Diana Valencia Duarte
Discipline: History
Project Summary
The Food Question:
The agrarian counter-reforms and peasants’ food insecurity in Colombia, 1961-2011
Provisional Abstract:
My research explores the agrarian counter-reforms prompted by contradictory policies and other stressors, and its impact on the Colombian peasant landscape. I will address the question: How did the agrarian counter-reforms have contributed to food (in)security and lack of food sovereignty (including agricultural traditions lost) in Colombia between 1961 (Agrarian reform law) and 2011 (Victims’ law)?. This is an interdisciplinary investigation where principles of environmental history and its dialectic of social metabolism is attached to the impacts on the food component of the peasant life. The methodology I will explore combines: 1) a systematic archival and jurisprudence examination associated with land use or territorial conflicts and violent displacement, and the foreign influences, if any; 2) evidence of hunger seasons, changes in the soil use, nutritional traditions or indigenous agriculture losses, and food insecurity indicators in general; and 3) integration of oral history to build a chronicle of the main distortions in food self-sufficiency and the peasant landscape, from the field. By doing so, my dissertation will make the case that different agrarian counter-reforms had fractured the peasant landscape, disintegrating the social metabolism in the territories and causing a negative long-term impact on peasant agriculture practices, food security and food sovereignty.
Keywords: #AgrarianQuestion, #AgrarianReform, #AgrarianCounter-reform, #FoodSecurity, #FoodSelf-sufficiency, #FoodSovereignty, #FoodRights, #LandRights, #Colombia
Supervisory Team
Dr. Stacey Hynd
Dr. Tobias Rupprecht
Wider Research Interests
Land conflicts and sustainable agriculture linked with food (in)security in the countryside and peasants' rights
