Rural Geographies of Exclusion: Páramo livestock farmers in Boyacá, Colombia

Keywords: Livestock, páramos, delimitation, conservation, Colombia
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

This presentation uses interview data collected from livestock farming communities in the páramos of Boyacá, Colombia, to point out the spatial challenges that the country’s environmental authorities will face when trying to implement and enforce the “Ley de Páramos” from 2018, which seeks to determine who is allowed to do what in this Andean habitat through a policy of “delimitation”. Páramos are high altitude ecosystems in the Andes (Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela) whose biomes capture, store and produce water for the benefit of the rural communities that inhabit them as well as for downstream urban towns. National discourses of conservation blame the local smallholders for the páramos’ environmental degradation and have sought to use the delimitation line to discipline farmers’ agricultural activities. While the delimitation line has been drawn up at landscape level, meandering around the 3000m of altitude as the supposed limit for when the land is effectively páramo, its implementation foresees a process of land-use reconversion at farm level. We will argue that this misalignment 1. evidences contradictions in the socio-spatial understanding of the páramos, and 2. will proscribe an entire local economy based on community ties and solidarity rather than simply farm-level activities. Policymakers’ and implementers’ attention to the social complexities of the livestock-based economy we have uncovered would facilitate progress in their own definition of what they mean by high or low impact activities.