The Peasant Agroalimentary Territories – Echoing Post-development?

Inequality in access to land in Latin America, has led several rural communities to design and implement alternative forms of territorial management. In this article the identification and analysis of the characteristics of the Peasant Agroalimentary Territories (TCA for its Spanish acronym), which is the most recent territorial planning proposal in Colombia is offered; it rapidly has spread throughout this country and seems to be putting into practice some of the principles of post-development.

Confronting the current “development” dynamics (massive extraction, production, consumption, and disposal), post-development is a current of thought, gaining strength in Latin America that proposes to recover economic and environmental principles for achieving a more inclusive and equitable world. Hence, and based mainly on primary information collected (between 2019 and 2022) through interviews with social leaders and TCA inhabitants, minutes from meetings, and private documentation of other events related to their promotion and implementation, their main features and the progress in their establishment are explained.

The comparison between the theoretical principles of post-development and the TCA practices offers enough evidence to conclude that the peasant communities involved with the TCA are close enough to questioning hegemonic discourses and practices of development, understood mainly as economic growth. Another conclusion is TCA have not been created as a one-size-fits-all recipe, but rather seek to be as flexible and diverse as necessary. This characteristic is particularly important since it makes them easily reproducible in other rural contexts, and they do not depend on the rural location of a country or global region, on the geographic or ecosystem context, or on the social group that wants to organize it; instead, TCA provide the opportunity to recover a series of values and actions that are an integral part of a global trend in search of a transition towards a balance between the rights of human societies and those of Nature.