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The lives of campesino women from Northern Cauca have not been easy. The armed conflict has fiercely infiltrated their homes, leaving an aftermath they cannot erase. They have had to fight to find a way to survive together with their children, some who still have their husbands, and some who are now widows.This situation led, in 2013, to women from the department of Cauca uniting and successfully pressuring the departmental government to create a special agency for women. These joint efforts led to the creation of the Secretariat for Women in Cauca.

In 2015, with the support of USAID and the Secretariat for Women, the Itinerant School for Rural Women was created. Its objective is to develop community participation and awareness about gender-based approaches to land and property rights, the economy, and production initiatives.

In one year, 480 women from 15 municipalities participated in this school, whose goal is to gradually serve the 42 municipalities of Cauca and spread its message to more than 3,000 women.

In the municipality of Suárez, and over a period of three months, 30 women completed the school’s four different modules. Among these women were cacao and aloe growers who have taken advantage of these tools to protect their land and move their business plans forward.

“It has been very helpful to learn how to value myself as a person and to value my skills. Working the land is not just for men, and I have been able to grow my crops successfully together with my children. We learned when our rights are being violated. I am contributing to my society through my work, and what I have done is very valuable,” asserts María Ascensión Choco, an aloe grower from Suárez.

The Cloudburst Group has released the Request for Proposal (RFP) No. 2017-ERC-002, “Investor Report on Land Risks and Mitigation Strategies.” The deadline for questions and inquiries is June 26, 2017, while the overall deadline for proposals is July 14, 2017.

The proposal requested is to subcontract with a firm to undertake a quantitative analysis of land tenure risks and associated costs of investing in developing countries. This subcontract will cover the design and implementation of research, which will include a quantitative survey of investors working in developing countries (U.S., multi-national, or local investors), report on findings, and report launch event.

Download the RFP and pricing template here.

IN A PARAMILITARY JAIL

In the village of Lomitas, a rural area of the municipality of Santander de Quilichao, paramilitary groups were especially ruthless with residents. Most of the village’s 1,300 inhabitants were Afro-descendants making a living by growing fruits and vegetables on farms. It was a peaceful and self-sufficient community.

In 2000, the paramilitary group United Self-Defenders of Colombia began using the village as a base, displacing many people from their lands and setting up training camps in their place. The paramilitary group used Lomitas’s community center as an interrogation and torture room for people accused of being guerrilla infiltrators. For years, the village was the site of barbarous acts.

“Our town was used as a jail. Here, they tortured people from other municipalities until they would confess. Then, they would kill them and throw them in the Cauca river. You could hear the screams of people crying for help. Every day, you could find dead bodies along the river’s edge,” explains Lorenzo Mosquera, a community leader from Lomitas.

The community tried to resist. However, as the situation grew increasingly worse, many left their lands and sought refuge in the homes of relatives or even in other countries. With heavy hearts, Lorenzo Mosquera and his family of 23 contacted the Brazilian government, which offered them asylum.

But Mosquera never lost contact with his neighbors from Lomitas, and in 2008, after living in Brazil for three years, a yearning for his land and his roots made Lorenzo return to Lomitas. Upon arrival, he was surprised to see that his land parcel and that of his relatives had been overrun by others who were now growing sugarcane there.

Eighty percent of Lomita’s lands remained in the hands of four or five companies that entered the area through intermediaries offering low prices to campesinos desperate to leave. These companies also cultivated lands that were supposedly abandoned. In addition, the electricity company dismantled the electricity network without the community’s authorization.

“We felt invaded and trampled on. These business transactions were a type of legal displacement. Here, there didn’t use to be sugarcane—we lived on sustainable farms that produced food,” Mosquera explains.

In 2012, with the support of the Land Restitution Unit, Lorenzo began the fight to recover his land. Finally, in 2015, a restitution judge issued a ruling in favor of Lorenzo and five other families. The ruling orders several reparation measures that seek to benefit the community as a whole and states that these measures should be implemented by the municipality and other government entities. Since then, another 22 restitution sentences have been issued for other families in Lomitas.

Originally appeared on Exposure.

THE RURAL DEVELOPMENT AGENCY

DISPLACED BY THE VIOLENCE

Making a living off of cacao at age 51 was not part of Nays Mora Cohen’s life plan. With yuca, corn, and avocado crops and a herd of cattle, she dreamed of living on a sustainable farm in the village of El Hobo, in the lush hills of Montes de María. When the violent factions of Colombia’s conflict became the de facto ruling authority of the region, she never imagined that she or her family would also lose their land.

Mora tells the story about how first she had lost a large portion of her cattle to the groups, and then ran the risk of the guerillas recruiting two of her children. The violence and the death of one of her field workers forced her family to move to nearby El Carmen de Bolívar after. They had no home so they set up as squatters in the makeshift homes on the outskirts of town, catering to displaced people.

“After being gone for nine months, I returned, but they killed a friend of mine. I got scared and left again, but I could only take six chickens. The psychological and financial impacts were big for me,” Mora recalls while choking back tears.

El Carmen de Bolívar has 160,000 inhabitants, and one of every three of them is a victim of the armed conflict. Most of these victims were displaced from their lands and forced to leave behind a stable life based on food production and living off the land. For many, the avocado was the most important cash crop.

Due to abandonment, poor tree management, and fluctuations in the market, those same avocado farms have diminished over the last few years, and this has led to the introduction of crops that are more adaptable to the region, such as cacao, offering market opportunities that can generate stable incomes.

AN ALTERNATIVE: CACAO

In 2016, Mora and other farmers got the chance to improve their cacao operations when the USAID-funded Land and Rural Development Program facilitated a public-private partnership (PPP) in the cacao value chain for 500 campesino farmers in the Montes de María. The PPP takes a sustainable approach to reinserting these cacaoteros in the region’s rural economy. Valued at over $16 billion pesos (US$6.6 million), the PPP is designed to strengthen productivity and quality, expand cultivation areas, and establish direct relationships with reliable commercial partners.

As part of this partnership, governors’ offices and private partnerships have already trained more than 150 people on good agricultural practices and on improving post-harvesting and storage techniques. Among those who have received training are growers and officials from municipal government entities, such as the Secretariat of Agriculture.

“People are very excited about this PPP. Asprocam is making progress because the National Chocolate Company helped guide us and supported us a lot,” Mora says, who is also a member of Asprocam (the “Montes de María Farmers’ Association”), a group of cacao farmers that has sold 17 tons of cacao since the partnership was established.

Like Mora, the majority of the participating farmers—from seven cacao farmers’ associations—are victims of the conflict, and at least ten of them are currently involved in the land restitution process.

“The focus of the program is to support local governments and offer a range of economic alternatives, especially for those who were displaced and are just returning to their farms with their pockets empty,” says Anna Knox, director of the USAID Land and Rural Development Program.