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Coffee Unites War-Torn Colombian Community

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2014-03-09T180249Z_166842088_GM1EA3A05KQ01_RTRMADP_3_COLOMBIA-ELECTIONS-CONGRESS_preview

A soldier stands guard during a congressional election in Toribio, in Colombia’s Cauca province, on March 9, 2014. (Reuters Photo/Jaime Saldarriaga)

Colombia. After enduring eight hours of machine-gunfire and bombs between leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries, Maura Leonor Vega and her husband fled their home of four decades in Colombia’s Andes for the shelter of the nearest town.

They joined droves of small-scale farmers who left the Perija mountains from around 2004 as paramilitaries ransacked, burned or occupied their homes while pursuing Marxist FARC guerrillas fighting the government since the mid-1960s.

“We lost farm tools, hens, a donkey and our furniture,” said Vega, 60, describing how the couple fled and how the paramilitaries then moved in. “And we lost the coffee harvest.”

Coffee has for long been an important source of income for farmers in Perija and it has been crucial in helping Vega and her neighbors rebuild their lives since they began a cautious return in 2007 to an area made safe by the permanent stationing of army troops.

The Perija mountain range, about 50 kilometers from Venezuela, is one of the remote coffee-growing regions hit hardest by the political violence, which has uprooted an estimated five million people nationwide and claimed about 220,000 lives over five decades.

A mainly foreign-funded project run by Colombia’s Coffee Federation has helped 600 Perija families, including now-widowed Vega, fix their homes, replant overgrown fields and boost earnings by imparting the skills needed to produce specialty coffees. It has deployed agronomists to raise farming standards and social workers to sow the seeds of community in these hills haunted by the memory of violence.

Tackling rural poverty can yield powerful results in Colombia, deterring the cultivation of coca — the raw material for cocaine — and making it less likely young people will join the rebels for lack of opportunity.

Colombia’s Universidad de los Andes and the Universite Libre de Bruxelles show that when coffee growing is profitable it makes villager recruitment into the guerrillas less likely and also deters cultivation of coca for cocaine to fund fighting.

About half the farmers participating in the project now earn a premium for their coffee by meeting the social and ecological standards required to earn the ‘UTZ Certified’ Label from the Dutch-based foundation promoting sustainable farming since 2002.

Farmer and project participant Eliecer Vargas, 40, has repaired his house with the help from the project after “coming home to nothing.” He also renewed his plantation with free seeds from the project.

“Now we’re ready to take advantage of the higher coffee price,” he said, referring to the near doubling in the price of arabica beans on the international market.

The government says improving rural livelihoods is critical to foster peace as it enters its second year of negotiations with the FARC in the Cuban capital Havana to develop a five-point peace plan that will be put to referendum if completed. A more than decade-long US-backed military offensive has roughly halved guerrilla ranks and driven them deeper into the jungle. But regular combat with the armed forces and attacks on energy industry infrastructure shows they remain a threat.

The stationing of a permanent army battalion gave farmers enough reassurance to make their nervous return home after struggling to make a living in the nearest town, Codazzi, many as street vendors. Husbands and fathers often went first to make their homes livable before wives and children followed.

Farmers believe the nearest guerrilla presence on the border with Venezuela.

“Getting confidence back … and getting people to laugh again is very complicated,” said Agustin Giraldo, the Coffee Federation’s chief representative for Cesar province where Codazzi is located and neighboring La Guajira province.

Reuters

The post Coffee Unites War-Torn Colombian Community appeared first on The Jakarta Globe.


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