By: Gerardo Aldana Garcia
The phenomenon of forced displacement in Colombia has led millions of peasants to abandon the countryside to settle in the urban centers of the most important cities in the country, bringing with it all the bad luck of hardships and situations that they have had to face as a consequence of the loss not only from their farms and with it the economic dynamics from which they lived, but also the cultural uprooting inherent to the forced mobilization towards urban centers. In other cases, many families and rural youth have left the countryside because they believe that the city can give them better opportunities in fields such as the economy and education. And thus, the figures reported by the Government of Colombia, according to the Single Registry of Victims (RUV), the country has a historical cumulative of almost 8,219,403 victims of forced displacement due to events that occurred from 1985 to December 31, 2021. The rest, related to the disastrous consequences of displacement, is the subject of extensive sociocultural, economic and political research, which is being dealt with by universities and national and international experts.
The issue is that, today, in addition to the complex situation of the displaced peasants, the pressing global economic situation that, by hitting nations hard, has Colombia and its citizens in painful tight tights due to the enormous shortage of the products, with special emphasis on those of the family basket. The Petro government and its economic team that fail to decipher and propose forceful measures to face the colossal recessive phenomenon, leave the population in a truly amazing uncertainty where, despite the unprecedented increase in the minimum wage in decades that has reached 16% By 2023, purchasing power is greatly diminished and each family, especially from the lower and middle classes, knows that money is worth less today than six months ago when it comes to shopping for their family basket. Colombia is already experiencing a clear food crisis due to the overflowing prices that not only affect the market but also production in the agricultural sector.
The worrying panorama means that millions of Colombians are in the task of acquiring a piece of land in which they can not only build a home in a lively country environment, as has been an important motivation for investing in their own well-being, but also They do it today with the certainty that planting vegetables, fruit trees and products such as cassava, plantain, banana, among others, has become a necessity for survival. The technologies for agricultural production show how today different agricultural arrangements can be cultivated in a minimum amount of land and financial resources. In this area, towns like La Ulloa, just 20 minutes from Neiva, are emerging as one of the attractive alternatives where citizens acquire plots of land between 1,000 and 1,500 square meters in which they can perfectly relive the option of being productive in field. But the same thing happens with the desperate peasant families in the cities that are waiting for the vaunted programs of the Petro government related to the ease of buying a property and, yes, that they guarantee credit mechanisms so that they can do what they know do: produce The time has come to acquire a piece of land; It’s time to go back to the field. It is not only for the exceptional pleasure of living in the countryside, in an environment of pure air and uncontaminated water, a landscape that leaves you dreaming and at dawn under the concert of birds; It is today, a reason for survival