Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, has indicated that in a matter of weeks the agrarian reform process will begin, peacefully and without dispossessing the indigenous people of their lands.
«To begin the agrarian reform, in a peaceful manner. That is the challenge. Countries have industrialized where they have democratically distributed the land. That has not been a communist slogan, as they will now say, but to democratically distribute the land to industrialize a country is the beginning of capitalist society,» said Petro, according to W Radio.
The goal is, as happened in Japan or South Korea, to buy the land, even at a commercial price. «The State that we have received must, in the short term, in a matter of weeks, prepare to buy large amounts of fertile land and must combine this activity with credit from the Agrarian Bank, which must be converted, also quickly, into the first bank in Colombia», he explained.
«Food production and industrialization cannot be prioritized if there is no financial leverage to support the peasantry,» he argued, referring to the Agrarian Bank.
He also defended the purchase of crops so that peasants are not subjected to price speculation, but that the State acquires the products and takes them especially to places where there is hunger.
Petro made these statements during the First National Peasant Convention held this Friday at the National University in Bogota.
