Category: Uncategorized

Q&A with the Subdirector of the National Land Agency in Colombia, Andrea Silva

Since signing the 2016 Peace Accords, the government of Colombia has transformed rural land administration by adopting a model that puts the onus of formalizing rural property on government land agencies like the National Land Agency (ANT). With the support of USAID’s Land for Prosperity Activity, the ANT is streamlining processes and simplifying the steps needed to deliver land titles. In this interview, the Technical Subdirector of the ANT, Andrea Silva, talks about how the Agency has taken advantage of USAID’s experience and is embracing an evolving approach to securing land rights.

What are the biggest challenges that the ANT faces during the formalization processes?

The main situation that affects our progress is that we need people to move land processes forward, and there are not a lot of skilled people with experience in land. It is not easy to find cadastral engineers or topographers with experience in rural land surveying. Therefore, we have to find new methodologies that allow us to collect physical and legal information, which is why we are making a big effort to move from direct to indirect methods. This paradigm change sometimes generates resistance, but it is necessary to make progress, because with parcel-to-parcel visits, we are not going to achieve comprehensive rural reform.

Has this changed how the government faces land informality?

Everything we do is useful for the cadastral authority, but that does not necessarily mean that we have to survey the entire municipality. So a big change in order to optimize time and resources is completing municipal parcel sweeps by intervention units. In this regard, an intervention unit is surveyed and the information is delivered to the ANT for validation. While the first unit is going through the ANT’s internal process, in the field, the second unit is already being surveyed. Through analysis, we know which units are the most informal, and so when we arrive, we already have a more accurate and clearer objective.

Is this new adaptation going to be used in the Santander de Quilichao parcel sweep?

We have already used it, for example in the units that LFP delivered in Fuentedeoro and Puerto Lleras, we have already delivered land titles. In Santander de Quilichao we are going to identify the people and parcels that need to be formalized, that need land administration or legal tenure. We are going to make the processes quicker, more consistent, and especially produce results faster. What we aspire to is to avoid what happened to us in previous parcel sweeps, which were very long processes, too long for a single municipality, so we can gradually make progress.

What role do new technologies play in simplifying processes?

Strengthening information systems and data collection systems is very important to the ANT. We are increasingly moving towards the improved use of technology, even though in rural environments this is difficult. In the countryside, people do not feel comfortable signing digital documents, on a tablet, for example. They like using pen and paper, having a hard copy of the document to take home with them. It is necessary to move towards technology in a gradual way, so that the communities continue to trust us.

Have the recommendations made by LFP increased the efficiency of the ANT and other public entities like IGAC?

Yes, we have implemented many changes, not only in the processes but also in simplifying forms, consolidating information collection tools, and issuing guidelines that are clear, not just for ANT employees but also for the parcel sweep operators. For example, before the ANT had 32 attention routes for land formalization, and we simplified the processes to 24 routes. Everything LFP has done to support the ANT with Rural Property and Land Use Planning translates to the possibility for a dignified life for rural Colombians.

Are these changes strengthening how the ANT achieves comprehensive rural reform?

The comprehensive rural reform goes beyond delivering land titles. Of course, the title is the first step for people to access institutional services, for them to have a guarantee when requesting a low-interest loan from a bank, or to access a subsidy. The ANT looks for the people and parcels that are subject to formalization in a way that permits them to access all institutional services. Delivering a property title is delivering hope, delivering possibilities, it means that the life projects of these rural communities can be given certainty.

Cross-posted from USAID Exposure

USAID promotes the participation of women in agricultural production in Montes de María.

Luz Mery Valdez is an iconic woman, who is defying gender stereotypes through her work as a cassava and yam farmer in the Montes de María region of Colombia. She works with the Association of United Women of San Isidro (AMUSI) in the municipality of El Carmen de Bolívar.

USAID, through its Land for Prosperity Activity, is supporting the departments of Bolívar and Sucre in the Montes de María with land tenure programming and rural development initiatives. The Activity established a series of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the sesame, honey, yam and cassava value chains to shore up investments in agribusiness, improve yields, and bring more women into the value chain. So far, almost 400 rural women have benefited from the PPPs.

How has your experience growing cassava and yam been, since you joined the Public-Private Partnership?

LM: My experience has been great, as we have been able to regain the recognition that women can also participate in agriculture activities, which is something that had been lost.

What was the reaction of the men around you, when you joined this agribusiness?

LM: At the beginning when we started growing yam, the men found it unusual. To see women growing yam and cassava in the countryside is just not very common in our region. Then we started to get more involved in all of the process, to learn more about the business. We are reclaiming a space for women that we deserve.

What have been the most visible changes since women have participated in farming activities?

LM: The vision that women have today is very different to the one we had a few years ago. Now we think about agriculture production, about generating income for our families, and about strengthening our cultural bonds as women.

How do the men of your community see you now?

LM: Men see us in a different way, I think, at least when it comes to our farmers association, the Association of United Women of San Isidro, which sees itself as a women’s association that strives to increase income for its members. Thanks to USAID programs, we can achieve this, specializing in the production of cassava and yam.

What would you say to other women?

LM: I would tell them that they have to believe, believe in themselves, have goals, and achieve them. It was not easy when we started, because women see things from a different point of view than men. It may be difficult to participate in farming, but it is not impossible. What we have to do is believe and have goals with objectives so we can achieve them.

“To rural women I would say that it might be difficult but not impossible. Every day you have to get up thinking that you can do it, to move forward.”

Luz Mery Valdez, cassava and yam producer.

Cross-posted from USAID Exposure

USAID is echoing the voices of women asserting their rights to land.

As part of the 16 days of activism to end violence against women and girls, LFP talked to Judith Rodríguez, a member of AFROMUVARAS, an association of afro-Colombian women who farm cacao in the Rescate Las Varas Community Council in Tumaco, Nariño.

Despite violence against women in her municipality and community, people are changing their mentality. Women, in particular, are becoming aware of their rights to land and the importance of their contributions to the productive development of their collective territories and the care of their families.

In 2021, USAID’s Land for Prosperity Activity created a public-private partnership in the cacao value chain in Tumaco, which seeks to strengthen farmer associations like AFROMUVARAS so they can improve the quality of their cacao and access new markets. The cacao association was founded in 2017 and has 367 members.

What has the experience of having a collective land title for AFROMUVARAS been like?

JR: For us women, the collective land title means we are taking back what once was ours. As women, we are always forced to depend on men. Lately, there has been a lot of progress, and we are very thankful for it. In AFROMUVARAS it has been a wonderful experience to be part of this big group of women who want to develop their territory and improve the quality of life for women in rural areas. We want to make progress collectively, to be the voice of women in these regions, to take a chance on peace, on the wellbeing of our children, on the growth of our territory, as well as to generate employment opportunities and grow as a business.

In the Community Council, you share the land between members. Do you think the women who own land individually or jointly with their partners are as protected as you?

JR: Yes, I think working with men or living with their partners and their children, if they have a title they are protected. I mean, we are betting every day on personal and territorial growth, this is the foundation. Working hand in hand, every day, with our families.

AFROMUVARAS knows of cases of economic violence against women in Tumaco?

JR: You can’t see it, but you can feel the economic violence, because women always depend on men or their partners. They expect the man to be the one that provides, and when he gets home he decides what everyone can do. It is harder for women to generate our own income and provide because usually, they do not have the same education or economic opportunities. And the men take advantage of this to exert economic violence, because there are fewer employment opportunities for women in Tumaco. Men always get the opportunity to work first.

There are laws to stop men from selling common properties without the consent of their partners. Do you think there is a need to talk about these laws more widely? 

JR: Yes, we need more outreach, so that women know these laws. So they can feel empowered enough around these issues to be sure that they are important. Land and property are their rights.

In AFROMUVARAS, do you think the way rural men and women think is changing? Is violence against women diminishing? How?

JR: Yes, things are changing. And I am very proud to answer this and it makes me smile, to see how women are taking part in many collective processes, participating in spaces where we are invited. We are raising our voices and protesting. These processes are empowering women, but there is still a lot of work to do. It is a long and difficult process. For example, today the President of our Community Council is a woman.

Why should the women of Tumaco have hope?

JR: We can be hopeful, very hopeful. If we work together, if we continue to be united as women, hand in hand, and continue to empower ourselves in social and educational issues, we can continue to grow in our territory.

How do you encourage other women to understand and recognize their rights?

JR: Today, from the rural areas of Tumaco, from our Community Council and our organization, as a member of AFROMUVARAS and also as a person, I tell women in neighboring areas that we are all women, we should all be empowered, we should work together, be strong and keep fighting. We can’t give up, we need to persist, be sisters and look for spaces where we can grow and be equal to men. We need to be present in those spaces to get what we want, because we can do it. We can participate in public spaces, social spaces, everywhere we want as women, we can grow and take a chance on peace.

Cross-posted from USAID Medium

Please note: USAID’s draft updated policy is no longer open for public comment.

Nature is in crisis. USAID’s updated Biodiversity Policy reflects the need for transformative change and envisions a future in which biodiversity is conserved so people and nature can thrive. A draft of the updated policy is available for public feedback from December 8, 2023 through January 10, 2024. If you wish to provide comments, please submit them here. USAID encourages input from diverse perspectives to meet the policy’s goal of advancing equitable and ambitious actions to confront the crisis of biodiversity loss, and we encourage you to share this opportunity widely.

Protecting natural ecosystems, empowering Indigenous Peoples, and supporting effective land governance systems are necessary to achieve climate resilience. COP28 is fostering progress on these topics through today’s theme: Nature, Land Use, and Oceans.

USAID is leading the way on land issues by strengthening resource tenure governance and property rights to support sustainable livelihoods and protect the environment. Effective land and resource governance can encourage restoration and stewardship of land, resources, and ecosystems, which can help to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Secure land tenure can also encourage individuals and communities to adopt practices that promote greater adaptation and resilience to climate change. 

Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) own or manage more than a quarter of the world’s lands and are stewards of much of the earth’s biological diversity. Their systems of traditional knowledge can make significant contributions to global health, agriculture, and food security outcomes as well as help the world respond to the challenges of global climate adaptation. USAID is committed to partnering with IPLCs to protect and secure their tenure and to enable them to lead on climate action, as highlighted in USAID’s 2022-2030 Climate Strategy and in USAID’s Policy on Promoting the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. USAID also recognizes the importance of promoting equitable and inclusive systems of land governance so women and vulnerable populations have a clear path toward secure land rights.

Given that USAID’s climate change programming is inextricably linked to the need for clear and secure land and resource governance systems, LandLinks and Climatelinks are highlighting some resources that explore the issue in depth. Here are some climate-related resources on LandLinks that can help land and resource governance practitioners understand how their work intersects with climate change programming.

It’s Earth Day—Here’s Why Securing Land Rights Matters for Our Planet 

This blog discusses the Mapping Approaches to Secure Tenure (MAST) Learning Platform, an innovative, evidence-based, and context-appropriate tool for addressing land-related challenges within the context of climate change.

What Better Looks Like: Breaking the Critical Minerals Resource Curse 

Sustainably sourcing the green energy minerals crucial for green technologies presents both challenges and opportunities. This expert discussion explores what better looks like when it comes to mining, processing, recycling, and consuming critical minerals. 

Incorporating Land and Resource Governance into Climate Change Programming 

This brief covers the importance of land and resource governance in achieving positive human well-being and environmental outcomes, including mitigating the impacts of climate change and achieving sustainable economic growth. 

Women, Deeds, and Dirt: Confront the Climate Crisis, Uproot Gender Inequality 

This podcast episode examines the connection between gender-sensitive land rights reforms and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Gender and Climate Change: The Intersection of Women’s Empowerment and Sustainable Farming 

A USAID and PepsiCo partnership aims to empower women in the potato supply chain, improve yields and profitability, and promote the adoption of sustainable and regenerative farming practices that can help mitigate climate change.

LandLinks is the knowledge portal for USAID’s Land and Resource Governance Division. It serves as the primary host for resources related to strengthening land tenure and property rights. To learn more about USAID’s work in support of land tenure, visit LandLinks.

USAID is helping the government to increase efficiencies around rural land administration and reduce the cost and time to title rural property in Colombia.

One early morning in 1994, Gloria Ester Buelvas was woken and told she had to leave her grandfather’s farm in San Pedro de Urabá, where she had lived 16 years of her life. Nearly three decades later, Buelvas still does not know why she and dozens of members of her family were threatened and forced to leave their hometown.

“The paramilitaries told us we had from dusk to dawn to leave town. We organized ourselves and went to Carepa, 100 kilometers away,” Buelvas said, recounting a traumatic experience. “But when we got there, they told us that we had to leave from there too.”

Colombia’s Urabá region stretches from the border of Panama along the Caribbean coast and is famous for bananas and large cattle ranching estates. Over generations, the region became a textbook example of the type of class divisions between landless farmers and an elite land-owning class that fomented strife and erupted in brazen warfare between the leftist guerrillas and paramilitary groups in the nineties. Families like the Buelvas were caught in the middle, accused of helping or supporting one side or the other.

Although the traumatic memory of displacement persists, Gloria Buelvas and her family eventually found peace 500 kilometers away in Meta, a corner of Colombia’s eastern plains. La Unión del Ariari is located in the municipality of Puerto Lleras and home to a hodgepodge of families displaced by decades of conflict and several Venezuelan families who recently arrived.

Lack of Access

Over the years, the municipality provided relief, including improved roads and electricity, and the families rebuilt their lives. Gloria and her neighbors supported each other through subsistence agriculture, but none have ever obtained a land title for their property. In Colombia, low-income families can rarely afford to access land formalization services, which are complicated and expensive. In fact, the majority of Colombia’s rural parcels lack a registered land title.

Families without registered land titles mean the country’s cadaster, which is a comprehensive map of land ownership, is severely out of date, especially in areas that have been affected by violence. Unclear land rights with no backing from the state have made it easy for illegal groups to run off people like Gloria Buelvas from their land. 

This is changing, thanks to the implementation of Rural Property and Land Administration Plans, or POSPRs by their Spanish acronym, all over the country. USAID is helping the Government of Colombia untangle land administration issues and meet its commitments to the 2016 Peace Accords. The Land for Prosperity Activity is USAID’s largest investment in land tenure programming in the world and its main objectives are updating the rural cadaster and strengthening land administration.

Updating Records

When the cadaster of Puerto Lleras was last updated in 2011, it included 2,300 properties. Following the implementation of the 2023 POSPR, the initiative surveyed over 4,600 properties, many of which are home to displaced families. More than half of these parcels are not recognized by the state but are ready to be formalized and issued a registered land title.

In addition to formalizing properties, the Rural Property and Land Administration Plan provides the government with information about landholdings that could be subject to agrarian reform processes and provides a path for more than 700 landless farmers from Puerto Lleras to apply for land with the government.

“The government is going to give me the deed to my little piece of land, so I named my farm ‘La Bendición’ (The Blessing) because it has been a blessing for me and my family.” says Gloria Ester Buelvas.

Reaching Complex Municipalities

Calculating Costs

Q&A with the Mayor of San Juan Nepomuceno, Wilfrido Romero, and Bolívar’s Habitat Secretariat, Jorge Luís Valle

Regional Land Offices

With USAID support, plantain farmers in Fuentedeoro obtain secure land tenure and find new business opportunities.

Fuentedeoro is known for plantains. The municipality is located in Colombia’s eastern plains, a vast region of large rivers that drain the Andes into the Amazon basin. In this landscape, Luz Dary Mendoza learned farming from her father, who grew a variety of crops in the fertile plains. But his livelihood and family’s future always depended on the revenue generated from the region’s cash crop: the plantain.

Today, Luz Dary has her own farm in the village of Sardinata Alto, Fuentedeoro, and in 2018, she helped create AGROSARDI, an association consisting of 40 farmers who grow plantain on 40 hectares of land. Like all plantain farmers in Colombia, Luz Dary and her colleagues are challenged with pest management, an unpredictable and erratic climate, and intermediary buyers who pay low prices. But none of these obstacles are as important as secure land tenure, which has silently stymied progress for years.

In Fuentedeoro, an estimated 6 out of 10 parcels lack a registered land title. In fact, none of the 40 members of AGROSARDI have a property title. In most cases, landowners hold what are known as cartaventas, or notarized letters declaring the many details about the land they purchased. No cartaventa is exactly the same, and they are not legally supported by the government. The pervasive lack of land tenure is a disincentive for women like Luz Dary to invest in their plots and agribusinesses.

“We have never had a title to our farming plots. The only thing we have is the cartaventa, and that doesn’t give us any security,” explains Luz Dary.

Historically, landowners in Colombia are responsible for titling and registering their properties with the state, but due to costs, complicated land laws, and the absence of government services in rural areas, only wealthy landowners end up formalizing their land.

The Rural Property and Land Use Plan, known by its Spanish acronym POSPR, seeks to change this paradigm. The initiative, which surveys and updates the cadaster for every parcel in the municipality, was recently carried out by Colombia’s National Land Agency with USAID support. Land formalization teams surveyed almost 4,500 rural parcels, covering Fuentedeoro’s more than 56,000 hectares. The land administration plan discovered that some 2,000 plots are ready to be formalized. Among these plots are the farms of Luz Dary Mendoza and 19 AGROSARDI members.

“Thanks to the parcel sweep and USAID’s initiative to increase land security, we are finally going to own the land, receive a property deed. Many of us will now feel better about investing in other crops such as fruit orchards that will generate even more income,” says Luz Dary.

This year, the National Land Agency will deliver the first batch of 200 rural property titles, thanks to land formalization efforts and USAID investments to strengthen land tenure in Fuentedeoro, Meta. Luz Dary and the members of AGROSARDI will celebrate their land titles, the basis for building a plantain agribusiness.

Building New Partnerships

Under Luz Dary’s leadership, AGROSARDI joined a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) focused on plantain agribusiness. The PPP, which was facilitated by USAID Land for Prosperity, is valued at more than USD $250,000 and links critical investments from the public and private sectors to nearly 200 plantain farmers in and around Fuentedeoro.

Thanks to the PPP and the regional government, AGROSARDI will be able to access tools such as tractors and loading equipment to improve post harvest handling and moving plantains to new market channels. The PPP also has the support of Agrollanos as a commercial ally, which will purchase its plantains for distribution through final products to large food companies such as Pepsico.

The PPP is part of USAID’s comprehensive strategy to mobilize regional actors and the private sector and foster licit economic opportunities in areas where land tenure security is being strengthened. The strategy looks for strategy value chains in regions where USAID is working with the government to survey and formalize informal property in a handful of municipalities. Since 2021, Land for Prosperity has facilitated more than 27 public private partnerships, which have mobilized more than USD $90 million in public funds and investments.

Thanks to the plantain PPP, farmers are learning Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). AGROSARDI will generate cleaner, agrochemical-free crops. GAP also promotes soil recovery through the use of organic fertilizers, resulting in cleaner plantain suitable for human consumption.

“I always invite young women to get involved in farming. I know that if they live this experience, they too will fall in love with it and will continue to fight for a stable crop that allows us to support our family.” says Luz Dary Mendoza, plantain farmer, Fuentedeoro.

Cross-posted from USAID Exposure