The current laws regarding land rights, forestry and agriculture in Columbia are skewed towards private investment and economic development.
The current laws regarding land rights, forestry and agriculture in Columbia are certainly skewed towards private investment and economic development. This development comes at the cost of indigenous and local communities and their environment.
The law, in giving rights to local peoples to land, but not to what is produced from said land, is a ridiculous and rather transparent attempt to pretend that indigenous people have been taken into account. In reality, the law serves only to render the people powerless in the continuing commercialisation and degradation of the land on which they live, and supposedly have rights to.
In the neo-liberal development mission, economics will always be the main, driving factor. The World Bank, for example, works upon the principles of neo-liberalism in terms of the underlying belief that economic development should always be favoured, regardless of the cultural and environmental costs, because in the end it is that alone which will pull people out of poverty. The theory being that once a country has developed, it then has enough money to rectify the damage done during the manic drive for development.
It is therefore not surprising that in Colombia there are many problems with indigenous and local peoples land, and the exploitation of the environment. The laws will always favour private investment and economic growth over community interests and environmental sustainability. There is a huge amount of international pressure on the government to develop the country, and as such, the laws will favour the preferred form of such development. It would not be surprising if there are some ‘conditions of loan’ imposed by the World Bank which fuel the imposition of these laws, and the recent changes to them.
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