Silence speaks out loud: Armed conflict and bovine livestock in Colombia, a historical perspective

The convoluted nexus between bovine livestock and the dynamics of armed confrontation in Colombia is a terrain open for exploration. While a vast array of archival sources suggests a historical, problematic connection between livestock production, land dispossession and rising violence in rural settings, academic narratives remain scarce. While livestock activities have been largely understood as vital cultural and economic practices in Colombia and Latin America and much has been written on the history of the country’s multifaceted civil war, both phenomena appear to be disconnected from scholarly interpretations. By building on both print media archives and scant, yet path breaking secondary sources, we emphasize two salient perspectives on the topic. First, one literature segment that understands large-scale bovine livestock as a driving force of forced migration and dispossession affecting small producers and peasant communities across Colombia. A second, more recent trend recognizes the critical role of bovine livestock as an opportunity for rural development in impoverished regions, highlighting the importance of livestock systems for different agents, including returning peasants, youth, and even former combatants. Drawing from the experience of Central American communities who, also devastated by recent civil wars, have understood the pivotal function of bovine livestock production as an engine for change and improved livelihoods, we propose a third possible interpretation: one that accounts for the convoluted historical connections between wartime dynamics and cattle and dairy production in Colombia, acknowledges its capacity to empower rural communities in post-conflict contexts and deciphers academic silences as testimonies of its own, violent times. By reconciling divergent postures, our goal is to initiate the conversation around difficult, controversial tropes while seeking to provide methodological and theoretical explanations that can further our understanding on the subject

Youth in Colombia in view of generational transfer and income generation in the forage based livestock sector - Activity Report

Alquería, a major dairy company in Colombia, leads one of the most important rural education initiatives in the country, aimed specifically at the livestock sector (dairy farmers), their families, and new generations of young milk producers: Heirs of Tradition. After years of pilot training programs, field days, and technical training sessions, the company identified low schooling rates in milk producing areas as a key element hindering productivity, product quality, and overall continuity of new generations in the livestock industry (Triana & Ariza, 2019). The objective of Heirs of Tradition, a project operating since 2012 to the present, is that young generations of milk farmers from different, even conflict-affected regions of Colombia can be effectively trained in livestock practices at no cost, thus enhancing their knowledge and skills on subjects such as soil management, animal care, and environmental sustainability

Gestar cambios, transformar el sector: el caso de la Mesa Colombiana de Ganadería Sostenible

El sector ganadero en Latinoamérica y el mundo ostenta un potencial considerable en la producción a larga escala de alimentos, situándose así como un eje fundamental para la seguridad alimentaria global. Sin embargo, la producción ganadera es, simultáneamente, responsable de al menos el 9,5% de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero, encontrándose cada vez más a merced de factores y abruptos cambios climáticos derivados de una demanda constante y ascendente, lo que fuerza al sector a transformar sus formas de producción (Gerber et al., 2013)

Managing changes, transforming the sector: the case of the Colombian Roundtable for Sustainable Cattle

The global and Latin American cattle sectors have considerable potential for large-scale food production, thus positioning themselves as a fundamental axis for global food security. Cattle production is, however, simultaneously responsible for at least 9.5% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, finding itself increasingly at the mercy of a variety of factors, such as climate change and an increasing demand, forcing it to transform its forms of production (Gerber et al., 2013)

Cattle ranching in Colombia: A monolithic industry?

The Colombian cattle sector on the one hand contributes to the rural economy and producer welfare but on the other hand is one of the main contributors to climate change and environmental degradation. Given this panorama, the sector is currently under transformation towards more sustainability, including both climate change mitigation and adaptation. One solution for achieving sustainable intensification is the implementation of sustainable, forage-based cattle production systems. Despite the availability of sustainable technologies and practices, adoption levels are low, however. This study analyses literature on the history of cattle ranching and agricultural innovation adoption in Colombia to understand how cattle production systems have evolved from the 1950s until today. Departing from new scholarship that has questioned the idea that cattle ranching has been only a land-grabbing strategy dominated by few elites, this article focuses on the adoption of improved pastures and the role of key institutions in the transformation of practices and the shortcomings of technification. It shows that Colombia has had big transformations with the introduction of improved pastures, particularly Brachiaria spp., but these transformations did not translate into a radical change in the dominant extensive livestock production systems. Instead of promoting intensification, the adoption of Brachiaria has allowed producers to expand more, often resulting in high levels of deforestation. One of the main contributions of this article is the analysis of economic, developmentalist, and institutional reports that are not often used to construct historical analysis. It can also serve to scholars interested in the adoption of agricultural techniques

Improved pastures and some challenges of agricultural innovation adoption

Since the 1960s, but more intensely since the 1980s, the factors affecting agricultural innovation adoption in the so-called developing world have puzzled scholars and development institutions. Although early studies recognised that adoption is affected not only by the promise of economic profitability but also by other attributes of the innovation, such as compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability, economic analysis that barely touched upon sociological factors or the non-contingent character of extension programmes dominated the literature until recent years. Scholars and institutions have analysed both external factors such as credit constraints, risk, and information or internal constraints such as farm size, farmer behaviour, and land tenure patterns, showing how these factors affect agricultural innovation adoption. Yet, even when constraints are lifted or improved, adoption does not seem to increase in overall terms. To explain so, new constraints have been researched, such as gender, age, and belonging to a social network but the answer is still elusive. This study reviews and summarises evidence on experiments of agricultural innovation adoption, particularly those related to improved pastures and forage seeds in the Global South. We found that, first, farmer’s social and cultural constraints must be properly mapped to explain, more in depth, the limiting factors to diffusion and the shortcomings of adoption incentives. Second, we found that perfectible transference strategies lay at the core of agricultural technology adoption, and thus we aim to amplify the debate onto how to map societal constraints and how, if so, new narratives and mechanisms should be put in place to achieve more successful innovation processes