NEWS


Farming in the Páramos of Boyacá: industrialisation and delimitation in Aquitania

In October and November 2019 Lauren spent time in Boyacá on a six-week fieldtrip to find out about key socio-environmental conflicts and the impacts on the inhabitants of the páramos, as part of the historical and cultural component of the project. 

Labourers harvest ‘cebolla larga’ onion in Aquitania

Descending down the hill in the bus from El Crucero, the pungent smell of cebolla larga onion begins to invade my nose. The surrounding land transforms into plots of uniform rows of onion tops at various stages of growth, some mostly brown soil with shoots poking out along the ridges, others long, bushy and green. Sandwiched between the cloud settled atop the mountainous páramos and the vast, dark blue-green Lake Tota, all I can see and all I can smell is onion production. Sprinklers are scattered around, drawing water from the lake, and large teams of labourers every few plots harvest en-masse. Some may see this as a bucolic landscape, indeed, there are ‘ecotourism’ posters advertising ‘agroturismo’ tours to learn about cebolla larga production. However, there is a less romantic idyllic side to this industry, which Aquitania and the surrounding area depend on heavily: around 90% of Aquitanenses’ economic activity is related to the onion industry.

Approaching Aquitania, where onion cultivation start to dominate the surroundings

Aquitania lies at an altitude of 3,030 meters, that is, 30 meters above the supposed line where páramo land begins, according to the Humboldt Institute. As such, this intense onion cultivation would be in breach of the delimitation law (Ley 1930 of 2018) that wants to limit agricultural activities because of their damaging effects on páramo ecosystems, which are now the focus of intense conservation efforts. The area under cultivation immediately around the lake was omitted in the delimitation (around 95% of the cultivable land in the water basin is under cebolla production), perhaps due to the economic importance of the onion industry and maybe even some pressure from the influential landowners who benefit from it. Indeed, many livelihoods depend on cebolla there, so it is complicated. The fieldtrip was aimed at understanding the tensions between livelihoods and conservation at different points of the Boyacá páramos, so Aquitania was an interesting place to start.

From a viewpoint higher up in the páramos, looking down over the town of Aquitania. The cebolla production expands all around it and reaches right upto Lake Tota.

Cultivation of cebolla larga (picture a spring onion the size of a leek, also known as cebolla junca and cebolla de rama) began in the 1960s, following the demise of wheat, barley and a range of cold-weather crops, and the encouragement for specialisation and intensification (Galli 1981, Instituto Humboldt 2014) – evidenced in the diminished local weekly market. Since then, cebolla larga farming has grown exponentially: there are approximately 1,300 hectares under onion production around Aquitania (some estimate as much as 2,500, especially when the whole municipality is counted), where upwards of 500 tonnes are harvested per day – 200,000 tonnes annually, dominating over 80% of the national market and providing cebolla larga all over Colombia. Toxicologists are worried about the use of chemical fungicides, herbicides and pesticides which growers deem essential, as well as high amounts of gallinaza (chicken manure) for fertilizer, the quantities of each which are only ever increasing as land tires, diseases and insects become resistant, and pressure on yield dominates. Scientists from the UPTC (Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia) are concerned about the toxicity of the lake, which receives the run-off, as indicated by emerging toxicology studies (Barrera, Espinosa-Ramírez and Silva 2019). Growing virtually nothing else, with year-round production and 3-4 harvests annually, Aquitania is the epicentre of the cebolla larga industry and is where producers, intermediaries and distributors are concentrated. Famous for its production, onion has come to form an integral part of the Aquitanense identity, and there are calls for Protected Designation of Origen (like champagne or roquefort cheese). In the central plaza amidst a water fountain, the most prominent feature is a statue of a man standing on top of a giant bunch of cebolla larga, harvesting tool across his shoulder, onions clutched in his hand. This proud identity is reflected again in a nearby mural depicting an image of cebolla larga alongside a statement on being Aquitanense (“Soy Cultura, Soy Ambiente, Soy Aquitanense”: “I am culture, I am environment, I am Aquitanian”).

Mural about Aquitanense identity and water fountain in the central plaza depicting onions and onion producers

The Aquitanenses I encountered were incredibly kind and open in sharing their lives with me. I spent time with campesinos who live above the town and benefit only marginally from onion production – with limited access to irrigation away from the lake, fewer resources to input, smaller plots of land and within the protected delimited páramos. I also spent time with jornaleros/cebolleros – day labourers who plant, weed, fumigate and harvest the crop –, and in a pelanza de cebolla – a processing operation where the onions are peeled and packed into nets of 500g and 1kg bunches, largely for direct sale in Bogotá supermarkets. The pelanza takes place in simple warehouses which employ mostly women – with male bosses and managers – who are paid by the quantity of bunches they process. The rectangular warehouse I spent time in was a closed space with a surprisingly low ceiling, one opening on the narrow side with no other windows, a few skylights for visibility, concrete block walls, corrugated fibreglass roof and dirt floor, making the conditions stuffy and dingy for the 15-20 or so workers inside. Throughout the day, the women have with them their babies and infants, who nap and play amongst piles of onions; their older children join after school. It is grubby, hard work, and it didn’t take long before my eyes and nose were irritated and streaming, with a headache lingering well into the night. I wondered if there were residues from the multiple chemical applications, and if this affected the health of the women and their children in the poorly ventilated space. They were concerned, but grateful to have work. I was full of admiration and compassion for them. They were understandably a little suspicious of me at first, but warm, curious and increasingly welcoming, especially once I had learned how to peel adequately!

A ‘pelanza’ where women process the onion ready for supermarket shelves

Out in the fields with the jornaleros, I imagined, or rather hoped, the open air would minimise the irritation to my sinuses, but I still felt the aroma permeate my eyes and respiratory system. The work, demanding constant bending over and, for the men, heavy lifting and carrying, is quite literally back breaking. The men are out from about 5am until late lunch, with female partners/family members joining them after taking children to school (and whenever school is closed, children help too, to learn working skills). Cebolla larga generates employment for 170 jornaleros (daily labourers) per hectare per day (Acevedo 2018) and since 89% of the land is occupied by only 20% of the population, in contrast to the 81% of land owners with less than 3 hectare plots (Albarracín 2015), most of Aquitania men are contracted on a daily basis. Hence, whilst there’s often work, there’s little security, and certainly no benefits like sick pay, healthcare, or pensions. The labour is arranged directly with men and the wage goes directly to the man, usually the day before, so whilst female family members work alongside them most of the time, they do not receive a wage. At 50,000 Colombian Pesos a day (about £10), whilst high compared to some manual labour work in Colombia, it is not well remunerated, especially when the man is accompanied by female family members (and sometimes children), which increases the amount of labour for the wage. Working 6, sometimes 7, days a week, most of the jornaleros have spent their entire lives in this work since childhood and see little difference for their future. There is an interesting tension. On the one hand, they feel “solo” (alone), with little state and welfare support, not unionised, and they see few alternatives for the rest of their lives, which can be depressing. On the other hand, they are proud, hard workers and grateful to be in a place with such reliable employment: “those who go hungry are those who do not want to work, because here we’re blessed with plenty of work” – variations of this comment were commonplace. However, it comes at a cost to the social fabric. Several interviewees reported that the rates of alcoholism, especially amongst men and linked to high levels of domestic violence, are amongst the highest in Boyacá.

Labourers load up the trucks for Bogota having harvested the onion

The jornaleros are concerned about their health – they know more than most how much chemical inputs are used in the onion production. However, similarly to the women in the pelanza, they are glad that the lake cultivation area is not included in the páramo delimitation, therefore meaning their livelihoods are protected. Indeed, despite being above the 3,000 meters mark, the lack of the characteristic frailejones around the lake indicate to them that they are not in páramo land, which they say is “más arriba” (further up). Having said that, the mounting environmental concerns of the production and increasing pressure to address them prompted from the delimitation debates do worry them – what employment will Aquitanenses have if the cebolla industry is restricted? The landowners and the representatives of the cebolla larga industry seem to have similar concerns and have been heavily active in their opposition to the delimitation and any environmental restrictions. NGOs and public officials in the area have reported that landowners and employers in the industry, who have had a free reign for decades, have demonised them by fuelling fears that the authorities and environmentalists want to stop the production and take away the various jobs (see also studies on socio-environmental conflicts around Aquitania such as Instituto Humboldt 2014 and Carrasco 2018).

A campesina milks her cow in the paramos above Aquitania and Lake Tota

In contrast to the Lake Tota industrialised economy, above the town, campesinos have been pushed further up into the páramos and pushed out of their small holdings. They try to participate in the onion industry on marginal land; many have given up and abandoned their dwellings, moving down to Aquitania to work as a labourer, joined the transport business integral to the industry, or migrated further afield to larger urban centres in search of better paid and less back-breaking work. Those who have stayed struggle to compete with the industrial level of production below, but have little choice, as there’s scant market aside from cebolla larga in the area. As a result, it is common to see cultivation right up to the edges of roads and buildings. Women from the Association of Female Campesinas (ASOMUC) report that male household heads are reluctant to allow them to use even small amounts of land to diversify their production, income and family food supply; for the men, every square meter should be onions. Whilst most other crops fetch a poor price at market, like in many other parts of Boyacá and Colombia, milk is one of the commodities that provides a dependable income, even at a small scale. With every inch taken up by onion, cows (often around 2 per household) are found grazing the verges between plots and taken higher up in the páramos above cultivation. Despite this, Aquitania is one of the few municipalities that has no milk collection service for the veredas (hamlets), making it difficult to sell surplus – all the infrastructure focus is on cebolla. Overall, the campesinos I spoke to were angry and felt betrayed and neglected by the government, who provide little support and instead are felt to mainly impose restrictions. Already struggling to survive and maintain their livelihoods, they feel disadvantaged and cut off from the participation and benefits of the onion industry and market, whilst any other activities are not supported either. Furthermore, they now fear the implications of living in and depending on delimited páramo land, worried that the government and authorities will soon prohibit them from practicing the marginal cultivation and livestock that they rely on. Feeling abandoned, the campesinos are often driven to abandon their smallholdings.

Abandoned house with onion planted right up to the edges

All photos by Lauren Blake

Scoping historical and socio-cultural conflicts in the Boyacá páramos

Lauren and Maria Paula, of the historical and cultural component of the project, are recently back from a three-week scoping trip in Colombia to the Boyacá departamento (or department, similar to a UK county), where our research will be focused. The days were long and intense and the travelling non-stop, but it was extremely fruitful and inspiring. We met with some wonderful people, saw a cross section of the beautiful landscape, learnt more than our brains could hold and clarified our focus.

Visiting Páramos inhabitants, farm shelter around Mongüa and Monguí.
Photo by Jery Hernán Ramos

The aim of our component is to research the relationship between the people and their environment and the challenges and tensions of the conservation strategy of páramo demarcation. Páramos are individual ecosystem sites that also configure a wider unitary ecosystem called a “complejo” (complex); Boyacá has 6 complejos (see map below). While this horizontal differentiation follows natural fractures in the landscape, páramo conservation policy has sought to demarcate each complejo – and sometimes each páramo – on a vertical line, on the premise that the key plant and climate features of a páramo begin at an altitude of 3,000 meters. This vertical demarcation determines a physical frontier to economic activities including crop and livestock farming and has therefore been a matter of contention for its implications on people’s livelihoods. Furthermore, not all people perceive, categorize or describe the páramos in this way.

Our research seeks to map the key historical and contemporary socio-environmental contexts of these tensions and, in this scoping trip, we wanted to select specific areas that illustrate the multiple legacies of a variety of social, economic and political conflicts as well as make more informed decisions about the research methods to use. The strategy was to visit as much of the region as possible, see the environment first-hand and speak to a variety of actors (national institutions, local government, inhabitants and campesinos (peasants) of the páramo regions).

Graffiti in Bogotá celebrating the importance of frailejón in water systems.
Photo by Lauren Blake

Upon arriving, we spent a few days in the capital, Bogotá, acclimatising, sorting practicalities and meeting with and interviewing people in national organisations and institutions. This included the Humboldt Institute, the Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia, and a number of social science academics. The Humboldt is a publicly funded research Institute responsible for studying, classifying and, more recently, providing the evidence on which the Ministerio del Medio Ambiente (Ministry for the Environment) officially demarcates the páramos. The Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia (SAC) is the agriculture union of the country (mainly dealing with conventional and industrial production), with whom we spoke about the historical and contemporary legislation relating to the páramos and farming. The social scientists from the National University of Colombia shared their knowledge about the páramos and Boyacá and provided feedback to enrich our project.

We then travelled to Boyacá, and its capital, Tunja, where we spoke to officials responsible for agriculture and environment policies at the Gobernación (departmental government office) and Corpoboyacá, an autonomous environmental authority that implements regional policies and programmes on sustainable development and renewable natural resources. Aside from an overview of the diverse and complex regional situation, these meetings set us up for the next leg of visits to the rural areas to speak to the inhabitants and campesinos of the páramos. In Tunja we also met with a local member of Dignidad Agropecuaria, a non-profit national union for the country’s campesinos, but this was once we came back from the rural expeditions.

Exploring the high páramo areas of Pisba.
Photo by Lauren Blake

To see as much of the mountainous and extensive department as possible, with an area of 8,953 miles (23,189 kilometres) squared, we embarked on a whistle-stop tour, visiting a different area each day and climbing up into the páramos of each place. We started in the lower north eastern areas of Socha and Tasco, in the complejo of Pisba, then moved a little south to Mongüa and Monguí, in the complejo of Tota-Bijagual-Mamapacha. Moving south west into the central part of Boyacá, still in the complejo of Tota-Bijagual-Mamapacha, around the Tota Lake, we visited Aquitania and Pesca, then Toca and Siachoque. Moving west, next was Arcabuco and Cómbita, in the complejo of Iguaque-Merchán. Finally, we went south to Samacá in the complejo of Rabanal y Río Bogota. There were two complejos that we did not visit: Cocuy, where armed actors are still active, and Guantiva – La Rusia, the research focus of PARAGUAS, another ColombiaBIO project. Our colleagues are investigating conflicts around water in this area and you can learn about some of their work here.

For each visit we had a local guide or key contact, nearly all identifying as campesinos (peasants) themselves, but others were local activists, community leaders and environmental specialists, thereby providing us with a range of perspectives. Each one described the main local challenges, the defining political, economic, social and environmental changes over time and how these have affected the landscape and livelihoods. They took us on walks through some of the páramos and helped us to meet and talk to campesinos – this was crucial, in order to understand the campesinos’ lives, their relationship with the páramo land, and their experiences of environmental and social change.

Meeting a family and discussing their farming experiences in the complejo of Tota-Bijagual-Mamapacha.
Photo by Jery Hernán Ramos

Each region we visited was typified by different economic activities, local histories, landscapes and challenges. These included:

  • ecological and social tensions over mining (industrial and artisanal)
  • pressure to move towards tourism, often eco-tourism 
  • small scale, semi-subsistence mixed (crop and livestock) farming
  • small scale, intensive commercial farming (predominantly crops)
  • larger, intensive, monoculture commercial farming (onion)

During our time there, we began to distil some insights that are informing our next stage of research. One of these is that the armed conflict is not as obvious on the landscape as we expected. However, its underlying causes around land and livelihoods are still a source of tension and the opportunities opened up by the peace agreement to access land for conservation or natural resource exploitation purposes are not only challenged by these old and unresolved tensions, but might in fact be generating new ones.

Frailejón in the Páramos of Boyacá.
Photo by Lauren Blake

Thus, our next task will be to flesh out the diversity of conflicts in the páramos of Boyacá to interrogate on one hand the public policy idea that the páramo communities, problems and solutions are homogeneous; and, on the other, the very notion of “post” in the formal context of post-conflict. Through a mix of methods (including interviews, focus groups, participatory workshops, photo-voice, story maps, GIS, participant observation) we will focus on identifying:

  • the multiple and interconnected conflicts that need resolving if the ecosystem-livelihoods tension is to be addressed
  • the new conflicts that seem to be emerging from the delimitation process and its implementation
  • the daily, real life experiences and disparate challenges of the campesinos and how this relates to (or is disjointed from) the concerns and focus of local and national government
  • the different concepts and spatial understandings of what constitutes páramo land and what it means to different people
  • how the activities, changes and challenges fit into wider global trends of climate change, urbanisation, farming and food production and commercialisation

The next field research trip will crack on with formal data collection and is planned for the autumn/winter, so watch this space!

Authors: Lauren Blake and Maria Paula Escobar-Tello

UK-Colombia Integration Workshop, Bogotá 8-12th October 2018

We were delighted to attend the UK-Colombia Integration meeting in Bogota, which sought to enhance collaborations between the UK’s Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) and Colombia’s Colciencias-funded projects.

During the meeting, POR EL Páramo project lead Prof Terry Dawson provided a quick summary of our research objective and the components of the project:


The 5-day event was extremely productive, allowing our members from both Colombia and the UK to meet and hone our research strategy.

A number of promising collaborations were discussed, and we look forward to sharing our data collection and knowledge with these other researchers.

The meeting addition provided the opportunity to visit the Chingaza Páramo and learn first-hand about the cultural history, ecosystem and pressures affecting the upland environment.

 

Research preparations are currently on-going and the team hopes to return to the Páramo early 2018.

Members of the team during UK-Colombia integration meeting

POR EL Páramo Launch Event

On 11th July 2018, members of the POR EL Páramo team attended a UK integration meeting for recipients of the NERC Colombia BIO funding call held in Birmingham.

The meeting provided the opportunity for recipients’ to introduce their project proposals and to discuss opportunities for collaboration to ensure the most effective research outcomes from the research council funding.

More information on our project can be viewed on the About The Project page.

Project Funding Success

POR EL Páramo (POst-conflict Reconciliation of Environment and Livelihoods in Boyacá Páramos) was successful in its application to investigate environmental change, ecosystem services and the cultural history and identity associated with the Páramo environment of Boyaca, Colombia.

The research will take place over the next 3 years and involve stakeholder interviews, hydrological monitoring and modeling, satellite remote sensing, and ecosystem valuation.

It is hoped the research will lead to fair and equitable security of the ecosystem and livelihoods of the Páramo of Colombia following the 2016 peace agreement.

We are looking forward to embarking on the research!