#24 The role of agriculture in Colombia and other conflict regions (English Episode)

Agriculture is complex. Even in economically and politically
stable countries such as Germany, there are many different
players with different interests and points of view. In conflict
regions, farmers are faced with a multitude of additional
challenges.


Colombia, for example, is one such conflict region. In 2016, the
Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas signed a peace
agreement. This ended more than 50 years of armed conflict in the
country. But to guarantee peace in the long term, profound social
and societal change are needed, and it won’t just happen
overnight.


Today, the level of violence in the country has decreased, but in
some parts it is still high, which endangers peace. This violence
is financed primarily by the drug trade. This is one of the
reasons why, after the peace agreement, alternatives to drug
cultivation were supposed to be created, providing a legal source
of income for farmers in rural parts of the country. But Colombia
remains the world’s largest cocaine producer.


In this podcast episode, we talk about the conditions under which
agriculture can work there at all, when the main crop of many
farmers is coca plants (i.e. plants from which cocaine is later
produced), what part agriculture plays in peace, what challenges
but also opportunities the more difficult conditions in the
country offer and what we can learn from these regions for other
conflict regions in the world.


Our guest is Dr. Stefan Sieber, Agricultural Engineer from
the ​​​​​​​​​​​Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
(ZALF).


Learn more Stefan’s work here:


https://www.zalf.de/de/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/Seiten/sieber_s.aspx


For feedback and suggestions write us at querfeldein(at)zalf.de


For this episode we used the sound „Rain Sound and
Rainforest.mp3“ by INNORECORDS,  found on www.freesound.org
(unchanged).


https://freesound.org/people/INNORECORDS/sounds/457447/


https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/


Cover image: Laura Rheinfels