in the long run, they produce more per unit area and destroy less.”

In India, along the LODE Zone Line, a crisis is playing out in the wake of new "Farm Laws"! 

The acts, often called the Farm Bills, have been described as "anti-farmer laws" by many farmer unions, and politicians from the opposition also say it would leave farmers at the "mercy of corporates". The farmers have also demanded the creation of an Minimum Support Price (MSP) bill, to ensure that corporates cannot control the prices. The government, however, maintains that the laws will make it effortless for farmers to sell their produce directly to big buyers, and stated that the protests are based on misinformation.

Indian farmers fear the result of this legislation will drive their livelihoods "into the ground"! 

In Punjab, small-scale protests started in August 2020 when the Farm Bills were made public. Since then, after the passage of the acts on 20 September 2020, more farmers and farm unions across India joined protests against the reforms. On 25 September 2020 farm unions all over India called for a Bharat Bandh (lit. transl. nation-wide shutting down) to protest against these farm laws. The most widespread protests took place in Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh but demonstrations were also reported in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and other states. Railway services have remained suspended in Punjab. 

Along the LODE Zone Line in Odisha the Times of India reported on September 26 2020 that:

Farmer bodies protest against farm bills in Odisha

This photo of farmers blocking train tracks during a protest against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, following the recent passing of agriculture bills in the Parliament, was posted on 25 September 2020, as part of a report in the Statesman on the Bharat Bandh protests.

Farmers observe Bharat Bandh in protest against agriculture bills; cops in Punjab, Haryana on standby

The Bharatiya Kisan Union and several other organisations on Friday will hold nationwide demonstration and chakkajam against three contentious farm legislations which were passed in the Parliament earlier this week.

In Punjab, the state which has Agriculture as primary business, the farmer unions began a three-day ‘rail roko’ protest at six different locations in the state.

Amid the protests, the Railways has partially cancelled 20 trains and short-terminated five trains till September 26. 

Meanwhile, these recently passed laws will benefit the largest corporations with increased monopoly power.

Businessmen, they drink my wine . . .

. . . plowmen dig my earth

Landlessness, as identified by the study from the International Land Coalition, is the highest in Latin America, where the poorest 50% of people owned just 1% of the land. Along the LODE Zone Line in Colombia there are differing ways of framing this reality. There is, for example, a story from Borgen Magazine, and referenced in one of the Cargo of Questions Information Wraps for Colombia, that sets out the opportunities presented in three innovative agricultural initiatives. But landlessness is NOT mentioned.

Sustainable Agriculture in Colombia: Three Current Projects 

Promoting Organic Products for Colombian Farmers

In 2011, the Colombian government announced an initiative to promote organic agriculture in the country. This program, dubbed the “Organic Agriculture Production Chain”, consists of a number of parallel efforts aimed at increasing the use of organic and sustainable practices.

In recent years, a private organization partnered with this government effort to promote sustainable agriculture in Colombia. The Federacíon Orgánicos de Colombia is a private cooperative of producers, exporters, logistics providers, and certification specialists whose goal is to promote the growth of organic farming and agricultural production. Among the many achievements of this partnership between government and private industry is the replacement of formerly illicit crops with profitable organic yields. In particular, Colombian farmers have planted the Amazonian Cayenne pepper for sale in place of illegal crops. Farmers in Colombia met 40 percent of the organization’s replacement goal by the summer of 2016.

Using High-Tech Sensors to Increase Sustainable Yields of Bananas

Bananas and plantains are a major crop in Colombia and comprise 10 percent of the nation’s total agricultural exports. These crops are sensitive to many environmental variables, including flooding, oxygen levels in the soil, humidity, temperature range and the amount of sunlight. The Colombian National Service for Learning announced a program in 2016 to develop a smart farming system that will be used with the country’s banana crops.

This program incorporates internet-connected sensors to accurately monitor conditions in the fields and provides this information in a user-friendly manner to farmers. The information allows farmers to react more efficiently to the needs of these crops. Among other effects, the new information can reduce farmers’ use of artificial fertilizers.

Information from the sensor network also helps agriculture experts develop and monitor new banana varieties. Genetic diversity derived from this process promotes disease resistance, increases sustainable yields and will add considerable value to the future of sustainable agriculture in Colombia.

“Agroforestry” Technique Increases Sustainable Production of Herds and Fields

Colombia is in the middle of a five-year, $42 million project to introduce a novel form of sustainable agriculture to the country. An initiative by the Nature Conservancy, the United Nations and two Colombian organizations, the project is promoting agroforestry to landowners in Colombia.

Agroforestry is the practice of cultivating trees with food crops or livestock while making use of the trees’ benefits to the immediate environment. What makes the current project in Colombia different is its focus on cattle ranching along with the cultivation of multiple species of trees and food crops on the same land.

This system has multiple benefits for all of the products involved. Milk production can as much as double using the new technique. Not only can it increase the amount of food produced per acre, but agroforestry also adds resilience to the effects of a warming environment and reduces vulnerability to weather extremes.

One visible effect of the agroforestry initiative is reducing the amount of exclusively pastoral land in Colombia. Colombia has historically used up to 80 percent of its agricultural land for grazing cattle, and this practice has led to soil degradation and other abuses of the natural environment. By allowing the use of smaller grazing areas while sustaining or even increasing herd sizes, the advent of agroforestry will have a notably positive result in reducing these destructive effects.

Sustainable agriculture in Colombia has significant momentum behind it, as these three projects are only a sample of the initiatives aiming to improve future outcomes for Colombia’s farmers and people. As the nation emerges into relative peace after decades of war, these and other programs will take hold to lead the agricultural sector and the rest of the country into the 21st century.

The Banana Massacre - Framing realities? 

The emergence of relative peace after decades of war is a significant factor in framing the realities of Colombia's agricultural sector. As mentioned in the Borgen Magazine article, bananas and plantains are a major crop in Colombia. The history of Colombia and the history of the banana industry is one that is capable of exposing the impact of the capitalocene upon people and the planet. Significantly, a so-called "banana massacre" figures in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad). 

Emily Temple's article, published March 6, 2018, by the LITERARY HUB looks at the cover designs of for this Colombian and global classic of modern literature.

Pablo Neruda once called Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude “perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes.” Now a beloved classic for millions, and the defining pinnacle of magical realist literature, the novel traces the Buendía family over seven generations spent in their fictional hometown of Macondo—founded in the Colombian rainforest by their patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía—which is reportedly based on Márquez’s own hometown of Aracataca, near the northern coast of Colombia. For a while it is a kind of utopia, though a strange one, but eventually, the encroachment of the outside world destroys everything the Buendías have built. This is a lush, descriptive, and relentlessly irreal novel, and as such, its cover treatments have varied wildly over the years. Below, I’ve selected one hundred different covers used for One Hundred Years of Solitude, published around the world between 1967 and 2018. The only question is: which one is the best?

The very first edition draws directly from one of the book’s earliest images: “When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones.

The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.”

There is an "echo" of this episode, or "apparition", in the 1972 epic historical drama film produced, written and directed by Werner Herzog:

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.

Since it was first published in May 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature. 

The novel's narrative follows the fate of the fictional town of Macondo and its inhabitants. For years the town remains solitary and unconnected to the outside world, with the exception of the annual visit of a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. The leader of the gypsies, a man named Melquíades, maintains a close friendship with José Arcadio, who becomes increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with investigating the mysteries of the universe presented to him by the gypsies. Ultimately he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin, and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.

Eventually Macondo becomes exposed to the outside world and the government of newly independent Colombia. A rigged election between the Conservative and Liberal parties is held in town, inspiring Aureliano Buendía to join a civil war against the Conservative government. He becomes an iconic revolutionary leader, fighting for many years and surviving multiple attempts on his life, but ultimately tires of war and signs a peace treaty with the Conservatives. Disillusioned, he returns to Macondo and spends the rest of his life making tiny gold fish in his workshop.

The railroad comes to Macondo, bringing in new technology and many foreign settlers. An American fruit company establishes a banana plantation outside the town, and builds its own segregated village across the river. This ushers in a period of prosperity that ends in tragedy as the Colombian army massacres thousands of striking plantation workers, an incident based on: 

The "Banana Massacre" of 1928! 

The United Fruit Company, now Chiquita Brands International, was an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas) grown on Latin American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. It flourished in the early and mid-20th century, and it came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia and the West Indies. Though it competed with the Standard Fruit Company (later Dole Food Company) for dominance in the international banana trade, it maintained a virtual monopoly in certain regions, some of which came to be called banana republics, such as Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The Banana Massacre was a massacre of United Fruit Company workers that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928 in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia, and along the LODE Zone Line. 

A strike of United Fruit Company workers began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to work until the company would reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions. After several weeks with no agreement, in which the United Fruit Company refused to negotiate with the workers, the conservative government of Miguel Abadía Méndez sent the Colombian army in against the strikers, resulting in the massacre of thousands of people.

After U.S. officials in Colombia and United Fruit representatives portrayed the workers' strike as "communist" with a "subversive tendency" in telegrams to Frank B. Kellogg, the United States Secretary of State, the United States government threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests. The Colombian government was also compelled to work for the interests of the company, considering they could cut off trade of Colombian bananas with significant markets such as the United States and Europe.

Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his La Casa Grande. Although García Márquez references the number of dead as around three thousand, the actual number of dead workers is unknown.  

Estimates of the number of casualties vary to extreme degrees, from an unlikely 47 to a figure of 3,000. This is a history that has been dramatically obscured by lack of reliable testimony against the background of the extreme violence employed. The military justified this action by claiming that the strike was subversive and its organizers were Communist revolutionaries. Congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán claimed that the army had acted under instructions from the United Fruit Company. The ensuing scandal contributed to President Miguel Abadía Méndez's Conservative Party being voted out of office in 1930, putting an end to 44 years of Conservative rule in Colombia. 

General Cortés Vargas issued the order to shoot, arguing later that he had done so because of information that US boats were poised to land troops on Colombian coasts to defend American personnel and the interests of the United Fruit Company. Vargas issued the order so the United States would not invade Colombia.

A telegram from Bogotá Embassy to the U.S. Secretary of State, dated December 5, 1928, stated:

"I have been following Santa Marta fruit strike through United Fruit Company representative here; also through Minister of Foreign Affairs who on Saturday told me government would send additional troops and would arrest all strike leaders and transport them to prison at Cartagena; that government would give adequate protection to American interests involved."

The following telegram from Bogotá Embassy to Secretary of State, date December 7, 1928, stated:

"Situation outside Santa Marta City unquestionably very serious: outside zone is in revolt; military who have orders 'not to spare ammunition' have already killed and wounded about fifty strikers. Government now talks of general offensive against strikers as soon as all troopships now on the way arrive early next week."

A dispatch from U.S. Bogotá Embassy to the U.S. Secretary of State, dated December 29, 1928, stated:

"I have the honor to report that the legal advisor of the United Fruit Company here in Bogotá stated yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military authorities during the recent disturbance reached between five and six hundred; while the number of soldiers killed was one."

This following dispatch from the U.S. embassy to the U.S. Secretary of State, dated January 16, 1929, stated:

"I have the honor to report that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded one thousand."

The Banana massacre is said to be one of the main events that preceded the Bogotazo, the subsequent era of violence known as La Violencia, and the guerrillas who developed in the bipartisan National Front period, creating the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia.

A culture of terrorism?

United Fruit had a deep and long-lasting impact on the economic and political development of several Latin American countries, including Colombia. It's business practices were combined with political machinations, as in the overthrow of the duly elected Guatemalan government in 1954, in order to maintain the political and business environment that suited United Fruit's exploitative neocolonialist mission, and thereby prevent a proposed policy of land reform from being implemented. 

The toppling of the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was achieved by U.S. - backed forces led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas who invaded from Honduras. Commissioned by the U.S. Eisenhower administration, this military operation was armed, trained and organised by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency(see Operation PBSuccess). 

The directors of United Fruit Company (UFCO) had lobbied to convince the U.S. Truman and Eisenhower administrations that Colonel Árbenz intended to align Guatemala with the Eastern Bloc. Besides the disputed issue of Árbenz's allegiance to communism, UFCO was being threatened by the Árbenz government's agrarian reform legislation and new Labour Code. UFCO was the largest Guatemalan landowner and employer, and the Árbenz government's land reform program included the expropriation of 40% of UFCO land. U.S. officials had little proof to back their claims of a growing communist threat in Guatemala; however, the relationship between the Eisenhower administration and UFCO demonstrated the influence of corporate interest on U.S. foreign policy. United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an avowed opponent of communism, was also a member of the law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, which had represented United Fruit. His brother Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, was also a board member of United Fruit. United Fruit Company is the only company known to have a CIA cryptonym. The brother of the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, John Moors Cabot, had once been president of United Fruit. Ed Whitman, who was United Fruit's principal lobbyist, was married to President Eisenhower's personal secretary, Ann C. Whitman. Many individuals who directly influenced U.S. policy towards Guatemala in the 1950s also had direct ties to UFCO.

After the overthrow of Árbenz, a military dictatorship was established under Carlos Castillo Armas. Soon after coming to power, the new government launched a concerted campaign against trade unionists, in which some of the most severe violence was directed at workers on the plantations of the United Fruit Company.

The history of this company represents the archetypal example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of the banana republics. After a period of financial decline, United Fruit was merged with Eli M. Black's AMK in 1970, to become the United Brands Company. In 1984, Carl Lindner, Jr. transformed United Brands into the present-day Chiquita Brands International. 

The Culture of Terrorism

The Culture of Terrorism; 

a book by Noam Chomsky, first published in 1988, that exposes the complicity of media and academia with the U.S. political class and the capitalist establishment. In particular he exposes their roles in the promulgation of the persistent ideological imperative, to negate any and all resistance to the engulfing neo-colonial capitalist project of accumulation by dispossession. Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters" committed terrorist atrocities against civilian populations in Nicaragua, while progressive coalitions were cast as terrorists. 

Noam Chomsky turns this ideological construct on its head, exposing the capitalist industrial/military/academic/media complex as the de facto "culture of terrorism". Chomsky ends his preface to The Culture of Terrorism with the words: 

"As the latest inheritors of a grim tradition, we should at least have the integrity to look in the mirror without evasion". 

The tradition to which he is referring is none other than the Western imperial project and in encouraging Americans to pursue integrity, he dissects the events of just one year - 1986 - at the height of the Reagan Era and describes American involvement in acts of supreme state terror, both open and clandestine, to present a case study which has great relevance today and whose lessons must never be forgotten. 

And it is a long tradition . . .

. . . as the preface to William Blake's Milton testifies. Milton is an epic poem by William Blake, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810. Its hero is John Milton, who returns from Heaven and unites with Blake to explore the relationship between living writers and their predecessors, and to undergo a mystical journey to correct his own spiritual errors.

The preface includes the poem "And did those feet in ancient time", which became the lyrics for the hymn "Jerusalem". 

The poem appears after a prose attack on the influence of Greek and Roman culture, which is unfavourably contrasted with "the Sublime of the Bible".

The text of the PREFACE says: 

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible. but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce; all will be set right: & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men, will hold their proper rank, & the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.

Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fash [i] onable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord.

William Blake had a view of the establishment in his own day, calling them out as "Hirelings in the Camp, the Court and the University", along with an accompanying  and specific view of the classic Greek or Roman Models, especially when it comes to "the exercise of power". 

William Blake took the view that it was: 

The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.

Blake references Virgil's poem the Aeneid, a work that celebrates a Prince of Peace, Augustus Caesar, and at the same time sets out for the reader something of the ruthlessness associated with the prioritising of power for power's sake, as well as securing "peace" through war and oppression. This kind of "peace" is therefore, as Michel Foucault explains, a form of war.

This ideological "peace" is exemplified in the Ara Pacis Augustae (Latin, "Altar of Augustan Peace"; commonly shortened to Ara Pacis) is an altar in Rome dedicated to Pax, the Roman goddess of Peace. The monument was commissioned by the Roman Senate on July 4, 13 BC to honour the return of Augustus to Rome after three years in Hispania and Gaul and consecrated on January 30, 9 BC. The altar reflects the Augustan vision of Roman civil religion. The lower register of its frieze depicts agricultural work meant to communicate the abundance and prosperity of the Roman Peace (Latin: Pax Romana). The monument as a whole serves a dual civic ritual and propaganda function for Augustus and his regime, easing notions of autocracy and dynastic succession that might otherwise be unpalatable to traditional Roman culture.

When Octavian in 27 BC was given the title of Augustus, a shield was set up in the senate inscribed with four virtues; virtus (power), clementia (clemency), iustitia (justice), and pietas (piety). Aeneas, the great ancestor of Octavian, is frequently praised for pietas, virtus, and iustitia in the Aeneid. Regarding clementia, however, Virgil is conspicuously silent. Indeed, in the battle scenes of books 10 and 12, Aeneas refuses to spare enemies who ask for mercy. Virgil does not exculpate Aeneas, instead he deliberately, and in accordance with contemporary political events, created a merciless hero for his epic.

On Virgil, Blake says, under the heading: 

On Virgil 

Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece & Rome as Babylon & Egypt: so far from being parents of Arts & Sciences as they pretend: were destroyers of all Art. Homer Virgil & Ovid confirm this opinion & make us reverence The Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by War. Virgil in the Eneid Book VI. line 848 says Let others study Art: Rome has somewhat better to do, namely War & Dominion

Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroyd it a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not Make.

The lines that Blake references from Virgil's Aeneid require some context. Virgil’s vision of Roman greatness is put into the mouth of Anchises, the dead father of Aeneas whom Aeneas travels to find in the Underworld, an episode that is seen as the turning point of the poem.

Anchises points out the future heroes of Rome yet to be born, a long catalogue that is patriotic and visionary but also cautionary and sad. It culminates in this grand passage which, although outwardly imperialistic, also warns of the great responsibilities and dangers that go with power.

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.”

Others will forge breathing bronzes more smoothly (I believe it at any rate), and draw forth living features from marble. They will plead law-suits better and trace the movements Of the sky with a rod and describe the rising stars. You, O Roman, govern the nations with your power- remember this! These will be your arts – to impose the ways of peace, To show mercy to the conquered and to subdue the proud.

On the forging of "breathing bronzes" . . . 

Lot 148 

Mel Ramos 

Chiquita Banana

. . . SOLD FOR £134,500

Mel Ramos, the American artist, along with Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud, produced art works that "reproduced" and "re-presented" aspects of popular culture found in the North American mass media. Whether celebratory or critical, the works expose a culture driven by advertising, display and commodification. 

And, as William Blake says in his version of Laocoön and His Sons in an engraving made 200 years ago this year, and drawn from a plaster copy at the Royal Academy in London:

Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only

Intimate CONFESSIONS 

POP!  TRUE  I was a Rich Man's Plaything  

Pop art as an artistic strategy, a re-fashioning and re-presenting of the persuasive techniques of advertising draws attention these techniques, to aspects of this commodified information environment. The pin-up girl is nowadays a nostalgic and knowing part of retro-style and, as with the Mel Ramos' "breathing" sex object, conjures commodified sex with commodified fruit. This mix produces the classic advertising ploy of distracting the target audience from distraction, by distraction, so the images slip through the net of consciousness to work on the "unconscious" through "suggestion". 

This is the "wonder" of communication in a global capitalist system that has the power to transform all things, animal, vegetable and mineral, to the status of a commodity. The Re:LODE Cargo of Questions project has a page that explores how in echoland we must proceed with a hush, and then extreme caution regarding:  

"clickbait" On stage & on display in Bon Marché & the brothels of Paris

Commodity fetishism?

NOT the Goddess of Peace

In the 1990s and early 2000s, faced with an unstable political situation in Colombia, Chiquita and several other corporations including the Dole Food Company (a U.S. agricultural multinational, the company is the largest producer of fruit and vegetables in the world), Fresh Del Monte Produce and Hyundai Motor Corporation made payments to paramilitary organisations in the country, most notably the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Chiquita paid the AUC $1.7 million in a ten-year period. 

Although official accounts from the company state they only made these payments as the AUC was extorting payments from Chiquita in order to ensure their security, these claims are disputed as Chiquita also allowed AUC to use their loading facilities to transport AK-47s. Indeed, the Chiquita's United States counsel had warned them against using this extortion defence in cases where the company benefitted from these payments, and the company's lawyer reportedly told them to stop making the payments. 

Chiquita's dealings with AUC continued even after it was officially designated as a terrorist organization in the United States. Although the company eventually voluntarily disclosed their involvement with AUC to the United States Department of Justice, they still sent over $300,000 to the organisation even after the Justice Department instructed them to halt all payments.

Chiquita massacre! What a brand?

Diego Laserna, in his article for the Columbia Political Review (May 2, 2007) looked at where things stood in 2007 on this capitalist financing of terrorism in Colombia, and referencing One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, under the heading: 

Chiquita massacre:

“After his shout something happened that did not bring on fright but a kind of hallucination. The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once... When Jose Arcadio came to he was lying face up in the darkness… Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn…and those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them like bananas…man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.”

This passage from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude could be read as another example of the Nobel Prize-winner’s genius ability to use fantasy as a metaphor for everyday life. It could be an imagined story that references the violent history of Colombia and the country’s seeming inability to learn from its experiences. Yet as those who visit Colombia will realize, Marquez describes Colombian reality much more often than one would think, and this case is no exception: in Colombia, banana companies help pile people like bananas.

In 1928, roughly ten thousand workers of the United Fruit Company went on strike in a small town called Cienaga, on the northern coast of Colombia. Their demands were considerably modest: they did not want to be paid in coupons that could be used only at company stores, they did not want to live in extremely poor conditions at company shelters, and they wanted to unionize. Still, the company refused to negotiate, and the army was called in to solve the problem. An estimated 300 people were killed, but precise figures remain elusive. Soon after, the United Fruit Company (UFC) decided that Colombia was too messy for it to operate there, and with no acknowledgement of the tragedy they had caused, the corporation left.

Sadly, the massacre did not strike any sense into the UFC, which continued to meddle in Latin American politics. In 1954, the company pressured President Dwight D. Eisenhower to overthrow Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz when he proposed to carry out a land reform program that threatened to redistribute uncultivated land to landless peasants. The UFC, which owned approximately half of all the productive land in Guatemala—85 percent of which was uncultivated— was not very fond of Arbenz’s idea. The company eventually managed to depose him and Guatemala was ruled by military dictatorship for the next 40 years.

Somewhat embarrassed by the reputation it had earned, the United Fruit Company changed its name to the United Brands Company in 1975 only to be forced to change it again in 1980s after information emerged that the company had bribed Honduran Dictator Oswaldo Lopez Arellano. The new name they chose was Chiquita Banana.

But as poor, old and blind Ursula desperately claims in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “It’s as if the world is repeating itself,” and Chiquita has proven no better than its predecessors. In fact, much like Marquez’s novel, everything seems to be coming full circle, back to Colombia. In a plea agreement with the US Justice Department on March 14, Chiquita agreed to pay a $25 million fine after the company confessed to making over one hundred payments amounting to $1.7 million to Colombian paramilitaries for “security services” between 1997 and 2004. The company also admitted to paying Colombian guerrillas between 1989 and 1997.

The Colombian paramilitaries, or AUC, have long been known for controlling the largest share of the country’s cocaine export business, using gruesome methods to kill those who stand in their way. Nonetheless, Chiquita was quite comfortable sponsoring them even after September 11, when the company failed to realize that the US State Department had included the Colombian paramilitaries and guerrillas in its list of terrorist organizations. At that point, the payments became a crime not only Colombia, but in the US as well. In fact, the relationship between Chiquita and the paramilitaries had grown to be so close and productive that according to the Colombian Attorney General, on November 7, 2001, Chiquita allowed the paramilitaries to smuggle 3,400 rifles and 4 million rounds of ammunition through its private port in the region of Uraba. The company even held on to the goods for four days until the paramilitaries could schedule a pick up.

Although no one knows exactly where Chiquita’s rifles and money went, Carlos Castaño, the founder and leader of the paramilitaries, acknowledged that receiving those weapons was a turning point in his war. The number of combatants grew from 8,000 in 1998 to 32,000 in 2006, and the paramilitaries’ resulting territorial expansion was built on massacres like that of El Salado. In that incident, the paramilitaries mutilated 38 people while drinking and dancing for three days in a row. Highlighting the brutality that has made them famous, the paramilitaries in El Salado were not satisfied with mere mutilation—they proceeded to undress the town’s women and dance with them to Vallenato tunes while their relatives were executed with chainsaws at a nearby table.

Questioned on the payments to the paramilitaries, Chiquita spokesman Michael Mitchell explained in an email that Chiquita’s actions “were always motivated by our good faith concern for the safety of our employees and their families…The company could stop making the payments, complying with the law, but putting the lives of our workers in immediate jeopardy; or we could keep our workers out of harm’s way while violating American law. Each alternative was unpalatable and unacceptable.”

Yet Chiquita’s apparently reasonable argument does not hold water. Paramilitaries have never been very fond of workers, and even less so of unionized workers; many of Chiquita’s own employees died at the hands of those who were supposed to be defending them. But more importantly, Chiquita’s defense conveniently elides the fact that between 2001 and 2004, a time of great financial difficulties for the company, the company’s Colombian affiliate earned over $49 million, making it the corporation’s most profitable unit. Great profitability in a time of crisis might go a long way in explaining why the orders to continue paying the paramilitaries came from the top of Chiquita’s corporate structure. In fact, according to Justice Department documents, the decision to continue making the payments was approved by at least one member of the board of directors and five senior executives in Cincinnati, where the company is headquartered.

Chiquita is not the only US corporation in trouble for working with the paramilitaries. Both Coca-Cola and Drummond, an Alabama based coal corporation, have come under fire for hiring paramilitaries to kill union leaders. And with current developments in Colombia, similar scandals are likely to multiply. But what exactly was Chiquita supposed to do? Cornered in one of the most dangerous places in the world, abandoned by the Colombian government, blackmailed and harassed by guerrillas; the option of paying the paramilitaries seemed the only alternative to halting all operations.

Granted, Uraba has long been an epicenter of violence in Colombia, and it is hardly a great place to do business. If Chiquita had not paid the paramilitaries, they might have turned hostile and disrupted the company’s operations.

But many companies that operate in the region have survived without paying the paramilitaries. Chiquita could have offered to pay the government to bring its own troops to provide security. Indeed, it even could have hired a private security agency that was large enough, instead of paying a terrorist organization known throughout the world for human rights violations. Chiquita did not follow that path—the company found it easier and cheaper to hire the paramilitaries, and it did so without any concern for the consequences to the company’s host country and its people. The bottom line often takes precedence over the higher moral ground.

The Chiquita case also poses some interesting questions for the future of US foreign policy and the US government’s war on terror. Should the US government bother to bring American corporations that support terrorists to justice when those terrorists do not harm American interests? Since September 11, Americans have realized that terrorism can have grave consequences and that to stop it both the people who perpetrate it and those who sponsor it must be held responsible. While Chiquita was paying the paramilitaries, they murdered around 3,700 people—roughly the same amount of people who died on September 11. Why should the Al-Qaeda cells that sponsored the September 11 hijackers be treated on different terms than those who made it possible for the paramilitaries to cause just as much harm? The notion that terrorism is a problem only when it affects American interests is dangerous: it suggests to the world that terrorism is only an American problem and it makes countries more reluctant to cooperate with the US.

History has led many non-Americans living abroad to view the US government and US corporations as two sides of the same coin. Events such as the Chiquita-Eisenhower cooperation in Guatemala or the Nixon-ATT relationship in Chile have only reinforced this belief. Thus, when a corporation like Chiquita is able to get away with a mere fine—paid to the US government no less—after having sponsored a terrorist group that caused thousands of deaths and widespread destruction, people tend to perceive the US government’s complicity in the crime. Nonetheless, Columbia professor Stuart Gottlieb says, “As important of an issue as this is, it just doesn’t have any traction; it’s not on anyone’s radar and the US government is not going to take the initiative on it.”

But if an American corporation were unable to operate in Lebanon without paying Hezbollah, would paying that notorious terrorist group be appropriate? Many critics argue that being too stringent on the behavior of American corporations abroad might severely impair their ability to bring important foreign investment to developing countries and to do business in many places in the world. Still, none of those critics would forgive any corporation that paid Islamic terrorists for security under any circumstances. Why should anyone be any more understanding with Chiquita?

Often against its own interests, Colombia has collaborated extensively with the US. The country follows the US’s inept drug policy to the letter and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is the only South American head of state who claims to be George W. Bush’s friend. Also, the nation is about to sign a bilateral trade agreement that will destroy vital sectors of its economy, and it has extradited just about anybody the US has requested. Yet shortly after the Chiquita scandal, in a display of false bravado, Uribe demanded that Chiquita officials responsible for approving the payments to the guerrillas and paramilitaries be extradited to Colombia: they had violated Colombian law and, he claimed, extradition had to be a reciprocal process. From Washington there was only silence.

During part of Chiquita’s illicit payment period, the company’s CEO was none other than Cyrus Freidheim, currently the CEO of Sun-Times Media, a corporation that owns dozens of newspapers in the Chicago area. Although Freidheim has not been officially linked to the Justice Department’s investigation, Uribe should know full well that people like this do not get extradited. But if the US were truly ethical and coherent in combating global terrorism, Chiquita’s executives would be extradited to Colombia, just as Colombian narco-traffickers are extradited to the US. But that will not happen. And Uribe probably will not push the matter further—after all, “too much” is at stake.

The US government should nonetheless show a certain degree of consideration for the victims of the paramilitaries that Chiquita helped sponsor; the government should hand over the $25 million fine received by the US Justice Department to an organization that helps rehabilitate victims of Colombian paramilitaries. Those who have survived to this day live in slums of Colombia’s large cities in utter misery, burdened with the psychological trauma of having seen their relatives and friends murdered in front of their eyes. Unprecedented as such a transfer of money might be, these victims should receive compensation. Such a redistributive gesture might make sense for US policymakers as a display of sympathy for other people’s suffering in a world increasingly tainted by anti-Americanism. While compensation would not fully exculpate Chiquita for its crimes, it might make America more respected in the eyes of its neighbors and the rest of the world. In the meantime, Colombians and Americans alike will have to put up with a not so magical realism that allows a company that caused so much violence to advertise its products with a strikingly innocuous motto: 

“perfect for life.”

In 2013 and 2014, Chiquita spent $780,000 lobbying against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, hiring lobbyists from Covington and Burling, a high-powered white shoe law firm.

On 24 July 2014, a US appeals court threw out a lawsuit against Chiquita by 4,000 Colombians alleging that the corporation was aiding the right-wing paramilitary group responsible for the deaths of family members. The court ruled 2-1 that US federal courts have no jurisdiction over Colombian claims.

In 2016, Judge Kenneth Marra of the Southern District of Florida ruled in favor of allowing Colombians to sue former Chiquita Brand International executives for the company's funding of the outlawed right-wing paramilitary organisation that murdered their family members. He stated in his decision that “'profits took priority over basic human welfare' in the banana company executives' decision to finance the illegal death squads, despite knowing that this would advance the paramilitaries' murderous campaign." In February 2018, an agreement between Chiquita and the families of the victims had been reached.

Information about who was behind the Chiquita payments to terrorist groups was made available by the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research organization, in a series of document releases related to Chiquita's operations.

In 2018, Colombia's Office of the Attorney General filed charges against 13 Chiquita Brands International executives and administrators after tracing payments made by a local Chiquita affiliate to the paramilitary group AUC, some of which was used to buy machine guns. 

Chiquita fights against  Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act and . . .

. . . is driving the victims of terrorism bananas!

Undertaking research for Re:LODE in 2017 it was clear from reports, such as this one from ALJAZEERA, that following the Colombian government's peace deal with FARC the consequent power vacuum in the countryside threatened the security and future livelihood of many of Colombia's peasant farmers, including communities of Indigenous People.

The photo shows an indigenous person confronting members of the army during an operation against the burning of sugarcane crops organised by the "Liberation of Mother Earth" of the Nasa community in rural Cauca. 

The headline for this story by Wil Crisp (24 Oct 2017) runs: 

The new struggle for Colombia’s countryside after FARC

Cauca, Colombia – Against the blue outline of the distant mountains of Cauca, black smoke is billowing upwards from dozens of fires burning in the densely planted sugarcane crops that spread out as far as the horizon in every direction.

In the fields, dozens of protesters are dotted about methodically starting new fires and slashing at the crops with machetes.

One man is wearing a navy-blue jumper emblazoned with the logo of a private security company; his face is covered with a black balaclava.

“Warn me if you see the real security or the police,” he says as he kneels down and sets fire to some dry leaves at the bottom of a sugarcane plant.

This protest, involving the destruction of the sugarcane crops, is part of a long-running conflict between the Nasa, one of the indigenous groups that live in Colombia’s Cauca region and the large agribusinesses that run plantations in an area that the Nasa believe is part of their ancestral homeland.

Until recently the Cauca mountains and the surrounding plains, like many rural areas in Colombia, used to be dominated by the country’s biggest guerrilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

But in August, the group gave up the last of its arms as part of a peace accord, signed last year with the Colombian government, ending a war that lasted more than five decades.

While the war with FARC is over, the group’s transition to a peaceful political entity has left a power vacuum in much of Colombia’s countryside that the government is struggling to fill.

The Nasa: ‘We don’t know who is assassinating us’

Prior to the peace deal, FARC was far more powerful than the government, local community groups, or any other militant force in much of rural Colombia.

Not only did FARC use its influence to control the drug trade and tax local communities to fund its activities, but it also enforced its own laws, mediated disputes, provided some limited social services and was involved in the building of roads and other infrastructure in regions it held for decades. 

Now that FARC has put down its weapons in these regions, a range of entities that include indigenous communities, ideological guerrilla groups, criminal gangs, and the Colombian government are all adjusting to life without the guerrilla group’s dominance.

In many regions, this adjustment has led to new disputes emerging over land and resources, and some ongoing conflicts have escalated, complicating efforts to find lasting peace in the country.

One element of this is the ongoing struggle by rural communities, like the Nasa, who are trying to reclaim farming land they formerly occupied. 

Another part is a scramble to take over the country’s illegal drug trade and mining business that were formerly taxed and regulated by FARC.

For those who succeed in controlling these illegal industries, the rewards could be significant.

InSight Crime, an investigative non-profit organisation, estimates that before demobilising, FARC was earning at least $267m a year from the cocaine trade, as well as making $30m from cannabis, $5m from opium and $200m from illegal mining.

Fighting between the groups looking to take over FARC territory has resulted in more than 56,000 displacements in the first half of 2017, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

The IDMC said in a recent report that fighting for control of areas once dominated by FARC has “led to a reversal in the trend of reduction of armed clashes, threats, attacks on civilian targets and mass displacements that had been observed between the beginning of the negotiations with FARC in 2012 and 2016”.

The assassination of community leaders in Colombia has also continued at an alarming rate, despite the peace deal being ratified.

As of September 28, 106 social leaders and human rights defenders have been murdered this year, according to the Bogota-based conflict-monitoring NGO Indepaz.

In 2016, 117 social leaders and human rights defenders were killed.

At the demonstration on the sugar cane plantation, several Nasa protesters complain that their communities have seen more violence and uncertainty since the peace agreement with FARC was announced in December last year.

“Outside, the people say peace has come, but for us, life is a lot worse,” says one protester as he rests under a tree in the corner of a field watching the smoke rise from the fields.

“Before we were in regular conflict with the army and FARC, but now there are many new smaller groups – and we don’t know who is assassinating us.” 

A group of indigenous people drink “Guarapo” while sugarcane crops are burned during the Liberation of Mother Earth protest organised by the Nasa community, in the rural area of Cauca, Colombia  

The protest is like a well-organised family event. Under the shade of a tree, two men are standing in the back of a parked pick-up truck pouring sugarcane water, known as “Guarapo”, out of large cans.

The sweet, murky drink is poured into bowls that are being passed around by a group of men who are taking a break from starting fires.

They’re chatting and laughing as they watch an elderly woman in a bright pink sun hat and a teenage girl wearing a purple rucksack hack away at a patch of sugarcane.

The relaxed atmosphere instantly evaporates when the army arrives. The soldiers announce their presence with a megaphone and slowly move up a nearby road in formation, with a line of men with riot shields at the front.

Behind them stands a line of soldiers armed with tear gas launchers and stun grenades. At the back are two armoured trucks.

As the army advances, the older people disappear into the sugarcane while some students and younger indigenous protesters gather near a junction and prepare to clash with the soldiers.

Calmly, they quickly arm themselves with shields made out of road signs, unpacking slings from rucksacks and tying t-shirts over their faces before moving into the centre of the road. 

At around 200 metres, soldiers start firing tear gas at the protesters, as well as shooting live rounds over their heads.

The protesters respond by lobbing rocks and homemade grenades at the soldiers with their slings.

One soldier and two protesters were injured in this particular incident, but sometimes the price paid by indigenous protesters is much higher.

On May 9, the police opened fire on a demonstration in the same sugarcane plantation with automatic weapons, killing Daniel Felipe Castro Basto, a 17-year-old Nasa protester, and putting a local journalist into intensive care.

The guerrillas: ‘Aggressive recruitment’

An hour away by car, young children play outside during their lunch break in the mountain town of Toribio.

Down the road from the primary school, in a low-ceilinged open-plan office Jose Miller Correa Vasquez, the Education Secretary for the Municipality of Toribio sits at a desk where he has been holding meetings with local people all morning.

“Over the last couple of years everything has changed for the children in this region,” he tells Al Jazeera. “Before, there were clashes every single day here. The school children could never play outside – it was just too dangerous.”

“Now the children can have real dreams about building their future – and we can make real education policies that aren’t just about managing the crisis and solving short-term problems associated with the conflict.”

Children play outside their school in Toribio 

While fighting on a daily basis is a thing of the past, Miller says his community faces new challenges that are likely to escalate if local authorities and community groups don’t work together to combat them.

Most of these challenges stem from armed groups that are moving into the region with the aim of taking control of the region’s trade in coca and cannabis, which is cultivated by local farmers.

Prior to its demobilisation, FARC used to control the drug trade in these mountains, but over 2017 the FARC graffiti on road signs and walls in the Toribio municipality has been painted over by other groups that are looking to take control of the region.

These include the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the smaller Popular Liberation Army (EPL).

Negotiations between the ELN and the government began in February, but have stalled several times. The Marxist rebel group and the government began a ceasefire in this month as a sign of goodwill during the talks.

Officials believe it will be harder for the Colombian government to forge a lasting peace deal with ELN due to the group’s structure, which is less hierarchical and more fragmented than FARC’s. 

In the weeks building up to the ceasefire, both ELN and EPL were active in parts of the Cauca region that were previously controlled by FARC, clashing with the military and recruiting from local populations, according to Miller.

“These groups have been aggressively targeting children in school as potential recruits,” he says. “A few cases I have been involved with directly, and I am aware that there are many others. Former FARC guerrillas that have rejected the peace process have joined the new groups. They know how to recruit vulnerable people and are employing more extreme tactics because they need these groups to grow quickly.”

Over 2017, several regions that are key to Colombia’s illegal drug trade have seen an increase in activity by criminal groups led by former FARC members who left the rebel group because they were unhappy with the peace deal.

Many of the FARC dissidents have joined the ELN, EPL, small criminal gangs and larger organised crime groups.

In July, the Colombian navy reported the seizure of large quantities of cannabis in the region of Caqueta, which security forces linked to one-time members of the FARC 47th and 14th units. 

Security forces have also identified criminal networks led by FARC dissidents that are controlling drug trafficking corridors in the regions of Meta and Narino, as well as cocaine processing sites in Antioquia.

The recruitment of minors by dissident-led groups has also been seen outside Cauca with reports of young people bring targeted in the regions of Meta, Guaviare and Caqueta. 

Between 1975 and the end of 2016, around 11,000 children were recruited into FARC, according to Colombia’s attorney general’s office.

In collaboration with other education officials from neighbouring regions, Miller has been involved in creating a team that tours schools to teach children how to respond to recruitment efforts by guerrilla groups and criminal gangs.

“This is very difficult to do effectively,” Miller says. “Once one student has been recruited it can become a very effective tool for persuading more young people to join an armed group.”

Miller says young people are especially vulnerable to recruitment in rural regions like Toribio where there are very limited opportunities for young people to improve their standard of living by legal means.

The valleys around Toribio are heavily scented by the hundreds of cannabis farms that are a key pillar of the municipality’s economy. At night, the mountains are illuminated with thousands of lights, which are used by farmers to stimulate rapid plant growth.

“If young people believed they could become successful without breaking the law – then the offers made to them by armed groups wouldn’t be so attractive,” Miller says.

The military: ‘We can’t let our guard down’

At the foot of the mountain on the road between Toribio and Corinto, Lieutenant Diego Carreno Betancourth is watching his men as they confiscate two large bales of cannabis from a scooter driver who was heading down the mountain.

Although the military has been able to move with increasing ease around these areas over the last year, Betancourth still can’t relax.

“The peace deal is here, but we can’t sleep in the sun,” he tells Al Jazeera while watching his men throw bales of confiscated cannabis in the back of a lorry. “We need to stay alert.”

Army members push a motorcycle after confiscating two large bundles of cannabis in Toribio 

His unit, Battalion 149 from Brigade 29, has been called out to disarm an improvised bomb that was placed near a dam at a water processing facility.

The bomb is made out of a gas cylinder that has been filled with explosives and shrapnel. It is a type known as a “tatuco” that has been used by guerrillas in this region for years.

As the unit prepares to detonate the bomb, a team of six soldiers in full camouflage huddle together and talk in the shade of a tree next to the road.

Three of them disappear down a path towards the dam with detonators and explosive charges.

Another two motorbikes laden with sacks of cannabis drive past, but go unnoticed by the soldiers who are now preoccupied with the bomb disposal.

A crowd of residents stand nearby talking and watching the soldiers.

One says the bomb was found by children who had been swimming in the reservoir the day before and no one knows why the bomb was put there, or who put it there.

“Maybe it’s one of the new groups in the area,” a fruit farmer named Mateo says.

“Maybe they want to destroy the dam or to kill the soldiers that patrol around the edge of the water facility,” he adds. “Perhaps they just want to keep people afraid.”

A family covers their ears during controlled explosions in an army operation to deactivate two makeshift bombs placed near a dam at a water treatment plant between El Palo and Toribio 

The explosion is loud and is followed by a wisp of white smoke that rises from a patch of trees.

There’s a palpable sense of relief among the soldiers when the bomb has been detonated without any complications.

“Gradually our relationship is changing with the people in this area,” Lieutenant Carreno says as his men pack up their things, chat with the villagers and prepare to leave the area.

“Before, civilians would be afraid to be seen talking to soldiers in public as they would have been accused of collaboration,” Carreno adds.

“Now FARC’s grip has been loosened, but we still can’t let our guard down.”

A soldier walks in front of the smoke produced by controlled explosions in an army operation to deactivate two bombs that were placed near a dam at a water treatment plant between El Palo and Toribio 

Though armed clashes between the military and guerrilla groups are no longer a daily occurrence in Cauca they still happen enough to be a constant cause of concern for Lieutenant Carreno.

A few days before, Carreno’s battalion was involved in a clash near Corinto with an armed guerrilla group. They captured one fighter, but still don’t know for certain whether he belonged to ELN, EPL or another group.

On September 23, one week before the ELN ceasefire, a soldier was injured when a military sentry post was targeted with two grenades and machine-gun fire. The attack was blamed on ELN.

On September 30, three policemen were killed in the nearby region of Miranda when a patrol was ambushed by suspected FARC dissidents.

“Before, we always knew who we were fighting against,” says Lieutenant Carreno. “Now, we’re not so sure.”

The growers: ‘Big problems remain’ 

A two-hour drive from Toribio, an eagle is soaring, hardly moving its wings as it rides currents of rising air above the mountaintop village of La Esmeralda. 

Down on the ground, Hector Cundalatin is walking through his three-hectare coca plantation, describing the qualities of the different coca varieties.

The Ecuadorian strains produce all year round and are more resistant to the herbicides that used to be sprayed by aeroplanes as part of a US-led eradication programme.

The Colombian plants are bigger and have a greater yield.

Cundalatin is a 40-year-old Nasa farmer. He has grown coca since he was 16 and his farm is one of 20 plantations in La Esmeralda.

As part of a country-wide scheme to encourage coca farmers to switch to legal crops, Cundalatin has already slashed the number of coca plants on his farm by a quarter in return for a subsidy, but he is still waiting to receive the funds from the government.

Officials were meant to visit his farm three months ago to assess the progress that he has made switching from coca to coffee, but the visit has been repeatedly delayed, and his farm still hasn’t been assessed.

“I’m proud that I’ve been given this opportunity to change to legal crops,” Cundalatin tells Al Jazeera.

“But for it to be a real opportunity, the government must keep its promise on subsidies,” he adds.

“Legal crops are hard to grow on the mountainside and are worth much less money. In order to switch, we need government support, or we just won’t be able to survive.”

As he walks through the crops, touching their leaves and breaking off berries, military vehicles rattle up and down the dirt track that borders his property.

Though he welcomes the end of daily armed clashes in this region, he is worried that soon he may not be able to provide for his family.

“This is the only business I have – and it’s becoming much more difficult to make money,” he says. 

Since the peace process started, coca prices have declined across the country due to increased production in other areas, including Narino, a region to Cauca’s south that borders Ecuador. 

Both US and Colombian officials have blamed the boom in coca production on poor implementation of the mechanism that was meant to encourage farmers to grow alternative crops.

In March, the Colombian minister of foreign affairs said farmers were planting more coca so they could take advantage of the new substitution initiatives under the peace accords. The farmers rejected the allegations. 

Figures published in July revealed that cocaine production in Colombia hit an all-time high last year.

The country produced an estimated 866 tonnes of cocaine in 2016, up from an estimated 649 tonnes in 2015, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Unlike most farmers in Colombia, Cundalatin has not been able to expand his production due to his farm being located close to an official FARC demobilisation zone, which is protected by a 24-hour military presence.

Such demobilisation zones were created within territories that were traditionally controlled by FARC for its former members to live while they transitioned to civilian life.

FARC insisted that the camps were provided with military protection as a precondition for disarming, as they feared fighters would be targeted by attacks once they had given up their guns.

“The farmers in this area don’t want to create problems for anyone,” Cundalatin says.

“All we do is grow coca, which is a natural product. We don’t get involved in processing it to make cocaine.”

Prior to the ceasefire deal, the farmers that lived in La Esmeralda would rarely be bothered by the police or the army. 

FARC made sure that traders and cocaine producers were protected and even brought farming machinery to the plantations to help improve productivity.

“Before the peace deal, my buyers would pay for the crops in advance. Now they only pay when they have received them, and sometimes they never arrive to pick up the crops at all,” says Cundalatin.

He adds everyone in his large family is totally dependent on the farm.

“There are about 120 families in this area, and for every family, the story is the same as mine.”

Efforts to eradicate the coca crops by force in other areas have been opposed by local farmers worried about being stripped of their livelihood, and have led to some tragic confrontations.

After weeks of protests by farmers in Tumaco in the Nariono region at least six farmers died in a violent incident on a coca farm this month. 

The police and army have blamed the attack on FARC dissidents, but locals and human rights organisations say that the police indiscriminately opened fire on farmers who were protesting against their crops being eradicated.

After walking around his farm, Cundalatin sits on the porch of his small house located on a peak above the fields. 

The porch offers a panoramic view of the distant plains that surround Corinto.

Cundalatin says he watched the fires burn in the sugarcane and saw the tear gas rising from the fields the day before when the protesters were clashing with the army.

“Colombia is so close to finding real peace, but big problems remain,” he says.

“The people here are tired of conflict. Everyone needs to be ready to make compromises to stop the country from sliding into another 50 years of war.”

That was the situation in 2017! This is what is happening NOW! 

This article for AL JAZEERA by Steven Grattan (24 Nov 2020) looks at how:

Four years after FARC peace deal, Colombia grapples with violence 

Bogota, Colombia – Hector Mariano Carabali has been unable to keep count of the number of death threats he has received in recent years.

The Afro-Colombian human rights defender from the southwestern Cauca region, which continues to be mired in insecurity, has been left disillusioned by the peace deal struck between the previous government of Juan Manuel Santos and the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in November 2016.

“Signing a peace agreement doesn’t mean peace for a country. It takes a lot more than that,” Carabali, who has taken it upon himself to try and uphold the peace deal in his region, told Al Jazeera. “The government is not implementing it.”

Carabali said the current government “ripped the peace deal to shreds” when they came to power in 2018 and that nothing has changed in his region, where “the situation is really complicated,” he says.

The deal was meant to put an end to a bloody 50-year armed conflict which killed more than 260,000 and displaced millions. But while some gains have been made, Colombians in many parts of the country continue to live with insecurity.

“In terms of security, there are areas in post-conflict, some that have improved and others that have deteriorated substantially. There’s around 130 areas with very delicate security situations,” Ariel Avila, a Bogota-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

“The country has improved a lot in many political and social areas, but there has been a huge deterioration of security in the last two years. We’ve had over 70 massacres and a rise in killings and illegal economies in various areas.

Continuing violence

Violence continues to devastate rural areas. Demobilised fighters and human rights defenders have been systematically killed, threatened, or attacked and dissident groups and other armed actors have moved into areas the FARC left behind.

These groups vie for control of valuable coca crops or illegal mining territory, which has caused the continued forced displacement of local communities. In some areas, armed groups have imposed controls on the locals’ movement in and out of communities.

One rebel group, the Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN), continues to operate with approximately 3,000 active fighters. The administration of President Ivan Duque has refused to initiate any peace talks with the group until it releases all hostages and ends kidnappings and attacks.

Colombia’s President Ivan Duque says he will not entertain peace talks with the ELN until the group releases hostages

Arlene Tickner, director of political research at Rosario University in Bogota, says talks with the ELN are not “even a remote possibility” under the Duque administration.

The researcher highlighted a number of positive changes since the signing of the peace accord such as the demobilisation of 13,000 FARC combatants and the consequent reduction of combat-related deaths, as well as the implementation of the transitional justice system in which victims of the conflict occupy centre stage.

“Nevertheless, it would be a stretch to say that there is peace in Colombia,” Tickner told Al Jazeera.

“A considerable number of violent non-state actors, including FARC dissidents, ELN guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug-trafficking groups, continue to operate throughout the national territory and to threaten local civilian populations. Killings of social leaders, human rights activists and ex-combatants, not to mention massacres, are at horrific highs,” she said.

A new, right-wing government led by President Duque came to power in 2018, two years after the agreement. The Democratic Centre political party, to which Duque is affiliated, was staunchly against many aspects of the peace agreement from the beginning, especially in relation to lighter sentences for crimes committed by the FARC during times of conflict.

Peace deal ‘not working as intended’

The promise of tougher measures towards the demobilised FARC was one of Duque’s main election promises to his voters which has continued into his presidency, and the implementation of the peace agreement continues to be one of the most contentious issues among Colombians.

“Looking at the peace agreement and how the government has implemented it, I think it’s obvious that it’s not working as intended,” said Sergio Guzman, director of Colombia Risk Analysis.

“The government wants to show the international community that it's fulfilling an agreement, and on the other side, before the Colombian Congress and in particular the ruling party, the government wants to defend that it is in fact not doing that,” he said.

The think-tank INDEPAZ says 56 FARC ex-combatants have been killed in 2020 

Bogota-based think-tank the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (INDEPAZ) has registered the killings of 256 human rights and community activists in 2020 so far. Official government statistics are much more conservative, with 49 registered deaths. In 2020, INDEPAZ says 56 FARC ex-combatants have been killed.

Lags in government funding for ex-combatants to implement economic projects in their civilian lives is another issue. Only a small percentage of the funds have arrived, meaning many demobilised fighters have not been able to economically integrate into society.

“The government has not complied with supporting the economic projects of ex-combatants in the reintegration zones,” said Carabali, the Cauca-based human rights activist.  “Nor have they guaranteed their security and we’ve seen a rise in dissidence groups emerge.”

The projects were meant to ensure former fighters did not return to growing coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.

Other elements of the accord that have faced delays include the complex land reform disputes, which, Tickner says, are at the root of the conflict and violence in the Andean nation. Coca substitution and alternative development, political participation and representation of ex-combatants and the victims of the conflict are other elements that have yet to be adequately addressed.

For Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, Andes director for US-based advocacy group the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), the four-year anniversary of the signing of the deal is “bittersweet”.

“While the architecture of the accord has advanced, it’s lacking implementation on the ground. The lack of decisive political and financial backing from the government is leading to a resurgence of massacres, displacements and killings of social leaders and former FARC combatants,” she said.

“Beyond promises, peace has not reached indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities whose leaders are killed and under threat and youth massacred by illegal groups. Unless Duque and his government turn this around quickly we will see the loss of a historical opportunity to change Colombia into a rights-respecting real democracy.”

For many from rural communities racked by violence, the hopes for peace have quickly faded.

Carabali says he has a folder full of police reports from the death threats he has received.

“I think it’s in the thousands now. I’ve had family members murdered,” he said.

“In spite of all these difficulties and adversities, we have to keep fighting for social reforms in the country, and not lose hope.”

Indigenous Colombians protest to demand end to drug violence

Yesterday (Tue 25 Nov 2020), AL JAZEERA reported on continued anti-government protests, despite the coronavirus pandemic.

The report by Jennifer Bitterly (25 Nov 2020) includes coverage of the multiple grievances held against the government by the poorest sections of Colombian society. They have given voice to these grievances in protests that have been ongoing for more than a year. The report's headline runs:

'The fight continues': Colombia protests continue despite pandemic

Bogota, Colombia – Hundreds of people gathered at a street corner in downtown Bogota on Monday to commemorate the anniversary of Dilan Cruz’s death. His mother and sister arranged a circle of flowers on the street where the 18-year-old was shot by police a year earlier during an anti-government protest, with his clothes and a framed portrait placed in the centre.

Throughout the vigil, the mostly young crowd chanted: “Dilan didn’t die, Dilan was killed!”

The killing of Cruz, who was shot with a projectile by riot police at close range, fuelled Colombia’s burgeoning anti-government protests in late 2019. What began in November as a “National Strike” against labour reforms, quickly evolved into a nationwide anti-government movement.

Hundreds of thousands of Colombians rallied to express their anger with the administration of President Ivan Duque over a range of issues, including its implementation of the 2016 peace deal, economic reforms, inattention to rural populations, inequality and the assassination of social leaders.

People stand under a huge cloth with a portrait of the late student Dilan Cruz, during a march against the government of Colombian President Ivan Duque within a national strike in Bogota on November 27, 2019 

The protest movement lost momentum earlier this year amid the country’s coronavirus outbreak, with Duque in March introducing wide-ranging restrictions in an attempt to minimise the virus’s spread. Much of the country remained under lockdown for six months as the government banned mass gatherings.

Colombia has confirmed more than 1.25 million cases of COVID-19 and its death toll from the disease has passed 35,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally. Its economy has also deteriorated amid the restrictions, with some sectors only re-opening in September. Informal workers, who make up roughly 47 percent of Colombia’s workforce, have been the hardest hit and are also the most vulnerable to COVID-19.

Despite the months-long restrictions, the movement has continued activities. In June, the National Strike Committee sent a letter to President Duque outlining six suggested measures to respond to the dual health and economic crises, including emergency rent subsidies and increased support for the public education system. Duque’s administration had not responded to the letter or met the committee at the time of publication.

“This year, despite the pandemic, I’ve seen many youths and families with a lot of social consciousness,” said Laura Garzon, one of Dilan Cruz’s teachers who attended the vigil.

“The future is uncertain, but regardless the fight continues.”

Indigenous people taking part in a ‘Minga’ (Indigenous meeting) walk along the Pan-American highway as they arrive in the city of Cali with the expectation of meeting President Ivan Duque, on October 12, 2020 

The committee and other collectives have also organised a handful of marches in recent months to demand emergency measures to provide financial relief and healthcare guarantees.

Ruben Pinilla, a teacher and organiser for the District Association of Education Workers, said that thousands of protesters had taken part in several demonstrations since June, despite the restrictions. Among them was the Indigenous Minga gathering from October 17 to 21, when 8,000 Indigenous people from the southwest of Colombia travelled hundreds of miles to the capital to demand governmental reform and protection for their territories and their leaders.

In a recent instalment of the national strike, thousands of students and workers took part in marches on November 19 demanding government reforms. The Central Union of Workers marched with banners declaring that “Duque neither listens nor negotiates.”

“We are young people representing a voice that is trying and seeking to transform our futures,” said Fabio Castro, director of activist drumming group Barbukana. He told Al Jazeera he marched in hope that the government would distribute resources equitably. “Art is one of the most forgotten sectors during this pandemic – there’s no economic relief, and the government doesn’t offer us employment opportunities either,” he said.

Women hold signs reading ‘When death exists, memory resists’ and ‘The dead on my country hurt me’ during a protest against police brutality in Medellin, Colombia, on September 14, 2020 

While the government has provided some emergency relief, authorities have opened several investigations into irregularities in contracts linked to emergency coronavirus aid and the potential involvement of officials.

Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, director of the advocacy group Andes for the Washington Office on Latin America, told Al Jazeera, “In addition to the previous discontent, now protesters are reacting to the mass corruption of COVID-19 funds.” She added that some politicians have wielded the pandemic as an excuse to ignore pleas for increased security and other reforms.

The government has blamed recent protests on “outside infiltrators” from the ELN armed group and remaining FARC dissidents. During the heated and spontaneous protests against police brutality in September, the defence ministry pronounced them “an articulated, systemic, organised manifestation of violence and vandalism”.

When the committee announced plans for a march on November 21, the anniversary of the biggest mass mobilisation during last year’s protests, the government announced that select purchases would be tax-free on that day. The protests were a fraction of the size of the previous year’s event, and local media reported floods of consumers in shopping centres.

Hundreds of thousands took part in the national strike on November 21, 2019 

Pinilla told Al Jazeera that organisers did not see the “critical mass” they were hoping to welcome in the capital’s main plaza, but that it was important to recognise that people gathered in their respective neighbourhoods throughout Colombia.

“In this moment, it is important to strengthen the permanent presence [of the movement] in each territory,” he added.

While the COVID-19 outbreak could continue to deter some people from taking part in mass gatherings, protest organisers and analysts said the movement could continue to evolve on local levels.

Shauna Gillooly, PhD candidate and researcher in political science at UC Irvine, said that the national strike committee should ally with those protesting police brutality to amplify the movement in the future. In September, when a man was killed after police repeatedly shocked him with a taser in Bogota, the city exploded into protests.

“There need to be conversations about the national strike expanding demands and turning to the factions within the national strike who weren’t represented well last year,” she said.

Pinilla’s organisation has been negotiating with local administrations, calling for more political involvement and voter participation in the next congressional election, and is hopeful social movements will continue to grow.

“It’s an evolution not in size or quantity, but in profound conviction and understanding of the causes that build this platform for peaceful change,” Pinilla told Al Jazeera.

Twelve months ago . . .

. . . the Guardian reported on the demonstrations! 

Clashes in Colombia as hundreds of thousands protest against government

Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá, reporting for the Guardian (Thu 21 Nov 2019), filed this story just over a year ago and that puts recent events in Colombia into a context of democratic government's failure to attend to the needs of the people. He writes:

Hundreds of thousands of Colombians have taken to the streets in a show of support for the country’s embattled peace process with leftist rebels – and to protest against its deeply unpopular government.

Pensioners, students, teachers and union members joined marches across the country in one of biggest mass demonstrations in recent years.

In the capital, Bogotá, police helicopters whirred overhead, while riot police fired teargas at protesters who had blocked bus routes before dawn. Despite torrential rain, thousands of people thronged the city’s historic Plaza de Simón Bolívar, singing the national anthem.

The marches began in Bogotá largely without incident, although a few clashes broke out near Bogotá airport between protesters and riot police around midday. As the rain cleared, more confrontations broke out across the city in the early evening. Explosions could be heard across the city. Teargas was fired in the Plaza de Simón Bolívar and at the campus of the National University, where protesters battled with security forces.

The national strike was prompted by proposed cuts to pensions weeks ago. Though the reform was never formally announced, it became a lightning rod for widespread dissatisfaction with the government of President Iván Duque, whose approval rating has dropped to just 26% since he took office in August last year.

Protesters also expressed anger at the perceived slow-walking of the rollout of the country’s historic 2016 peace deal with the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc) rebel group. That accord formally ended five decades of civil war that killed 260,000 and forced more than 7 million to flee their homes.

Others say Duque has done little to protect social leaders and indigenous people, who are being murdered at alarming rates. Public fury has also been stoked by a recent airstrike against a camp of dissident rebel drug traffickers, which left eight minors dead.

“We live in a country that kills children, that kills social leaders, with a government that is against peace,” said Alexandra Guzmán, a businesswoman who hires ex-Farc members to work at her furniture workshop. “That is why we have to change something. We cannot continue to live like this.”

And as in Chile, which has been mired in more than a month of unrest, many in the expanding middle classes feel left behind as the economy continues to grow.

“It is not the economy that is growing like Duque and his friends say. It is the profits of the bankers that are growing, which means that they are draining the economy,” tweeted Gustavo Petro, an opposition senator who ran against Duque for the presidency last year, ahead of the march.

“I’m marching today because my generation need a pension when we grow old,” said María Rodríguez, a student who was marching with her colleagues. “We have to stand up for our rights.”

The marches were mostly peaceful, although clashes broke out near Bogotá airport between protesters and riot police.

In the past, such protests have failed to attract large turnouts, which activists attribute to a fear of being demonised as hardline leftists or rebel sympathisers.

“We have fought for generations to make sure we are no longer persecuted to speak,” said Mafe Carrascal, a prominent activist who attended the marches in Bogotá. “The peace process gave us a big tailwind in showing that to support peace is not to be a defender of the guerrillas.”

Also in attendance was Jacqueline Castillo, a mother whose brother was murdered by the army before being falsely declared an enemy Farc combatant – one of thousands of so-called “false positive” killings that plagued the country from 2002 to 2008. Some reports say the practice may have returned.

“We aren’t scared to fight for justice and peace, and we’ll take to the streets until we get it,” Castillo said. “The people do not surrender, dammit!”

The Guardian posted this video (Thu 21 Nov 2019)

Colombia violence erupts in Bogotá after anti-government protests

On the day following this report in the Guardian the World Socialist Web Site (International Committee of the Fourth International) published this report and analysis of the situation in Colombia.

The report and analysis is by Evan Blake (22 November 2019):

With the launching of a national strike Thursday, hundreds of thousands of Colombian workers joined the eruption of class struggle that has shaken Latin America over the past several months. Following the mass demonstrations and strikes in Chile, the eruption of social protest in Ecuador and the resistance of Bolivian workers and peasants to the US-backed right-wing military coup, Colombian workers have shut down the fourth largest economy in Latin America.

While exact crowd sizes are hard to determine, estimates have ranged from 200,000 to over 1,000,000 people participating nationwide. Over 100,000 marched in the rain through the capital of Bogotá, filling the streets and closing 130 Transmilenio bus stations. At least 20,000 marched in Cali, and tens of thousands more participated in over 100 cities and towns across Colombia. Solidarity protests were held in numerous cities internationally, including Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Munich, New York, Sydney, Madrid, Miami and San Francisco.

Dozens of organizations took part in the strike, primarily the various trade unions, indigenous rights groups and student organizations. In every major city, protesters blocked public transportation to varying degrees, shutting down large sections of transportation throughout the country.

Thousands of protesters filled Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá, the main square of the capital. Referencing the state violence unleashed against protesters in Chile, where hundreds have lost their eyes after being shot by rubber bullets, a large banner draped across a side of the square read, “How many eyes will it cost us to open theirs?”

Underscoring the significance of the strike, Oren Barack of Alliance Global Partners in New York, which holds Colombian sovereign and corporate debt, told Bloomberg, “I’m following it pretty closely. The government has something to be nervous about.”

While the protests remained overwhelmingly peaceful, minor clashes between protesters and units of the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron (ESMAD) took place in some major cities during the day, leading to the arrest of ten protesters by mid-day. Altercations in Bogotá and the western city of Cali injured seven protesters and 28 policemen, prompting the imposition of a 7pm curfew in Cali. As of this writing, some clashes have broken out between police and protesters defying the curfew.

Despite efforts by demonstrators to keep the protest peaceful, a confrontation took place in the afternoon between protesters and the ESMAD on Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá, prompting the militarized riot police to fire tear gas to disperse the crowd.

In the evening, thousands of people took to the streets in cacerolazos — banging pots and pans — in Medellín and Bogotá, protesting the police violence.

In the days leading up to the strike, the Colombian state mobilized its vast police and military apparatus, the second largest in the region after Brazil. The commander of the Colombian armed forces, General Luis Fernando Navarro, ordered the quartering of all of the country’s 293,200 soldiers beginning Monday and lasting through the national strike, commanding them to be on “maximum alert status.” 8,000 soldiers were deployed to Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Bucaramanga, Pereira and Pasto.

In addition, 10,000 local police were deployed in Bogotá and 7,000 in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, with thousands more in other cities. President Iván Duque issued a decree enabling local authorities to impose curfews and ban the carrying of arms and consumption of alcohol.

In an effort to whip up xenophobia, the government deported 24 Venezuelan nationals, as well as Spanish and Chilean nationals, whom they accused of “affecting public order and national security.” In addition, Duque ordered the closing of Colombia’s borders from midnight Wednesday until 5:00am Friday.

Twenty-seven raids were conducted by the National Police in Bogotá on Tuesday morning, searching the offices and homes of leaders of organizations involved with the strike. In a nationally televised public address on Wednesday, Duque warned that his government “will guarantee order and defend you with all the tools the constitution grants us.”

The underlying objective impulse for the national strike is the deep economic inequality that pervades Colombian society. With three billionaires owning more wealth than the bottom ten percent of the population, Colombia ranks among the most unequal countries in Latin America, the most unequal region in the world. Unemployment has risen under the Duque administration, as more than 600,000 people lost their jobs last year alone.

The right-wing policies of the Duque administration, which has been a dutiful servant to the Colombian bourgeoisie and foreign capital since coming to power in August 2018, have exacerbated this situation and created immense hostility to the existing political setup. The most recent opinion polls before the strike showed Duque’s approval ratings at a dismal 26 percent.

Duque has violated nearly every statute of the fraudulent 2016 peace accords negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla movement and has branded anyone who supports the peace accords as a guerrilla sympathizer. Duque has waged this campaign in alliance with his mentor, former president Álvaro Uribe, who during his reign from 2002-2010 vastly expanded the military and relied upon paramilitary death squads to wage war against FARC.

Under Duque, hundreds of innocent civilians, and in particular indigenous people, have been murdered. In October alone, five indigenous leaders were killed in Cauca, while more than 700 indigenous leaders and community organizers have been killed in Colombia since 2016.

The repeated treaty violations led a section of the FARC to resume the bloody, decades-long civil war with the government at the end of August. Since it began in 1964, the Colombian conflict has led to the killing of over 177,000 civilians by both the military and the guerrilla fighters, and is the longest armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere.

In late September, student protests erupted in response to revelations of corruption within the District University administration involving the embezzlement of over COP$10,400 million (roughly US$3 million). When the ESMAD violently suppressed the protests, students began organizing weekly protests and marches throughout Colombia, repeatedly clashing with police.

Also in September, the Supreme Court began hearing witnesses in the trial of Uribe, who has been accused of fraud and bribery to cover up his family’s past crimes. With Uribe’s record largely destroyed by this testimony, his far-right Democratic Center (CD) party lost significant ground in local elections held on October 27.

First announced by the country’s main trade unions on October 4, the national strike was initially ignored by the corporate media. The protests first centered on opposition to government plans for an austerity package to undermine the state-run pension program Colpensiones, reduce the minimum wage for minors, decrease education spending and cut taxes for the rich.

A tipping point occurred on November 5, when it was revealed that the state had covered up the fact that an August 29 military bombing had killed at least eight children in Caquetá, which it claimed was a FARC stronghold, leading to the resignation of Colombian Defense Minister Guillermo Botero. The revelation that the Colombian military had committed yet another war crime against its own population prompted students and indigenous groups to join the call for a national strike, shifting the central demand to the ouster of Duque. Since then, reports have surfaced that up to 18 children were killed, more than double the government’s count, further fueling social tensions.

The massive participation in the national strike in Colombia has exposed the determination of the Colombia working class to mount a struggle against the government and the capitalist interests it defends. For the trade unions and the “left” bourgeois opponents of Duque, however, the action is a means to let off steam, with the strike limited to a one-day protest.

Moreover, the nationalist policies of these forces inevitably lead the working class into a political blind alley, while paving the way to bloody defeats.

The national bourgeoisie, which Duque and all the existing political parties in Colombia represent, are tied to American and world imperialism by a thousand threads. Capitalism is in a state of crisis globally, and the bourgeois politicians are incapable of offering any reforms whatsoever.

In opposition to the national reformist program put forward by the various liberal, trade unions and pseudo-left parties, Colombian workers must turn to their allies in the international working class and fight to forge links with workers across the Americas and around the world. To carry their struggle forward requires the building of a genuinely revolutionary socialist party in Colombia, as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

"We need a government that fights poverty, not the poor" 

The present rightwing Colombian government faces resistance to an agenda that serves the interests of multi-nationals, globalised capital and the political agenda of the NORTH, in a world that continues to be divided by: 

The Brandt Line 

Looking at the North-South divide in the World from the North and the South

Landlessness

When it comes to the question of ownership of the land and landlessness in Latin America, an answer must include the stark reality that the poorest 50% of Latin American people own just 1% of the land. Such concentrations of ownership of land and property amongst an elite few, multinational corporations, agribusiness, the oligarchs at the top of the capitalist class, raise other fundamental questions about the development and sustainability of agriculture in Colombia arise, and against the background of political violence and social unrest. An article posted by Alternautas asks a question:

And if not in Havana?

So, Who are ALTERNAUTAS?

(Re)Searching Development: The Abya Yala Chapter

ABOUT Alternautas

The world of hyperinformation creates the illusion of a fairly democratized circulation and access to knowledge worldwide. Sadly, this is far from being true. A case in point where this is especially visible is the dominance of the English language serving the reproduction of mainstream Eurocentric frameworks and discourses on development ideas, concepts, and models, or – more generally - of the regulative principles steering the evolution of contemporary societies. We believe that there exists a vast and valuable production of relevant and original thinking about such issues in Latin America, or Abya Yala, as its native populations decided to refer to it. However, it remains largely confined to regional boundaries due to language barriers. Alternautas emerges from a desire to bridge such barriers, by bringing Latin-American intellectual reflections on development to larger, English-speaking, audiences. 

Alternautas also intends to serve as a platform for testing, circulating, and debating new ideas and reflections on these topics, expanding beyond the geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries of Latin America - Abya Yala. We hope to contribute to connecting ideas, and to provide a space for intellectual exchange and discussion for a nascent academic community of scholars, devoted to counter-balancing mainstream understandings of development.

The image in the header is América Invertida, drawn in 1943 by Joaquín Torres García, the Uruguayan modernist artist. More information on his work can be accessed here.

Abya Yala - A Note: 

Abya Yala, which in the Guna language means "land in its full maturity" or "land of vital blood", is the name used by the Native American nation Guna people, that inhabit near the Darién Gap (today North West Colombia and South East Panama) to refer to their section of the American continent since Pre-Columbian times. The term is used by some indigenous peoples of North and South America to describe the two continents.

Darién - a nexus of the New World!

Re:LODE Radio recognises the use of the term/name Abya Yala for a geography of Latin America named by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in France, after Americus Vesputius, the Latinized name of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512). It was Vespucci, an Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer who first suggested that Brazil and the West Indies were not the eastern regions of Asia as initially assumed as a result of Columbus' voyages, but were an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the Europeans. The Re:LODE Methods & Purposes page has a number of articles bundled on the section: 

To every story there belongs another . . .

 . . . including: The naming of the Americas 

. . . and Darién - a nexus of the New World!

The article for Alternautus by Alexander Liebman and Henry A. Peller has a title headline that begins with the question "And if not in Havana?"

¿Y si no en Habana? Landless science, peasant struggle, and capitalist development in Colombia

INTRODUCTION

On November 30th 2016, the Colombian government and FARC signed a peace agreement despite its narrow rejection in a national plebiscite two months earlier. The Havana Accords promise to end five decades of civil war. Among the FARC’s central objectives in the negotiations was agrarian reform. This, in order to resolve the highest land inequity in the Western Hemisphere and the accumulated centuries of violent injustice onto the rural poor. About 80% of agricultural land in Colombia is concentrated among 14% of landowners (USAID 2010). Land is most often used for export production and extensive cattle production. From the Andean highlands to the Eastern Plains, cattle dominate the landscape, occupying 80% of agricultural land, often the most productive areas. Another 40% of Colombian territory is under contract with multinational productions for agriculture, forestry, or mining export (OXFAM 2013). Inequality of land access is also borne unequally across race and gender – Afro-Colombians and women facing the highest levels of internal displacement due to rural conflict and agri-business land accumulation (Gomez 2012).

Unfortunately, among the consequences of post-plebiscite negotiations include the substantial weakening of agrarian reform. There is little to suggest that change to the status quo is on the horizon with the Havana Accords, a conclusion that the anti-capitalist left (and, actually, many more liberal Colombian intellectuals) had reached long before the peace doves and white linens.

We became interested in the question of agrarian reform in Colombia while conducting soils research at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) – the South American outpost of the world’s largest agricultural development institute, the Consultative Group in International Agriculture Research (CGIAR). During a semester of research on soil carbon dynamics in grazed agroforestry systems, we kept wondering: If not agrarian reform, what do foreign and Colombian elites offer as a resolution to the deep contradictions of rural Colombia? The contradictions were glaring – food production on precarious hillsides, alluvial valleys dominated by extensive monocultures, masses of displaced rural people surviving in the urban informal economy.

More concretely, what did the CGIAR and CIAT have to say about land?

After all, CGIAR’s stated mission is: ‘to advance agricultural science and innovation to enable poor people... [to] share in economic growth and manage natural resources in the face of climate change and other challenges’ (CGIAR 2016). After analyzing a decade of public archives from CGIAR and CIAT, our findings support our initial hypothesis: on land, CGIAR science maintains abject silence. It would follow that land must not be a challenge that rural poor people face in Colombia.

How do we explain this silence, and what fills the void? More precisely, what does ‘landless science’ tell us about the relationship between science and capitalism in Colombia? In this piece, we synthesize key features of capitalist development and land conflict in Colombia. We then move to discuss the ideological and political contributions of international agro-science in this history. [1] We argue that CGIAR science serves precisely to relieve the contradictions of rural Colombia without addressing land.

HISTORICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COLOMBIAN AGRICULTURE AND LAND

How can we explain the roots of Colombia’s land conflict, and what does this have to do with the failed plebiscite in November 2016? We begin at the onset of colonial violence. Many pages of Colombia history through the 16th to the 20th century are scribed with genocide and enslavement of indigenous peoples, plunder of raw materials, and colonization of arable land. Semi-feudal social relations characterized the Colombian countryside, with large-scale haciendas and latifundios [2] in fertile valleys, and a mix of impoverished peasants in the peripheries. In the late 19th century, coffee bean production became the key crop that integrated Colombian capital into global agro-commodity markets, which have diversified and expanded ever since.

During the 20th century, there has been little change in the general strategy for capitalist development. The template is to convert oligarchic and upper peasant holdings into export-commodity operations, while enrolling middle peasants into the supply chain and deliberately eliminating lower peasants. [3] The first phase of development began with a 1936 law to displace sharecroppers from latifundios. After World War II, Colombia was the first country in the world to receive economic and military loans from the World Bank in order to reduce “revolutionary pressures” (Chasteen, 2001: 277). During the next decades, debate raged over the nature and content of the reforms. Keynesians placed the lower and middle class peasants at the center of development strategy to produce cheap foods and relieve rural poverty. Winning the debate, however, were monetarists who argued for large-scale export enterprises. Lauchlin Currie, a chief architect of the World Bank development policy, proposed a pathway of ‘accelerated economic development’ via a process that De Janvry characterizes as “the elimination of the peasantry, the strengthening of commercial farms, and the absorption of the rural poor into the urban labor force” (De Janvry 1981, 162). On its own terms, the strategy has been enormously successful in rapidly expanding the agro-export sector of Colombia.

On the terms of the rural poor, however, the story is different. As Hector Mondragon writes:

Currie and today’s dominant class in Colombia believed in trying to remove the ‘primitive’ farmer by ‘pull’ or by ‘push’... Unable to remove the farmers by consent, the [civil] war became a programme of ‘deliberately accelerated mobility’, or one in which coercion replaced economic forces (Mondragon 2000, in Brittain 2005).

Alongside expansion of capitalist agriculture, a ‘second Colombia’ has persisted in the rural periphery. These regions inhabited by lower peasants have received minimal state investments in infrastructure and public services. Parallel to the initial influx of World Bank development funds, conflict between agrarian elites and rural poor sparked multiple uprisings, such as the violent strikes against United Fruit Company and protracted violence during the 1940s and 50s. Many of the components that would come to define Colombia’s civil war – extrajudicial killings by secret police, violent expansion of agricultural territory, and organized self-defense among peasant groups – emerged during this time.

Since its founding in the 1960s the FARC embodied the latter tendency of peasant self-defense by setting up armed rural communes that threatened large landholders and state control. While the FARC’s demands for land redistribution resonate today, they failed to transform guerilla activity into a tractable worker-peasant political alliance. This is largely due to tactics such as kidnappings and drug dealing which eroded public support. And the FARC’s failure must be understood within the brute repression by paramilitaries in collusion with the Colombian state and U.S. imperialism (Dudley 2006, 93).

However, the FARC was not alone in the idea of agrarian reform. Liberal Colombian governments have intermittently viewed land redistribution as a way to ameliorate rural conflict. Major government-led agrarian reform programs were established in the 1930s and 60s. Right wing reactions, in turn, subverted these programs in the interest of existing landholders. For example, President Pastrana (1970-1974) coordinated a national group of cattle ranchers (FEDEGAN), agribusiness executives, landlords, and urban industrialists to undo comprehensive lands reforms orchestrated by President Carlos Lleras Restrepo in 1961 under Law 135. The so-called 1972 “Chicoral Pact” group institutionalized rural land tax structures, while in exchange landowners were given favorable credit terms, loans, and protection from redistributive land reforms. Thus, ten years after the passage of Law 135, only about 1% of land identified for distribution had been expropriated.

Reforms and counter-reforms further concatenated the trajectories of ‘two Colombias’ that would strengthen FARC’s popularity in a divested countryside. And so today, it is no surprise that October 2016’s plebiscite vote split the electorate down the middle. The rural poor of ‘second Colombia’ voted for the peace accords; urban areas and major agribusiness departments of the ‘first Colombia’ overwhelmingly voted in opposition to the armistice.

Figure 1: Map of Colombia showing main physiographic characteristics

THE LAND QUESTION IN DEVELOPMENT THEORY

The debate over land reform takes a particular form within international development theory. Exploring its basic contours provides context for both Colombian development trajectories and international science’s conspicuous silence on the ‘land question’. A window into these phenomena is through a longstanding and ongoing debate in development economics surrounding the relationship of farm size to productivity and rural economic growth. In ‘labour-plentiful developing rural areas’, empirical studies have demonstrated an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and land productivity (Lipton 2009). [4] The IR is largely explained by transactional costs per unit production in developing countries, in which small, labor intensive farms can take advantage of family labor, informal relationships, aggregated, local knowledge, and adaptable systems. In developed countries with labor scarce, rural regions, the relationship is reversed and a direct relationship (DR) between farm size and productivity exists. In these scenarios, capital-oriented investments provide the highest returns. Small farms have advantages in managing labor, whereas large farms have advantages in managing capital. Counter-arguments generally identify market failures (sub-optimal use of labor), omitted variables such as soil properties (large farms are likely to cultivate larger percentages of suboptimal land), or measurement error (over-reporting of land size due to its relationship to prestige and political power) as main explanations for a perceived, yet false, increase in productivity on small farms (Bhalla and Roy 1998, Bellemare 2012).

However, in recent decades, major international development organizations such as the FAO and World Bank have avoided the IR-DR debate entirely, advocating for market-based land distribution. Whatever the effect of farm size or land reform on productivity, these ideas are irrelevant to the theory that unimpeded markets are the causa sui of optimum land allocation. To borrow the language from an FAO document published in 1997 tracing their own historical stance to land policy,

The 1945 Quebec Conference that founded FAO stated: ‘Recourse to land reform may be necessary to remove impediments resulting from an inadequate system of land tenure.’ [By the] 1966 FAO World Conference on Land Reform the consensus [was] that land reforms were important [for] equity and economic growth in rural areas. [I]n 1979 FAO’[s first] World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development [produced a] plan of action [including] access to land, water, and other natural resources [with] people’s participation. [However], land policies can only take shape as part of a larger economic and political canvas...agricultural polices during the 1970s and 1980s were mainly characterised by special agricultural programmes such as price controls, subsidised agricultural services and inputs, state intervention and regulations to protect domestic markets and land immobility through agrarian reform regulations which intimidated investments. The programmes proved to be unsustainable. Thus, we enter into the current period, following the collapse of the Berlin wall, with a return full circle to the marketplace to be the ultimate distributor of land (Herrera et al. 1997).

Taken at face value, neoliberal logics of land distribution should theoretically inform whether the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity holds true. That is, if small farms are more efficient at production, well-functioning land markets should transfer land from the land-rich to the land-poor. The reality is opposite. Land markets are segmented and segregated throughout Latin America, and thus an exclusionary, two-tiered system of land transfers has flourished. Cadastral survey and titling promotes formal land market and capital accumulation for the land-rich, who further leverage their power to restrict transactional deals. Poor peasants meanwhile conduct informal transactions and are precariously susceptible to dispossession (Baranyi et al. 2004).

Neoliberalism has exacerbated this kind of land market. Within neoliberal theory, vestigial attempts at state-assisted reform (thwarted as they are in Colombia by the latifundio elites) are seen as an obstacle to the ‘true’ functioning of the market. The market, it is argued, will foster a more equal distribution of land (Lahiff et al. 2007). Among the policies considered damaging to market functioning are prohibitions on land rentals and sharecropping, limits on land sales, maximum size limits on land ownership, and price ceilings on land sales (Baranyi et al. 2004).

In practice, the World Bank’s market-based policies, as they became implemented in Colombia, prove to have a disastrous effect on the rural poor. A 2004 report by the International Development Research Centre states that land sales by Latin America’s peasantry are often “…distress sales, compelled by either excessive indebtedness or the lack of support for cooperative production (in the form of credit, technical assistance or market channels) under the new policy regime” (Baranyi et al. 2004). How, then, have recent market-based land reforms taken shape in Colombia?

CONTEMPORARY COLOMBIA AND THE ZIDRES

Contemporary land reform attempts in Colombia have followed this neoliberal shift (Pereira and Fajardo 2015). With the embrace of World Bank pilot projects, a market-based strategy offers a minor role for state institutions and are aimed at high-performing, mid-sized entrepreneurial farmer. In the 1980s and 1990s the government acquired Bank funds for “associations of production”, aimed to create strategic alliances between large-scale farmers, small-scale peasants, and businessmen. Under the motto ‘change in order to build peace’ the government financed projects with a ‘high probability of competitiveness’ (Pastrana 1988). As Mondragon writes, “the government proposed a rural reform that would be completely dependent on a large central investment, creating as satellites small-scale producers in the ‘alliance’ system, a euphemism for their actual subordination.” (Mondragon 2006).

Decades later, the same strategy for capitalist development persists in the ZIDRES program. In a 2016 speech to U.S. development experts concerning the peace process, Colombian President Santos claimed:

We have half of Colombia still to conquer, in a way, like you conquered the West here in the United States in the 18th century, we have to conquer half of Colombia. We are one of the few countries who can produce more food, a lot more food, in the world (Oxfam 2016). 

The ZIDRES (Zonas de Interés de Desarrollo Rural Económico y Social [5]) laws designate agricultural investment for farmer associations in regions with limited infrastructure and far removed from city centers. The ZIDRES claim titling ‘tierras baldias’ (‘vacant, unused lands’) will stimulate development and reduce small farmer and agro-business conflict through shared business partnerships. Peasant groups including the FARC view the laws with skepticism, seeing ‘partnerships’ as a euphemism for continued peasant dispossession. For instance, the Altillanura, a vast tropical plain with acidic, weathered soils in the northeastern Colombia states of Meta and Vichada, is a focal point of ZIDRES. Brazil’s state-owned agricultural research corporation, EMBRAPA, is advising Colombia on the adoption of monoculture production in the Altillanura by transferring models from Brazil’s conversion of the Cerrado into an expanse of grain. Due to its remote location and poor soils, the government touts large-scale investment as the only viable mode of rural development. This strategy overlooks subsistence growers and farmers who already live in the Altillanura but are unable to finance expansion (Alvarez et al. 2015). Foreign multinationals meanwhile circle as hawks above ZIDRES, enticed by the promise of larger land aggregations under formal ownership or lease agreements (USDA FAS 2015). Santos’ rhetoric on rural agricultural development lays bare his interests – the production of commodities and raw materials, largely for animal proteins to meet rising demand in Indian and Chinese markets (Santos 2011). In total, the country seeks to rapidly open twenty-five million acres for agricultural development in the coming years.

Proponents of ZIDRES argue that legislation prohibiting land acquisition and ownership will prevent land accumulation. This is a dubious claim. The laws allow for long-term, renewable leases. Under novel forms of globalized agricultural capital, land ownership is often no longer required nor seen as desirable. Jan van der Ploeg’s writings on the peasantry in the age of global economic and political Empire illuminate how, in a clear transition from classic hacienda models, land ownership is often viewed as unnecessary and risky. He writes: “Empire is a hit-and-run phenomenon. As soon as conditions for production and trafficking are better in some other place, Empire will move its ‘roots’, leaving behind only ecological destruction and a generalized impoverishment” (van der Ploeg 2008).

What emerges in Colombia is a formula for ongoing peasant disenfranchisement: forced expropriation of lands, deliberate exclusion from agrarian reform programs, and the steady deterioration of the social and material elements of the peasant economy. As Mondragon writes, 

Campesinos no longer face only landowners as employers, but now must deal with a range of other forces as they compete directly as entrepreneurs in the global market. Such a market, and its “globalization” model, seeks to “clean” territories of “inefficient” people. While elsewhere this happens as a result of so-called Darwininan economic competition, in Colombia it is being attempted through war.” (Mondragon 2006).

Such is the contemporary strategy of capitalist development co-authored by Colombian and transnational elites. It flows out of the dominant historical currents in favor of wealthier peasants and agri-business. What, then, is the contribution of international institutions that claim, similarly to the Colombian FARC guerrillas, to represent the rural poor?

CGIAR/CIAT: LANDLESS SCIENCE

Figure 2: Aerial photograph of International Center for Tropical Agriculture campus, Cali, Colombia in the Valle del Cauca, amidst sugarcane fields.

In the thick of civil war, in 1967, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture entered the realm of Colombian agriculture. CIAT was an early member institution of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research), a global umbrella organization with 15 stations around the world whose mission is to apply modern scientific methods to the complexities of smallholder tropical agriculture. Its establishment marked the beginning of a new type of development strategy, organized into an expansive array of programs that claimed, as Cullather writes, “guardianship over the 40 percent of the developing world living in ‘absolute poverty” (Cullather 2010, 238). CGIAR funding came from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and later joined the ambit of the UN and World Bank. Through the CG system, the World Bank sought to construct an alternative development praxis that would largely bypass national governments to focus on small entrepreneurial farmers. Designed to institutionalize early Green Revolution crop development advances, the CGIAR system was directly linked to broader geo-political aims to quell the global rise of rural Communist political movements (Cullather 2010, 7).

From the outset, CGIAR research focused on industrialization and inclusion of lower peasants into global markets. Yet these technological and economic levers did little to address fundamental production constraints in areas with unequal land distribution (Lipton 2009, 118). Nowadays, CIAT’s strategy is to increase yields while reducing ecological degradation of soils and forests. Their methods include farm management trials, econometric analyses, and crop breeding under the catchphrase “increasing eco-efficiency of agriculture for the poor” (CIAT 2012).

To take a closer look at the place of land in international agricultural research, we analyzed policy documents published by the CGIAR and CIAT. Given the bloody history of land, we wondered whether CGIAR science demonstrates any concern over land distribution in last decade. We derived keywords from an initial review of policy documents, cataloguing the most frequently appearing terms (see table 1). We analyzed 5 CGIAR strategic plan documents, 9 CIAT policy briefs, and 4 CIAT program development documents. We used these terms to delineate main categories of CGIAR and CIAT research: environment, poverty/hunger, markets, gender, genetics, and land.

Table 1.

Preliminary results demonstrate abject lack of research and directives on land distribution and land conflict in the CGIAR system. Across both organizations, land reform/redistribution is 1% of search term results. Of the five CGIAR documents, land inequality is never identified as a focus point. A single CIAT policy brief from February 2013, “Bridging the Urban-Rural Gap in Colombia” comprises 13 of the 18 total references to land distribution. In comparison, poverty/hunger, markets/productivity, and environment are mentioned 482, 540, and 610 times, respectively. 

Although both CIAT and the CG broadly maintain a conspicuous silence on the land question, one of the CG centers, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) does give the topic some attention. Specifically, it aims to support market-based land reform for farmers to ensure supportive linkages between market-based food security and land tenure, as well as fostering global South-South collaboration for sustained growth. Rural areas are perceived as a potential space for entrepreneurial development if international assistance is coupled with pro-growth trade policies. Gender equality is framed as the inclusion of women into market-oriented production. As a 2010 IFPRI policy brief states,

Latin America can learn lessons from Asia’s experience in smallholder land reform, investment in infrastructure and agriculture, and regional trade [...] Asia, in turn, can learn from Latin America’s experience with opening up trade within and beyond the region, privatizing public services, and improving access to markets for high-value agricultural products […] Asia, with its rapid economic expansion, population growth, and poverty levels, is generating huge demand for food and intense pressure on land and water […] Latin America’s agricultural capacity and export orientation makes it a natural partner in trade as well as learning. Both regions can gain from each other. (IFPRI 2010)

In the rare case that reform makes a splash in CG policy and research, subsistence production, land conflict, political struggle, and gendered dynamics of accumulation are conspicuously absent. The obvious conclusion then is that neither economists’ support of land reform according to the logics of the inverse productivity relationship, nor early State approaches for resolving conflict over land have been aligned with radical goals of communist revolution or militant opposition to the State as espoused by the FARC. Rather they viewed land reform as a central engine of capitalist growth. But thus, it is doubly surprising that international research stations such as CIAT neglected (and continue to neglect) to study land reform or situate their research around the land question. While it would be quite unexpected to witness these institutions approaching the land question from an anti-capitalist, revolutionary lens, it is even more shocking that capitalist development approaches to land reform are equally absent from research agendas.

LANDLESS AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE: DEVELOPMENT'S UNDERBELLY

Having demonstrated an abject silence on land, one could criticize CGIAR science from a Keynesian lens that argues in favor of progressive land redistribution. Instead, we isolate a more incisive question: What does silence on land reveal about the relationship between science and capitalist development in Colombia? Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on science are helpful here. He argues that science is, at its most elementary, the process by which humans form and refine their “conceptions of the world” (Gramsci 1976, p. 34); and furthermore, that “Scientific experiment is the first cell of the new method of production, of the new form of active union of man and nature” (Gramsci 1976, p. 446). What kinds of conceptions does CGIAR science produce, and what form of capitalist development is CIAT attempting to seed?

We argue that CGIAR science serves precisely to relieve the contradictions of rural Colombia without addressing land. In other words, CGIAR science is a subordinate component of broad development strategies that is designed to contain development’s inevitable social fallout –dispossession, landlessness, and precarious rural economies. This is accomplished by emphasizing the integration of lower peasants into global agro-commodity markets using new technologies of land use. While it is true that new technologies can lower transactional costs of agricultural production, it is crucial to recognize that the strategy is spatially constrained to the marginalized patches of land onto which rural violence and displacement has reduced lower peasants. Markets and technology do the work of resolving poverty in situ. CGIAR centers perform experiments upon this ‘landless strategy’ and create ideological justification (papers, reports, conferences) for its broader reproduction. And so, a conception of the world is formed in the minds of scientists, a conception in which land is subtracted from the calculus of how to advance the interests of the rural poor. Globalized land grabbing and extreme rural poverty cohabitate the land, apparently in harmony.

In James Brittain’s overview of American development intervention in Colombia, he describes the unique role played by academic economists, providing a screen of ‘plausible deniability’ for the ruling class, government, and international elite (Brittain 2005, 336). Technocratic, politically neutral, and outside advice is used by standing governments to justify coercive policies or deny alternative visions. Scientific information regarding economic models and development trajectories, which is presented as empirical and politically ‘neutral’, can then be used to shield highly interested decisions about land management and titling, tax structures, and loan packages. Modernist World Bank advisers avoided the specifics of revolutionary struggle and land reforms made by the FARC, focusing instead on the involvement of peasants in the urban industrial sector to alleviate the socio-economic plight of rural poor (Thomson 2011). This form of technocratic logic justified the displacement of peasant class, obscuring the violent procedures necessary to achieve these goals. Economic theory made large-scale and export-oriented agriculture ‘legible’ (Scott 1998), providing ideological justification for the violent expulsion of peasants at the hands of state warfare, paramilitary organizations, and transnational economic policies.

We argue, that, to its peril, the CG system operates in the same vein. The CG centers provide scientific evidence that is financed by high-profile, global funding networks, and mobilized by transnational research networks and a visible scientific elite. Thus, certain development agronomy approaches, such as ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’, market chain integration, and the inclusion of women into commodity production gain precedence and visibility, while others, such as land reform, agroecological social movements, and subsistence production do not. National, regional, and local governments can point to CGIAR research as evidence to support continued capitalist development trajectories for rural Latin America (Minagricultura 2016).

Backers of the ZIDRES laws in the Santos administration can highlight the potential for improved marketization of agricultural products as a desirable outcome for Colombia, drawing support from the intellectual contributions of the development agronomy apparatus. In 2011, Santos announced a strategic partnership between CORPOICA (Corporación Colombiana de Investigación Agropecuaria) and CIAT, with technical assistance from EMBRAPA. While a quick acknowledgment is given to the importance of including smallholders in Altillanura development, the role of technical science is one of production – improved genetics, new seed varieties, soil amendments, and climate change adaptation for large-scale landscape transformation (Santos 2011). Under the guise of innovation and international agricultural science, the State and the multinational business interests it beckons are then freer to pursue policies that ignore peasant demands.  

It is plausible to propose a strategic connection between CGIAR science and capitalist development among the chief architects of its agenda, which is comprised of a small circle of elites including leaders of transnational agribusiness and billionaire philanthropy. Land is not on their agenda, for good reason. But this leaves us wondering, how does that agenda travel down the chain of command to the mid-level intellectuals who produce CIAT reports? How could these intelligent minds ignore the centerpiece of rural violence in their country? Scientists at CIAT are comprised of upper-middle class Colombians and visiting academic researchers from around the world, many who have long-term relations in-country (author observation). One explanation is that scientists who are most often selected from urban middle and upper classes, have little conception of land struggle and rural conflict. Further, land reform has been excluded from the intellectual formation of scientists since the post-War heyday of Keynesianism. Or, perhaps scientists’ silence is due to repression: the politics of land reform have been violently suppressed in Colombia, while the demands on the scientific proletariat to fulfill one’s landless research agenda keeps minds in line with the binding bureaucracy of big science. Project demands are endless while the stickiness of land reform and local and regional political structures inconvenience the rollout of development projects (Mosse 2005). Both explanations are plausible.

Meanwhile, the CGIAR system is changing in macro-structural ways. In the face of diminishing government support, it pursues public-private partnerships. This further diminishes the possibilities of science serving interests outside the realm of capital, and reproduces linkages between scientific exploration and capitalist development. There is renewed focus on the smallholder farmer, who is seen as a future entrepreneur who can be removed from subsistence through the right mix of access to superior plant genetics, market chains, and soil management. Land is ominously absent, although it can now be ‘salvaged’ through limited tillage and cover cropping.  

Figure 3: Graphic displays of Syngenta’s “Good Growth Plan” (top) and CGIAR’s 2016-2030 Strategy and Results Framework (bottom). Overlapping aims in public-private partnerships create increasingly indistinguishable strategies, approaches, allegiances, and even graphic design.

In this instance, CIAT is a self-contained irony: an elite cadre of international scientists working in a gated commune amidst vast sugar cane plantations on fertile soils of Valle del Cauca; scientists who are tasked with resolving the misery of the rural poor thousands of miles away. Only a decade before CIAT’s founding, World Bank advisers to the Colombian government had advocated the forced removal of peasants from the valley, as their presence impeded development plans (Brittain 2005).

CAN THE LEFT RESPOND?

In the wake of the Colombian peace treaty, rural Colombia is at a crossroads. Santos’ vision for the peace accords is directly intertwined with the expansion of rural agribusiness, creating the likelihood of islands of rural FARC settlements in a sea of palm oil and soya export agriculture (Hylton 2017). An uptick in extrajudicial killings of rural social movement leaders exposes the precariousness of the peace agreement, drawing parallels to the massacre of Union Patriotica leaders in the 1980s, as FARC entered national politics in what became an unsuccessful peace accord (Telesur 2017, Dudley 2006). Will rural and urban Left organizations successfully transform the momentum from the peace accords into anti-racist, anti-capitalist political platforms based on wealth redistribution and increased equality of land, education, and employment? How will international development and scientific institutions respond and what political trajectories will they implicitly or explicitly support?

Meanwhile, the continued withering of public support for science and the international rise and powerful consolidation of hetero-patriarchical, economic nationalist agendas in the U.S. and Europe is attempting to change the nature of scientific institutions. This is not to say that research institutions were immune to the agendas of corporatization and national defense before the recent political conjuncture. As we stated previously, the CGIAR legacy has always been one of geo-political control and defining the contours of capitalist development. But, is CG’s ongoing silence on land questions a feature of capitalist development? Does it act covertly to depoliticize development? Or is it a more complex outcome of generations (or centuries, rather) of disembodied science? As the influence of integrated ecology and in-situ breeding gains some leverage in the CG system, the absence of research on land distribution and its effects upon rural well-being and agroecological adoption is increasingly untenable. It seems unlikely that the CG will resolve these contradictions to address rural inequality as it shifts its strategies to the latest entrepreneurial fads in public-private development in a constant struggle for funding.

When the political agenda is set squarely against scientific inquiry, does the possibility exist of transforming the resultant disillusionment and discontent among mid-level scientists into more radical social movement work? What tools do mid-level scientists currently have at their disposal? How can a CGIAR scientist immediately put to use genetic material, intellectually engaged and skilled peers, and legions of data to enact mass democratic futures? Can they? Are there possibilities for a reorientation of a ‘science for the people’? If there is any hope of organizing sustained change and reorienting science to support peasant struggle from within the CGIAR system, we believe that land conflict must be placed squarely in the center of scientists’ conception of the world.

Alexander Liebman is a researcher in political ecology and plant-soil agroecology, currently finishing a MSc in agronomy at the University of Minnesota. 

Henry Anton Peller is a doctoral student in soil science at Ohio State University. He works on number of agroecology, climate justice, and food sovereignty projects in the Americas.

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McFarland, Michael. 2015. “The Altillanure – An Uncertain Future.” Global Agricultural Information Network, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, http://agriexchange.apeda.gov.in/marketreport/Reports/The%20Altillanura%20%E2%80%93%20An%20Uncertain%20Future_Bogota_Colombia_10-13-2015.pdf, Accessed 2/10/17

Ministerio de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural, Colombia. 2016.  “Informe Rendición de Cuentas de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural 2015-2016”, https://www.minagricultura.gov.co/InformeRendCuentas2016/RENDICION%20DE%20CUENTAS%20-%20INFORME%202015-2016-julio%2001.pdf  Accessed 4/18/17.

Mondragon, Hector. 2001, “Towards ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ in Colombia?”, July 2001, Accessed 8/18/17, www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/colombia/hemon.htm.

Mondragon, Hector. 2006. Colombia: Agrarian Reform - Fake and Genuine. In Peter Rosset, Raj Patel, Michael Courville (Eds.), Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform (pp. 165-176). Oakland: Food First Publishers.

Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating Development. London: Pluto Press.

Pastrana, Andrés. 1988. Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 1998-2002: Campio para construir la paz. República de Colombia, Departamento Nacional de Planeación. https://colaboracion.dnp.gov.co/cdt/pnd/pastrana2_contexto_cambio.pdf, Accessed 8/20/17.

Pereira, J.M.M. and D. Fajardo. 2015. A “reforma agrária assistida pelo mercado” do Banco Mundial na Colômbia e no Brasil (1994-2002). Revista Brasileira de História 35: 157-180. doi:10.1590/1806-93472015v35n70001.

Reyes-Posada, Alejandro. 2016. La reversión del acuerdo agrario. El Espectador. 10/23/2016.   http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/reversion-del-acuerdo-agrario, Accessed 2/10/17.

Santos, Juan Manuel. 2011. Palabras del Presidente Juan Manuel Santos den IV Foro de la Altillanura Colombiana. Sistema Informativo del Gobierno. December 2, 2011. Accessed 8/20/17, http://wsp.presidencia.gov.co/Prensa/2011/Diciembre/Paginas/20111202_11.aspx

Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Telesur. 2017. 186 Social Leaders Assassinated in Colombia Since 2016. July 13, 2017. Accessed 8/20/17, http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/186-Social-Leaders-Assassinated-in-Colombia-Since-2016-20170713-0037.html

Thomson, Frances. 2011. “The Agrarian Question and Violence in Colombia: Conflict and   Development”. Journal of Agrarian Change 11:321-356.

USAID. 2010. Property Rights and Resource Governance: Colombia.  USAID Country Profile.

Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe. 2008. The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization. London: Routledge Press.

Vera, Raul R. 2006. Country Pasture/Forage Resource Profiles, Colombia. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006. Accessed 8/20/17, http://www.fao.org/ag/agp/agpc/doc/counprof/columbia/colombia.htm.

ENDNOTES

[1] For examples of a breadth of alternative agronomic institutions and agroecological science and social movements operating in Colombia, see articles such as Leon-Sicard et al. 2017, Altieri et al. 2017, and university and autonomous organizations such as the agroecology working group at UNAL Palmira, Agencia Prensa Rural, Fensuagro, Red Nacional de Agricultura Familiar, and the Instituto de Agroecologia Latinoamericano “Maria Cano”

[2] Latifundios are large landholdings, dependent on large numbers of agricultural laborers, as opposed to minifundios or peasant landholdings that are smaller and have historically comprised the basis of Colombia’s subsistence economy (USAID (2010). Latifundios formed the basis of conservative rural political relations in post-colonial Colombia, geographically located in the eastern cordillera regions of Santander, Cundinamarca, and Boyaca (Hylton 2014). The historical dynamics of latifundios, their conflict with urban finance and the rise of Colombian export commodity production, and 20th century associations with paramilitary, extrajudicial violence, are outside of the scope of this paper but have been explored in-depth by Machado (1999), Grajales (2011), and Hylton (2014).

[3] We employ the distinctions of ‘upper’, ‘middle’, and ‘lower’ peasants to highlight class mobility (or lack thereof) among peasants in rural Colombia during the 19th and 20th centuries. This corresponds with a description of ‘junker’ versus ‘farmer’ patterns of development (Lenin 1974). In the ‘farmer’ pattern, some peasants are able to accumulate capital and concentrate the means of production, corresponding to an ascendancy into a rural bourgeois class. Meanwhile, the majority of peasants lose control of the means of production and maintain a precarious, subsistence existence or are proleterianized (De Janvry 1978). The rural bourgeois ‘upper’ and ‘middle’ peasants largely share political control with bourgeois interests.

[4] The full debate regarding the existence of the inverse-relationship and its potential factors is wide-ranging, complex, and outside the scope of this paper. See Carter 1984, Chattapoadhyay and Sengupta 1997, Guarav and Mishra 2015 for a series of empirical studies at various scales and Bellemare 2012 on arguments against using the inverse relationship as a measure of peasant productivity.

[5] The ZIDRES pertain to Decreto 1223, Ley 1776, passed in Colombian congress in 2016, see Colombian Ministry of Agriculture for full text: https://www.minagricultura.gov.co/Normatividad/Decretos/Decreto_1273_2016.pdf.

Neil Young, Willie Nelson and Crazy Horse - All Along the Watchtower (Live at Farm Aid 1994)

Farm Aid was started by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp in 1985 to keep family farmers on the land and has worked since then to make sure everyone has access to good food from family farmers. 

To quote again from the story at the top of this post by Jonathan Watts, Global environment editor for the Guardian, under the headline: 

Small farmers squeezed out as global land inequality adds to climate crisis

"Over the past four decades, the biggest shift from small to big was in the United States and Europe, where ownership is in fewer hands and even individual farmers work under strict contracts for retailers, trading conglomerates and investment funds." 

And again . . . 

“Smallholder farmers, family farmers, indigenous people and small communities are much more cautious with use of land. It’s not just about return on investment; it’s about culture, identity and leaving something for the next generation. They take much more care and in the long run, they produce more per unit area and destroy less.”

It's a global phenomenon, NOT just happening in the global SOUTH! It's the CAPITALOCENE! 

Just over a month ago Sue Pritchard was warning readers of the Guardian Journal in her Opinion piece (Wed 14 Oct 2020), that:

The invisible hand of the market won't protect our food or fields

In a world of polarised debates, there is a broad, non-partisan consensus on the issue of trade and standards. So it was disappointing – even if predictable – that the government whipped against amendments to protect UK food standards in the agriculture bill, which returned to the House of Commons this week. The key amendment was defeated last night by 332 votes to 279. Curiously, many Tory shire MPs voted against the expressed concerns of their farming constituencies, while Ed Davey and Keir Starmer donned their wellies and backed British farming. Farming minister Victoria Prentis argued that the amendments were not needed, since the government had already promised to uphold UK standards in future trade deals.

Although they lost the Commons vote, credit should go to the combined efforts of the campaigning organisations – from the National Farmers’ Union, CLA and Tenant Farmers Association, to Green Alliance, RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, Which?, Sustain, WWF and many more – that have shifted farming standards and trade debates to the front pages of the tabloids. Leavers and remainers have come together, with Prue Leith supporting Jamie Oliver’s spirited #saveourstandards campaign, connecting children’s health and the future of small farmers. Campaigners have focused on chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-fed beef or ractopamine-dosed pigs, all features of US industrial production systems that we know are bad for people and planet. But it goes much further than this.

Let’s be clear: trade is a good thing. It gives us choices and flexibility. It builds reciprocal relationships between countries, for a more stable and secure world. We can import what we don’t produce at home; countries can specialise in those things that grow better in their climate or conditions; and we can offset risk, if our own production fails – a point relevant for UK wheat markets, after floods and droughts over the last 12 months affected our own production. But it also has downsides. The kind of buccaneering free trade anticipated by the likes of Liz Truss is about handing over more power to the markets to drive down costs, producing cheaper goods and a greater range of options. This might be great for certain businesses and those that invest in them. But when the cost of production falls too low, someone, somewhere, pays.

Some of the most talked-about television programmes in the last few years have been those that reveal to us the true cost of the way our global economy works. When David Attenborough shows us the heart-wrenching images of fields of plastic waste suffocating turtle breeding grounds, orangutans fending off bulldozers as their rainforest homes are destroyed for palm oil production, live pigs bulldozed into burial pits because disease has swept through their intensive housing, and people with chronic diet-related health conditions dying because of coronavirus, we see the results of markets that have prioritised profit over the health of people and the planet – and the trading environment that enables this to happen.

Declining to write UK standards into legislation assumes that we can always rely on markets to do the right thing. And the evidence suggests that this is too big a risk to take. When MPs argued last night that upholding standards is likely to damage the interests of developing countries, just whose interests are they protecting? The global farmers movement La Via Campesina is clear that it is not the interests of small farmers, who see their land and their livelihoods taken over by global businesses, exploiting cheaper labour and lax protections.

When government policies enable intensive, industrialised agricultural systems, it has serious impacts on UK farmers, driving them in a direction of travel that puts ever greater pressure on the environment and the land they farm. The agriculture bill should be about creating the conditions to deliver a compelling vision for the future of British farming – farming for the climate, nature and health. Farmers want to be a force for change, but without the right legislative levers to help them make the transition, and to prioritise sustainable farming systems, they have to take their chances in the marketplace – or leave farming to big global agri-businesses.

Most businesses want a level playing field of globally agreed, simple and rising standards that helps them play their part in tackling the climate and nature crisis. What do British citizens want? The Climate Assembly report published last month demonstrated that – with the right information and evidence – citizens want a fair, transparent and sustainable food system. The public consistently say they do not want to compromise on food standards – they are outraged that poor and vulnerable people are most at risk of diet-related illnesses, and the most unhealthy and ultra-processed foods, made from cheap commodities, are promoted most aggressively. Proposals to improve labelling alone will not do. Governments must put legislation in place to uphold safe and secure standards, to act on the climate and nature crisis and improve public health and wellbeing.

Upholding and raising standards in the UK helps raise standards around the world. Enshrining food and welfare standards in law would be a powerful way to position the UK globally, but we need to go further. Decisions we make about trade help us define who we are as a nation and strengthen our mandate for global leadership on climate, nature, and a sustainable future for all. We are in a strong position, as we head towards COP26, to push for bolder international commitments for climate and nature. Establishing our commitments in our trade agreements would be a powerful act of leadership on the world stage.

Sue Pritchard is chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission

La Via Campesina

What La Via Campesina is fighting for!

What La Via Campesina is fighting against

Small is beautiful . . .

“Smallholder farmers, family farmers, indigenous people and small communities are much more cautious with use of land. It’s not just about return on investment; it’s about culture, identity and leaving something for the next generation. They take much more care and in the long run, they produce more per unit area and destroy less.”

This assessment, as quoted from the news story at the top of this post, prompts Re:LODE Radio to present an example of the practical dimension and the benefits of sustainable small scale agri-culture, to protect the natural environment, and maximise real productivity. 

It's a culture thing, everywhere . . .

. . . as it is here in Java, Indonesia

When Re:LODE Radio puts a hyphen between "agri" and "culture", the intention is to differentiate, connect and draw attention to the cultural dimension involved in the practical management of the natural environment. The intention is also to highlight the capitalist culture of  endemic mismanagement, a necessary instrument applied in the pursuit, integral to the system, of the maximisation of private profit and the socialisation of loss. 

To quote Raymond Williams from his discussion in Keywords on the word:  

Culture 

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. 

Keywords also includes, according to Raymond Wiliams, the most complex word in the English language: 

Nature 

And so, accordingly, Re:LODE Radio provides links to these two texts for easy reference.

Culture - one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language

Nature - perhaps the most complex word in the language.

The notion of "small is beautiful" emerged into a wider "ideological arena" with the publication in 1973 of Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, a collection of essays by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr. This concept was, and is, often used to champion small, appropriate technologies or polities that are believed to empower people and communities, as against the continued iteration of capitalist mantras such as "economy of scale" or "bigger is better". 

Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher's critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and the popularisation of the concept of globalisation. In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. A further edition with commentaries was published in 1999. 

The book is divided into four parts: "The Modern World", "Resources", "The Third World", and "Organization and Ownership".

Part I, "The Modern World" summarizes the economic world of the early 1970s from Schumacher's perspective. In the first chapter, "The Problem of Production", Schumacher argues that the modern economy is unsustainable.  

Natural resources (like fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. 

He further argues that nature's resistance to pollution is limited as well. He concludes that government effort must be concentrated on sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements, for example, technology transfer to Third World countries, will not solve the underlying problem of an unsustainable economy. 

Schumacher's philosophy is one of "enoughness", appreciating both human needs and limitations, and appropriate use of technology. It grew out of his study of village-based economics, which he later termed Buddhist economics, and which is the subject of the book's fourth chapter.

Part II, "Resources" casts Education as the greatest resource, and discusses Land, Industry, Nuclear Energy and the human impact of Technology.

Part III, "The Third World" discusses the gap between the centre of the World System and the developing world as it existed then, with a focus on village culture and unemployment in India.

Part IV, "Organization and Ownership" presents a sketch of a Theory of Large Scale Organization, refutes and exposes some commonplace and false platitudes about capitalism as a social order and discusses alternatives. Chapter 3 of this part concludes with advice to socialists:

"Socialists should insist on using the nationalised industries not simply to out-capitalise the capitalists – an attempt in which they may or may not succeed – but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do this, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men."

The context and stimulus provided to Schumacher by the 1973 energy crisis had exposed the extent to which the global community had become dependent on non-renewable energy resources, and contributed to the formation of a gathering environmental movement. 

Sustainability was to become a key organising concept as it became increasingly clear that there were environmental costs associated with the many material benefits that citizens of the capitalist "First World" were enjoying.

World Scientists' Warning to Humanity

Just as the original LODE project was underway in 1992,  scientists wrote the first World Scientists' Warning to Humanity, which begins: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course." This letter was signed by around 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, including most of the Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences. The letter drew attention to severe damage to atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, soil productivity, and more. It warned humanity that life on earth as we know it can become impossible, and if humanity wants to prevent the damage, some steps need to be taken: better use of resources, abandon of fossil fuels, stabilisation of human population, elimination of poverty and more.

World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice

Twenty five years later, just as Re:LODE was in the process of being restored in its Re:Vision at the Bluecoat, Liverpool in 2017, the scientists wrote a second warning to humanity. In this warning, the scientists mention some positive trends like slowing deforestation, but despite this, they claim that except ozone depletion, none of the problems mentioned in the first warning received an adequate response. 

The scientists called for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, meat, and other resources and to stabilise the global population. It was signed by 15,364 scientists from 184 countries, making it the letter with the most scientist signatures in history.

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency

More recently, in November 2019, more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries published a letter in which they warn about serious threats to sustainability from climate change if big changes in policies will not happen. The scientists declared "climate emergency" and called to stop overconsumption, move away from fossil fuels, eat less meat, stabilise the population, and more.

Q. How is the term "sustainability" used, and how is it best defined?

Re:LODE Radio considers that the use of words, the use of terms, rather than definitions, is the way to open up the kinds of conversation capable of leading to a productive and constructive questioning process. 

I am the egg man . . .

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things–that’s all.’ 

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master–that’s all’.

In his Philosophical Investigations (published in 1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein argues against the idea of a “private language.” Language, he maintains, is essentially social, and words get their meanings from the way they are used by communities of language users. If he is right, and most philosophers think he is, then Humpty’s claim that he can decide for himself what words mean, is wrong. Alice’s skepticism about Humpty’s ability to decide for himself what words mean is well-founded. But Humpty’s response is interesting. He says it comes down to ‘which is to be master.’ Presumably, he means: are we to master language, or is language to master us?

At the top of the Wikipedia article on "sustainability" there are two links, one to Sustainability (journal) and the other for the AKB48 song "Sustainable" (song).

Sustainability (journal) is an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly, peer-reviewed and open access journal of environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. It provides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development, and is published semi-monthly online by MDPI. 

About Sustainability 

"Sustainable" (サステナブル, Sasutenaburu) is the 56th single by Japanese idol group AKB48. It was released in Japan by King Records on September 18, 2019, in seven versions. It debuted at number one on the Oricon Singles Chart and Billboard Japan Hot 100, with over 1.6 million copies sold in Japan in its first week, making it the highest weekly sales of the year. It was the best-selling single of 2019 in Japan. 

AKB48 are named after the Akihabara (Akiba for short) area in Tokyo, where the group's theater is located. AKB48's producer, Yasushi Akimoto, wanted to form a girl group with its own theatre and performing daily so fans could always see them live (which is not the case with usual pop groups giving occasional concerts and seen on television). This "idols you can meet" concept includes teams which can rotate performances and perform simultaneously at several events and "handshake" events, where fans can meet group members. Akimoto has expanded the AKB48 concept to several girl groups in China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Philippines, and Vietnam. AKB48 have been characterized as a social phenomenon. They are among the highest-earning musical acts in Japan, and is the fifth best-selling girl group worldwide.

According to the AKB48 YouTube channel, the music video for "Sustainable", AKB48's first release in six months; 

"includes fresh summery dance scenes with a contrast between green and blue, plus aerial drone shots of the overwhelming nature in Hokkaido!"    

Re:LODE Radio interjects at this point with a quote from the song by Bob Dylan that features at the top of this post; "All Along the Watchtower": 

"There must be some way out of here" 

And there is a way! 

Re:LODE Radio considers that any practical and political "way out of here" must include meeting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Global Goals, a collection of interlinked global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all". 

These SDGs were formulated and set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. 

They are included in a UN Resolution called the 2030 Agenda or what is colloquially known as Agenda 2030. The Number One Sustainable Development Goal is;  

"to end poverty in all its forms, everywhere"

While a Japanese Idol Group dance in a video that celebrates an "overwhelming" natural environment, one of the realities of Tokyo's urban existence includes  the overwhelming fact of people without a home and forced by circumstance to living on the streets. 

This photo is currently used in the Wikipedia article on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as evidence of poverty in a rich country like Japan.

The 17 SDGs are: 

No 1. No Poverty 

No 2. Zero Hunger 

No 3. Good Health and Well-being 

No 4. Quality Education 

No 5. Gender Equality

No 6. Clean Water and Sanitation 

No 7. Affordable and Clean Energy 

No 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth 

No 9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

No 10. Reducing Inequality

No 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities

No 12. Responsible Consumption and Production

No 13. Climate Action

No 14. Life Below Water 

No 15. Life On Land 

No 16. Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions 

No 17. Partnerships for the Goals

Though the goals are broad and interdependent, two years later (6 July 2017) the SDGs were made more "actionable" by a UN Resolution adopted by the General Assembly. The resolution identifies specific targets for each goal, along with indicators that are being used to measure progress toward each target. The year by which the target is meant to be achieved is usually between 2020 and 2030. For some of the targets, no end date is given.

To facilitate monitoring, a variety of tools exist to track and visualize progress towards the goals. All intention is to make data more available and easily understood. For example, the online publication SDG-Tracker, launched in June 2018, presents available data across all indicators. The SDGs pay attention to multiple cross-cutting issues, like gender equity, education, and culture cut across all of the SDGs. 

There have been serious impacts and implications of the current COVID-19 pandemic on all 17 SDGs in the year 2020.

Taking it as a given that the response of national governments to the challenge of the pandemic has largely been focussed on national rather than international solutions to the crisis, Re:LODE Radio considers it doesn't bode well for implementation of these SDGs within the next ten years.

Humpty Dumpty?

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

 

The default position of leadership throughout the current pandemic, and by extension, in the present climate crisis, is to make bold promises for a future and then prioritise attending to more pressing political demands in order to maintain "popularity" and to preserve the "business as usual" globalised economic system of capitalism and a stubborn "short termism" that's based of greed. The notion of "political demands" requires some qualification as political discourse in an age of identity politics is not much in evidence when it comes to the behaviour of populist politicians. These very same populists tend to "scrape the bottom of the barrel" when it comes to gaining support, reverting to familiar tropes around "exceptionalism", "nationalism", "patriotism", cultural stereotypes and even racism. 

Political entropy?

Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. The law describes a process known as entropy, a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder". The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. After his fall and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely (though not impossible) to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases. 

This video montage includes a clip from the Max Fleischer Color Classic animation of 1936 Greedy Humpty Dumpty and a track from the album The 2nd Law, the sixth studio album by English rock band Muse titled The 2nd Law: Unsustainable. 

Is capitalist greed . . .

. . . unsustainable?  

The animation Greedy Humpty Dumpty has the nursery rhyme character engage in an act of hubristic greed that results in a "fall" that includes the collapse of a "Tower of Babel" like construction. 

The Tower of Babel imagery is considered in the link from this post to the Re:LODE Radio page: 

I am the egg man . . . 

Is this a story about unrestrained capitalism as well as greed?