Colombia: Can Sustainable Farming Revive Colombia’s Former Killing Fields?

Mar 16, 2016 | Karen Tatiana Pardo, El Espectador
View Original

In what was once the setting of civil war and gangland murder, peasants in northern Colombia's Montes de María region are using sustainable farming practices to rebuild a degraded environment. It may be a ticket to their future. The innovative approaches include protecting the dry tropical forest of the Caribbean coast, using efficient cooking techniques to burn much less wood and growing food in small vegetable patches. This was "a very violent zone, where people used to flee their lands empty-handed just to avoid their sons being kidnapped and their daughters raped," an old man with a moustache says as he chews green mango in San Juan Nepomuceno's main park. "These villages are practically entirely inhabited by victims of violence. But why don't you ask them about how we feel now and how we are being forced out again. Not by war this time but by drought, which is killing us.