By María Camila Ramírez Cañon, EL ESPECTADOR, July 15, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Economic growth in the agriculture sector does not translate to a reduction in poverty, nor to improvement in living conditions for those who make up the majority of workers in agriculture. What’s going on in the countryside?
The activities that allow food to arrive at the tables of Colombians—such as agriculture, ranching, and fishing—have been protagonists in this country’s economic development since the days of the pandemic.
However, in the midst of the abundance of the macro statistics, the growth and the bonanzas have not arrived in the countryside in an equitable manner, where many of the people who live there are having problems finding a way out of poverty and eating regularly and adequately.
One symptom of this reality is that the country just experienced the second rice farmers’ work stoppage this year, with roads blocked in eight departments. Producers mainly are asking for a fair price for their rice so that their work is profitable.
That is, perhaps, the great paradox of the countryside. The people who provide food security and are protagonists in the growth of the GDP are at the same time the most vulnerable.
It’s in rural areas where they have the worst conditions in things like food, monetary and multidimensional poverty, unemployment, work informality.
Growth? For whom?
To understand this duality, it’s worth reviewing what’s happened with the economy of the agriculture sector. In 2024 it was the area that grew the most—8.1%–and it was the one that contributed the most to the increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which was 1.7%. For the first quarter of 2025, it had the second greatest increase, with 7.1% according to figures from the National Statistics Administration (DANE in Spanish). The data for the second quarter will be released in mid-August.
In reviewing the numbers in detail, the segments of agriculture that increased the most in the first three months of the year are: permanent development of coffee (31.3%), ranching (8.9%), followed by forestry (11.4%), and fishing and fish farming (18.2%).
The principal processes that explain the dynamism of the sector are the increase in prices (especially for coffee) and more customer demand.
For the case of coffee, Ángela María Penagos—Director of the office of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Commission (CEPAL) in Bogotá—the combination of higher international coffee prices and the depreciation of the Colombian peso led to historic internal prices for coffee. Although they have been stabilizing.
In disaggregating the crops, the cocoa beans, and the dry coffee beans are the ones that have increased the most, with 33.3% and 32.9% respectively in the first quarter of the year. That’s explained thanks to the bonanza that came after the largest producers in the world have had production problems because of the climate.
Here it’s important to say that, as history has shown on a number of occasions, depending on a bonanza is not a strategy for a country, for one thing. And for the other thing, neither do these crops contribute to food security.
Penagos offers another reason for the dynamism of the sector, and that is that families are also increasing their demand for these products. This “brought an increase of 4% in the area of food and non-alcoholic drinks in the first quarter of 2025,” she added.
Even though this is good news for the agriculture sector, not everybody benefits, because the increases arrive in an unequal manner. There is a concentration of the earnings, and to a large extent the profits go to the single crop planters of agricultural industry, with the notable exception of coffee, where 96% of the producers are small, according to the National Coffee Growers Federation (FNC).
In the other cases, the reality is different. “Nearly 80% are small campesinos, and they are the ones that are outside the system, confronting economic and security restrictions that keep them from achieving a good level of living,” emphasizes Carlos Duarte, a member of the Institute for Intercultural Studies at Javeriana University in Cali.
Not producing enough to eat
There is a wide gap between industrial agriculture and the small rural producers, who are responsible for 70% of fresh food production in Colombia, according to the Unit for Rural Agricultural Planning (UPRA). Many of them plant food even to the edge of profitability, always with the risk of generating losses, as has been the case with the yuca farmers in recent years or the rice farmers.
DANE points out that 43.6% of people who consider themselves campesinos are dedicated to agriculture, ranching, hunting, forestry, and fishing. And although the sector has grown economically, there continue to be difficulties in generating income. You see that in the gulf between the quality of life of people living in the countryside compared with those who live in cities.
An example of that is what happens with multidimensional poverty, which measures deficiencies in homes with respect to access to education, health care, employment, children’s wellbeing, and physical conditions of the residence. While in urban centers the indicator was 7.8% in 2024, in rural areas it was 24.3%; a difference of more than triple, according to DANE statistics.
In that regard, Felipe Roa-Clavijo, professor in the School of Government at the University of the Andes, maintains that there is poverty in the countryside because there is insufficient socioeconomic development, public, and private investment. “They are territories that we have left behind,” he stresses.
The outlook is more dispiriting when you review the data on food insecurity, which in 2024 made clear the great paradox: lower indications of poverty in the cities, but an increase in the countryside, according to DANE statistics and also those of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Between 2023 and 2024, both moderate and serious food insecurity went from 32.5% to 34.2% in the countryside, while in urban areas it went from 26.8% to 23%.
The reasons behind that increase have to do with extreme climate effects, like the El Niño phenomenon as well as the impact of the conflict and displacements in the rural areas. “In rural areas it continues to be a very important priority to invest in resilience to confront climate shocks, and work on the consolidation of the peace processes,” states Augustín Zimmermann, the FAO representative in Colombia.
The possibility of obtaining food, obvious as it sounds, is connected to the home’s income needed to buy it. Even though that also sounds really obvious, the equation is not that simple; nor does it produce the results that one might wish were evident.
“It’s not true that everyone can have a garden. The situation of poor people who live in the country is that they have no assets at all; they’re practically indigent, day laborers who live by selling their manual labor,” Penagos explains.
Roa-Clavija adds that much of the land where they plant crops is rented and, because of that, it’s not profitable to invest in permanent plantings (like fruit) that take years to become productive. At any moment, the owner of the land could demand the return of the property, or not renew the lease, and the campesino would lose his investment.
Rural employment: informality and insecurity
There are several factors that explain why small farmers have been left at the margin of the productive dynamic, in spite of the great importance of food. But there is one that turns out to be central: employment.
54.9% of people who consider themselves to be campesinos worked freelance during the first quarter of 2025, according to DANE. That shows a high level of informality, where they get work “two or three days a week and the rest of the time they do other kinds of work on their parcel,” says Nilson Liz, President of the National Association of Campesino Users (ANUC). The numbers talk about the first quarter of the year, but that reality covers a much broader spectrum of time.
Liz adds that the small farmers can’t obtain technical assistance and credit, and so their subsistence depends on the day jobs they can get. That represents between 300,000 pesos (roughly USD $75 at current exchange rates) and 400,000 pesos (roughly USD $100 at current exchange rates) every month, less than half the minimum wage. On their own property they plant what they can (yuca, plantain, and coffee) but they have no access to financing in order to expand that operation.
Added to that is the fact that this is a sector than functions by seasons, so that hiring the necessary workers needs to be at precise times, such as harvest time, and that keeps them from becoming permanent employees, points out the National Association of Financial Institutions (ANIF).
Besides that, the operations that transform raw materials are the ones that add the most value to the merchandise, but to do that you need an agricultural industry that can export, which could be a cooperative. And informality is greater because the policies have benefited industry and large size production chains, but have not been successful in generating value through campesino industries, Duarte points out. To the few sources of income that exist in the countryside, you have to add the pressure that’s generated by the illegal crops. Liz recalls that at the time of the bonanza, those kinds of crops paid the day laborer between 120,000 (roughly USD $30 at current exchange rates) and 150,000 pesos (roughly USD $37 at current exchange rates) a day, wages that are very hard to compete against, as the farmers can pay between 40,000 (roughly USD $10 at current exchange rates and 60,000 pesos (roughly USD $15 at current exchange rates a day.
“The campesino that saw hope in the coca leaf, because they paid well, doesn’t have that hope anymore,” he maintains. And he admits that the crisis of insecurity in the countryside is very complex.
“The lack of security is another obstacle to access to food, because it includes people being displaced or confined,” says the teacher from Los Andes University. “It also adds difficulty to the marketing of food because it affects transportation and even keeps the government from entering the countryside with programs to alleviate the food production conditions and to feed the people.
Finally, people living in the countryside are more vulnerable than the most vulnerable people that live in the city, in Duarte’s words.
“Decampesino” the countryside?
The gulfs, barriers, and difficulties that beset the Colombian countryside are nothing new. They are the consequence of some historic debts that the government has not been able to—or has not wanted to—pay, and the rural indicators reflect the necessity for public policies in accord with the debt it maintains with the campesinos, Liz believes.
Although in the ANUC they say it’s an accomplishment to have recognized the campesinos as people with rights and to have included them in plans for development, that process is only part of the story, because rules have not been established, nor funding allocated.
And yet the needs of the rural population include agrarian reform, connections between production and marketing systems, transformation of products, investment in tertiary roads, access to credit, and technical assistance, among others.
“The problem is not just employment; we have to strengthen the campesino economy because right now it’s producing food for the big cities at a loss. The government should be looking at ways to subsidize food production, because every day the campesinos are looking at fewer options. People can’t keep producing at a loss because that’s the way you’re going to “decampesino” the countryside, and we will have to import more products to feed ourselves, from places that do subsidize food production,” stressed the campesino leader.
In fact, the migration of young people from the countryside is one of the greatest concerns of the agriculture sector. But it’s difficult to retain them if they have no work opportunities, connectivity, and access to basic services.
Pay the debt owed the countryside
The gulf that exists for rural people includes access to education, employment, health care, connectivity, access roads, security . . . in other words, the presence of the government.
To accomplish that, Roa-Clavijo insists that nothing more needs to be invented, because all the solutions are already embodied in Integrated Rural Reform (RRI), which is the first point in the Peace Agreement signed by the government with the now-defunct FARC.
For more than eight years, of the 15 years allocated for implementation of the Agreement, the nine pillars of the RRI present an advance of 55.29%, according to National Planning Department data. Here follows the progress of each pillar, up to May 31, 2025:
1. National plans for RRI (46.7%)
2. Social ordering of rural property and land use (67.7%)
3. Infrastructure and suitability of properties (67.7%)
4. Health (24.8%)
5. Education (56.8%)
6. Housing (39.2%)
7. Agricultural production (58.4%)
8. Progressive guarantee of the right to food. (74.4%)
9. Plans for regional transformation (78.5%)
The Professor at the University of the Andes believes that there needs to be more commitment to the implementation of this plan, and that it’s necessary for local and departmental governments also to show more commitment.
On the other hand, Panagos points out that one way to generate income for the rural population would be to strengthen food industries. Activities have to be “technified” so that small producers are inserted into the system, because many times they don’t have enough land to produce at scale.
All in all, the problems of the countryside cannot be solved by one administration. But it’s also evident that the paradox between being an economic engine and being the site of the worst inequalities in the country has been a constant for the whole life of the Republic of Colombia, practically.