Abstracts
SESSION 1: SMALLHOLDER RESPONSES TO GLOBAL PHENOMENA
This session will center on discussing a range of ecological and economic phenomena shaping smallholder farming practices and livelihood strategies. Examples will be drawn from a number of specialty value chains and land use contexts across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Betting on Hope: Honduran Smallholder Coffee Producers and Cooperatives in Contexts of Climate Change, Market Volatility, and Certifications
Catherine M. Tucker
University of Florida
Smallholder coffee producers around the world face diverse challenges, including climate change, volatile markets, coffee pests and diseases, water supply variability, and insecurities linked to regional political uncertainties and globalization. In recent years, many smallholders have pursued coffee certifications (e.g., Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, organic, and others) in hopes of improving their circumstances. This study explores how farmers in western Honduras have engaged with certifications, and their evolving outcomes as individuals and as members of coffee cooperatives. Western Honduras appears to be a likely location for successful outcomes from certification, because in the past decade the region has emerged as a major producer of specialty coffee, and demand for its top quality coffee has grown along with accolades from international cupping competitions. At the same time, the region confronts a full range of climatic, political economic and environmental challenges, including struggles with coffee rust, irregular rainfall patterns, and structural violence particularly affecting indigenous smallholder farmers. As other studies have noted, certifications can create conundrums despite possible benefits (e.g., Jaffee 2007, Lyon 2011, Martinez-Torres 2006, Reynolds and Bennett 2013). Preliminary results from this ongoing research indicate that a majority of farmers interviewed are gaining expertise in quality control and eagerly pursue techniques and information that could increase their chances of a better price. Even so, marked differences exist across farmers’ and cooperatives’ experiences with certifications and specialty markets – from tragic setbacks to inspiring successes – but nearly all cases reveal high debt, incessant risks, and persistence in the face of difficult conditions.
The dream of upgrading: how certification enables access to high-quality, direct trade relationships in the cacao sector
Ximena Rueda
Universidsad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia
Using the Global Value Chain approach, we aim to evaluate the effects of voluntary certifications on upgrading. Upgrading has been defined as suppliers’ ability to enhance their position in the value chain, capturing a higher portion of the value created in the market. Our understanding of upgrading encompasses the economic gains obtained from participating in higher value chains, as well as the social and environmental dimensions under which gains are attained. Upgrading thus is achieved by farmers’ enhanced social capital in the form of bargaining power, contract agreements, and appropriation of (tacit) knowledge about quality, technologies, and market outlets, as well as by investments in natural assets. We conducted a study of 207 household surveys and several interviews in four provinces along the West coast of Ecuador. We assess the role of certification in enhancing farmers’ access to higher value chains, in particular those associated with direct trade. Our results show that certification enables economic upgrading by providing participants with higher incomes and more formal contracts, compared to their non-certified counterparts; certification also enables social capital accumulation, by means of cooperative formation that then leads to better production practices; certified farmers protect natural assets in the form of tree biodiversity in a larger proportion than their non-certified counterparts. When joining direct trade markets, certified farmers obtained even higher benefits than those farmers who sold in the direct trade market but who are not certified. This analysis shows that, once niche markets are open for farmers, certification multiplies the benefits of such opportunities, not competing but actually boosting benefits derived from joining direct trade markets.
Smallholder Vulnerability and the Coffee Rust Epidemic in the Jamaican Blue Mountains
Kevon Rhiney
Rutgers University
In this paper, I use the case of the high-end Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee industry to demonstrate the ways smallholder livelihoods and farming practices are shaped by wider-scale political and economic forces. I focus my analysis on the recent coffee leaf rust (CLR) epidemic as a means of illustrating the systemic, relational and multi-scalar ways socio-ecological shocks are often experienced by small-scale coffee producers, and how these shocks in turn map onto and are routinely mediated through everyday human-environment interactions. Since 2012, CLR has been one of, if not the most, significant and sustained environmental problem for coffee production in Jamaica, and has continued to negatively impact the livelihoods of the thousands of smallholder farmers and their families that rely on the supply chain for a living. Drawing on an empirical case study comprising 434 household surveys conducted across the Blue Mountains, as well as focus group discussions and interviews with a range of value chain actors, the paper shows how smallholder responses and exposure to CLR links into broader political-economic processes that are partly responsible for creating the structural conditions that influence smallholder vulnerability to socio-ecological shocks in the first place and often set the conditions for future impacts.
Narco-Capital and Smallholders in Central America
Kendra McSweeney
Ohio State University
The research presented here is part of a larger project to explore the conjoined role of global drug policy and illicit capital in shaping social-ecological change in Central America. The region’s relatively recent emergence as a major waypoint for cocaine demands close scrutiny of its effects beyond the urban settings where most scholarship and popular attention is focused. We have already documented the extent to which rural trafficking hubs become loci for environmental devastation, and we have unpacked the money-laundering and investment dynamics that lead traffickers to accumulate and ecologically simplify biodiverse and culturally diverse landscapes. Out of these research efforts, we scrutinize another part of Central America’s rural drugs/development nexus. That is: we estimate the magnitude of the narco-dollars that have circulated through Central America’s rural transit zones from 2000-2014. While necessarily crude due to the nature of the data (drug flow data come from the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, while price and payout data are derived from ethnographic work across 5 countries and secondary sources), the exercise is intended to initiate a conversation about the role of illicit capital in rural landscapes and smallholder livelihoods broadly, particularly in comparison with the role of remittance income and development aid. (We estimate that drug flows may be comparable to the former and swamp the latter.) Moreover, this exercise necessarily implies a bigger question: is it inevitable that narco-capital negatively distort rural livelihoods through wage inflation, ‘Dutch disease,’ and dispossession? Can more sustainable, long-term forms of rural development be narco-financed? The paper will end with our initial thoughts on this and related issues.
Catherine M. Tucker
University of Florida
Smallholder coffee producers around the world face diverse challenges, including climate change, volatile markets, coffee pests and diseases, water supply variability, and insecurities linked to regional political uncertainties and globalization. In recent years, many smallholders have pursued coffee certifications (e.g., Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, organic, and others) in hopes of improving their circumstances. This study explores how farmers in western Honduras have engaged with certifications, and their evolving outcomes as individuals and as members of coffee cooperatives. Western Honduras appears to be a likely location for successful outcomes from certification, because in the past decade the region has emerged as a major producer of specialty coffee, and demand for its top quality coffee has grown along with accolades from international cupping competitions. At the same time, the region confronts a full range of climatic, political economic and environmental challenges, including struggles with coffee rust, irregular rainfall patterns, and structural violence particularly affecting indigenous smallholder farmers. As other studies have noted, certifications can create conundrums despite possible benefits (e.g., Jaffee 2007, Lyon 2011, Martinez-Torres 2006, Reynolds and Bennett 2013). Preliminary results from this ongoing research indicate that a majority of farmers interviewed are gaining expertise in quality control and eagerly pursue techniques and information that could increase their chances of a better price. Even so, marked differences exist across farmers’ and cooperatives’ experiences with certifications and specialty markets – from tragic setbacks to inspiring successes – but nearly all cases reveal high debt, incessant risks, and persistence in the face of difficult conditions.
The dream of upgrading: how certification enables access to high-quality, direct trade relationships in the cacao sector
Ximena Rueda
Universidsad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia
Using the Global Value Chain approach, we aim to evaluate the effects of voluntary certifications on upgrading. Upgrading has been defined as suppliers’ ability to enhance their position in the value chain, capturing a higher portion of the value created in the market. Our understanding of upgrading encompasses the economic gains obtained from participating in higher value chains, as well as the social and environmental dimensions under which gains are attained. Upgrading thus is achieved by farmers’ enhanced social capital in the form of bargaining power, contract agreements, and appropriation of (tacit) knowledge about quality, technologies, and market outlets, as well as by investments in natural assets. We conducted a study of 207 household surveys and several interviews in four provinces along the West coast of Ecuador. We assess the role of certification in enhancing farmers’ access to higher value chains, in particular those associated with direct trade. Our results show that certification enables economic upgrading by providing participants with higher incomes and more formal contracts, compared to their non-certified counterparts; certification also enables social capital accumulation, by means of cooperative formation that then leads to better production practices; certified farmers protect natural assets in the form of tree biodiversity in a larger proportion than their non-certified counterparts. When joining direct trade markets, certified farmers obtained even higher benefits than those farmers who sold in the direct trade market but who are not certified. This analysis shows that, once niche markets are open for farmers, certification multiplies the benefits of such opportunities, not competing but actually boosting benefits derived from joining direct trade markets.
Smallholder Vulnerability and the Coffee Rust Epidemic in the Jamaican Blue Mountains
Kevon Rhiney
Rutgers University
In this paper, I use the case of the high-end Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee industry to demonstrate the ways smallholder livelihoods and farming practices are shaped by wider-scale political and economic forces. I focus my analysis on the recent coffee leaf rust (CLR) epidemic as a means of illustrating the systemic, relational and multi-scalar ways socio-ecological shocks are often experienced by small-scale coffee producers, and how these shocks in turn map onto and are routinely mediated through everyday human-environment interactions. Since 2012, CLR has been one of, if not the most, significant and sustained environmental problem for coffee production in Jamaica, and has continued to negatively impact the livelihoods of the thousands of smallholder farmers and their families that rely on the supply chain for a living. Drawing on an empirical case study comprising 434 household surveys conducted across the Blue Mountains, as well as focus group discussions and interviews with a range of value chain actors, the paper shows how smallholder responses and exposure to CLR links into broader political-economic processes that are partly responsible for creating the structural conditions that influence smallholder vulnerability to socio-ecological shocks in the first place and often set the conditions for future impacts.
Narco-Capital and Smallholders in Central America
Kendra McSweeney
Ohio State University
The research presented here is part of a larger project to explore the conjoined role of global drug policy and illicit capital in shaping social-ecological change in Central America. The region’s relatively recent emergence as a major waypoint for cocaine demands close scrutiny of its effects beyond the urban settings where most scholarship and popular attention is focused. We have already documented the extent to which rural trafficking hubs become loci for environmental devastation, and we have unpacked the money-laundering and investment dynamics that lead traffickers to accumulate and ecologically simplify biodiverse and culturally diverse landscapes. Out of these research efforts, we scrutinize another part of Central America’s rural drugs/development nexus. That is: we estimate the magnitude of the narco-dollars that have circulated through Central America’s rural transit zones from 2000-2014. While necessarily crude due to the nature of the data (drug flow data come from the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, while price and payout data are derived from ethnographic work across 5 countries and secondary sources), the exercise is intended to initiate a conversation about the role of illicit capital in rural landscapes and smallholder livelihoods broadly, particularly in comparison with the role of remittance income and development aid. (We estimate that drug flows may be comparable to the former and swamp the latter.) Moreover, this exercise necessarily implies a bigger question: is it inevitable that narco-capital negatively distort rural livelihoods through wage inflation, ‘Dutch disease,’ and dispossession? Can more sustainable, long-term forms of rural development be narco-financed? The paper will end with our initial thoughts on this and related issues.
SESSION 2: MODES OF SMALLHOLDER ENGAGEMENT & AGRARIAN/LAND REFORMS
This session offers a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives on the ways smallholder livelihoods and land systems are being shaped by a range of ongoing hegemonic discourses hinged on neoliberal market reforms, green agendas and resilience thinking.
Neoliberal reform, smallholder livelihoods and land systems: A review
Rinku Roy Chowdhury
Clark University
Over the past three decades, one of the most pervasive forces shaping agrarian land use and smallholder agriculture in particular has been the rise of the neoliberal economic logics and their attendant political-economic regime shifts. These transformations encompass changes to markets, land tenure and property rights regimes, including privatization and land enclosures, and new forms of environmental governance. In turn, these changes have been met with socially and geographically contingent forces of facilitation as well as resistance. This paper reviews key insights into the processes and impacts of neoliberal reform on smallholder decision-making, livelihoods and agro-forested landscapes, and highlights implications for future trajectories of land governance, use, cover and change.
Ecological Rents and Smallholder Engagement with Ecosystem Service Payments
David Lansing
University of Maryland Baltimore County
How do smallholders engage with ecosystem service payments? Drawing on survey work and interviews, this paper examines the types of smallholders that receive ecosystem service payments and how they are used and situates these trends within a broader analytic of rent. Drawing on Marx’s notion of absolute rent, it introduces the term ecological rents as way to situate smallholders within the broader political economy of production, state power, and land use that shape how ecosystem service payments get distributed and used. Doing so, it argues that attention to the emerging rents of ecosystem service payments can sharpen thinking about the distributional and political implications of this policy, and the kinds of options that ultimately become available to small land users.
Livelihoods, Socio-ecological Resilience, and Smallholder Transformations
Edward R. Carr
DCE, Clark University
Despite decades of predictions to the contrary, smallholder farms remain an important part of the global food system and a critical source of livelihoods-as-organizing principles for how to live in particular places. While inherently resilient to historical shocks and stressors, agrarian livelihoods face the rapid onset of new pressures such as increasing climate variability and new forms of market uncertainty. How we understand these pressures to impact these livelihoods is critical to assessing the likely outcomes of new shocks and stressors in particular socio-ecologies, with implications for future adaptation and development programming. By drawing on empirical examples from West Africa, this paper demonstrates how agrarian livelihoods, as projects aimed at balancing the provision of safety and certainty with the maintenance of privilege and authority, are likely to become more rigid, brittle, and precarious even as they deal successfully with these new pressures in the short term. These examples, however, also suggest pathways to indigenous transformation that might have both liberatory and sustainable outcomes.
Rinku Roy Chowdhury
Clark University
Over the past three decades, one of the most pervasive forces shaping agrarian land use and smallholder agriculture in particular has been the rise of the neoliberal economic logics and their attendant political-economic regime shifts. These transformations encompass changes to markets, land tenure and property rights regimes, including privatization and land enclosures, and new forms of environmental governance. In turn, these changes have been met with socially and geographically contingent forces of facilitation as well as resistance. This paper reviews key insights into the processes and impacts of neoliberal reform on smallholder decision-making, livelihoods and agro-forested landscapes, and highlights implications for future trajectories of land governance, use, cover and change.
Ecological Rents and Smallholder Engagement with Ecosystem Service Payments
David Lansing
University of Maryland Baltimore County
How do smallholders engage with ecosystem service payments? Drawing on survey work and interviews, this paper examines the types of smallholders that receive ecosystem service payments and how they are used and situates these trends within a broader analytic of rent. Drawing on Marx’s notion of absolute rent, it introduces the term ecological rents as way to situate smallholders within the broader political economy of production, state power, and land use that shape how ecosystem service payments get distributed and used. Doing so, it argues that attention to the emerging rents of ecosystem service payments can sharpen thinking about the distributional and political implications of this policy, and the kinds of options that ultimately become available to small land users.
Livelihoods, Socio-ecological Resilience, and Smallholder Transformations
Edward R. Carr
DCE, Clark University
Despite decades of predictions to the contrary, smallholder farms remain an important part of the global food system and a critical source of livelihoods-as-organizing principles for how to live in particular places. While inherently resilient to historical shocks and stressors, agrarian livelihoods face the rapid onset of new pressures such as increasing climate variability and new forms of market uncertainty. How we understand these pressures to impact these livelihoods is critical to assessing the likely outcomes of new shocks and stressors in particular socio-ecologies, with implications for future adaptation and development programming. By drawing on empirical examples from West Africa, this paper demonstrates how agrarian livelihoods, as projects aimed at balancing the provision of safety and certainty with the maintenance of privilege and authority, are likely to become more rigid, brittle, and precarious even as they deal successfully with these new pressures in the short term. These examples, however, also suggest pathways to indigenous transformation that might have both liberatory and sustainable outcomes.
SESSION 3: PROCESS & PATTERNS OF CHANGE AT THE FRONTIER
The session looks at process and patterns of land-use at frontiers shaped by economic shifts and conflict. The papers also explore the way socio-economic drivers influence the configuration of landscapes.
Smallholders and nonholders: the end-landscapes of agrarian reform and ranching in the landscape of the Brazil Nut Polygon of the Brazilian Amazon
Stephen Aldrich
Indiana University
To the West of the Araguaia river, a vast Brazil Nut grove once stretched for nearly 100 square miles, supporting a regional oligarchy through exploitative labor and abuse of all but the landscape itself. This area, formally designated the ‘Brazil Nut Polygon’ by government officials seeking to foster modern agricultural development in the Amazon, has experienced successive economic and ecological transformation ever since. The drive to develop this region exposed it to immense conflict over land – some of the most ferocious battles for agrarian reform ever waged in the Amazon – and permanently transformed the landscape. This paper employs property records, forest reserve data, key informant interviews, archival research, and classified satellite imagery to address the contemporary configuration of this contentious landscape. Specifically, I compare how forests and agriculture differ in their spatial configuration, but perhaps not their spatial form, on agrarian reform settlements and the large ranches that surround them. In the end, though the intermediate landscapes of contention and agronomic production are quite different from one another (and were subject to “green” rhetoric employed by smallholders and ranchers alike), the landscape of the former Brazil Nut Polygon has been utterly obliterated, fading to pasture in tandem with the violence of the past.
Overcoming persistent environmentally degrading and low income land uses in the Brazilian Amazon
Rachael Garrett
ETH Zurich
Despite decade of research, engagement, and policy interventions on the issue of smallholder agriculture in the tropics, many farmers persist in unsustainable agricultural activities. In the Brazilian Amazon low income and environmental degrading cattle ranching and fire usage are ubiquitous, despite the presence of alternative higher value land uses. We utilize a uniquely comprehensive social-ecological dataset from two regions in the eastern Brazilian Amazon to understand why farmers in this region persist in cattle ranching and fire usage. We find that transitions to less degrading and more profitable land use activities are driven by a combination of lagging supply chain infrastructure, socio-cultural preferences, and fire risk. These factors lead to a lock in of agricultural activities that are low risk and socially accepted, but fail to deliver high monetary benefits to smallholders. We conclude that transitions away from low-income land uses in agricultural-forest frontiers of the Brazilian Amazon require a “big push” of policy and program changes that improve farmers’ knowledge of new practices, safeguard revenue losses from investments in new systems, and increase access to processing, storage, and marketing infrastructure to sell higher value products.
Oil palm in Latin America: land and labour dynamics in a new frontier
Antonio Castellanos-Navarrete
CIMSUR-UNAM, Mexico
Increased global demand for palm oil has opened up new frontiers of expansion. Latin America has emerged as a new player as it has doubled, and in some countries even tripled, its output in the last decade. This has triggered a heated debate between polarized views. On the one hand, some see oil palm could help boosting agricultural growth and reduce rural poverty, and on the other hand, others consider this crop could displace local farmers and lead to negative environmental impacts in the producing landscapes. This review, centered on analysing the livelihood implications of oil palm development, points to large differences across countries depending on the trajectories followed by oil palm expansion, either linked to smallholder-based production or large-scale private plantations integrated to their own mills, and a variety of partnership schemes in between. These trajectories, and the resultant oil palm production systems, are associated with social differentiation dynamics, land tenure regimes, state policies, market conditions and rural politics. Major findings indicate that rural livelihoods and their landscapes are most threatened in situations where insecure land tenure predominates and in places predated by pre-existing violence. In contrast, benefits derive from policies guaranteeing access to land, forest conservation and fair labour conditions, as well as from functioning smallholders’ organizations. The latter, however, does not preclude tensions between smallholders (often immigrant mestizo settlers) interested in planting oil palm trees and neighbouring indigenous or afro-descendant communities opposing to its expansion.
Open for development: Land change in Arauca, Colombia after the signing of Colombia peace treaty 2016
Laura Schneider
Rutgers University
The department of Arauca in the Colombian Orinoco has been for the last 50 years at the intersection of economic development and (political, military?) conflict. Since colonial times, this region has been the focus of agrarian development and resource extraction, from cattle ranching to oil extraction. The main oil pipeline crossing the country from the oilfields to the Caribbean coast has been a constant target of armed groups’ attacks, causing major disruptions and oil spills. Since the signing of the peace treaty in 2017 (?) the Colombian state has been implementing one of the pilot programs that resulted from the 2016 peace agreement around land reform (Programa de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial- PDET.) According to the Colombian census report of 2015, 67% of the Orinoco has been affected by the conflict, and 70% of its territory has come under private ownership for agriculture and cattle ranching. The region has also experienced an increase in forest cover due to demographic changes. This presentation—and a future paper—will explore land transformation in Arauca before and after the signing of the peace treaty, and determine the impact of PDET and other development projects on current configurations of land use. I will argue that the transition from a state of war to a state of peace has resulted in the implementation of large scale development programs and resource use (oil extraction), and that the land reforms directed to campesinos are contradictory and will result in further land consolidation and pressure on forested landscapes.
Stephen Aldrich
Indiana University
To the West of the Araguaia river, a vast Brazil Nut grove once stretched for nearly 100 square miles, supporting a regional oligarchy through exploitative labor and abuse of all but the landscape itself. This area, formally designated the ‘Brazil Nut Polygon’ by government officials seeking to foster modern agricultural development in the Amazon, has experienced successive economic and ecological transformation ever since. The drive to develop this region exposed it to immense conflict over land – some of the most ferocious battles for agrarian reform ever waged in the Amazon – and permanently transformed the landscape. This paper employs property records, forest reserve data, key informant interviews, archival research, and classified satellite imagery to address the contemporary configuration of this contentious landscape. Specifically, I compare how forests and agriculture differ in their spatial configuration, but perhaps not their spatial form, on agrarian reform settlements and the large ranches that surround them. In the end, though the intermediate landscapes of contention and agronomic production are quite different from one another (and were subject to “green” rhetoric employed by smallholders and ranchers alike), the landscape of the former Brazil Nut Polygon has been utterly obliterated, fading to pasture in tandem with the violence of the past.
Overcoming persistent environmentally degrading and low income land uses in the Brazilian Amazon
Rachael Garrett
ETH Zurich
Despite decade of research, engagement, and policy interventions on the issue of smallholder agriculture in the tropics, many farmers persist in unsustainable agricultural activities. In the Brazilian Amazon low income and environmental degrading cattle ranching and fire usage are ubiquitous, despite the presence of alternative higher value land uses. We utilize a uniquely comprehensive social-ecological dataset from two regions in the eastern Brazilian Amazon to understand why farmers in this region persist in cattle ranching and fire usage. We find that transitions to less degrading and more profitable land use activities are driven by a combination of lagging supply chain infrastructure, socio-cultural preferences, and fire risk. These factors lead to a lock in of agricultural activities that are low risk and socially accepted, but fail to deliver high monetary benefits to smallholders. We conclude that transitions away from low-income land uses in agricultural-forest frontiers of the Brazilian Amazon require a “big push” of policy and program changes that improve farmers’ knowledge of new practices, safeguard revenue losses from investments in new systems, and increase access to processing, storage, and marketing infrastructure to sell higher value products.
Oil palm in Latin America: land and labour dynamics in a new frontier
Antonio Castellanos-Navarrete
CIMSUR-UNAM, Mexico
Increased global demand for palm oil has opened up new frontiers of expansion. Latin America has emerged as a new player as it has doubled, and in some countries even tripled, its output in the last decade. This has triggered a heated debate between polarized views. On the one hand, some see oil palm could help boosting agricultural growth and reduce rural poverty, and on the other hand, others consider this crop could displace local farmers and lead to negative environmental impacts in the producing landscapes. This review, centered on analysing the livelihood implications of oil palm development, points to large differences across countries depending on the trajectories followed by oil palm expansion, either linked to smallholder-based production or large-scale private plantations integrated to their own mills, and a variety of partnership schemes in between. These trajectories, and the resultant oil palm production systems, are associated with social differentiation dynamics, land tenure regimes, state policies, market conditions and rural politics. Major findings indicate that rural livelihoods and their landscapes are most threatened in situations where insecure land tenure predominates and in places predated by pre-existing violence. In contrast, benefits derive from policies guaranteeing access to land, forest conservation and fair labour conditions, as well as from functioning smallholders’ organizations. The latter, however, does not preclude tensions between smallholders (often immigrant mestizo settlers) interested in planting oil palm trees and neighbouring indigenous or afro-descendant communities opposing to its expansion.
Open for development: Land change in Arauca, Colombia after the signing of Colombia peace treaty 2016
Laura Schneider
Rutgers University
The department of Arauca in the Colombian Orinoco has been for the last 50 years at the intersection of economic development and (political, military?) conflict. Since colonial times, this region has been the focus of agrarian development and resource extraction, from cattle ranching to oil extraction. The main oil pipeline crossing the country from the oilfields to the Caribbean coast has been a constant target of armed groups’ attacks, causing major disruptions and oil spills. Since the signing of the peace treaty in 2017 (?) the Colombian state has been implementing one of the pilot programs that resulted from the 2016 peace agreement around land reform (Programa de Desarrollo con Enfoque Territorial- PDET.) According to the Colombian census report of 2015, 67% of the Orinoco has been affected by the conflict, and 70% of its territory has come under private ownership for agriculture and cattle ranching. The region has also experienced an increase in forest cover due to demographic changes. This presentation—and a future paper—will explore land transformation in Arauca before and after the signing of the peace treaty, and determine the impact of PDET and other development projects on current configurations of land use. I will argue that the transition from a state of war to a state of peace has resulted in the implementation of large scale development programs and resource use (oil extraction), and that the land reforms directed to campesinos are contradictory and will result in further land consolidation and pressure on forested landscapes.