Land, Coercion and State Building in Colombia

Various strands of the agrarian political economy literature agree that there has been a transition from extensive to intensive agriculture driven by agribusinesses in Latin America since the mid-20th century. Large, capital-intensive farms that produce for the international market not only dominate the most dynamic sectors (e.g. soy, sugar cane, fruits) but have expanded the area they occupy, reaching regions previously relatively "untouched" by commercial agriculture. Expanding large-scale agriculture driven by global demand and new technologies displaces less profitable and productive activities - such as extensive cattle ranching - to marginal areas with lower-quality soils, cheaper land and fragile ecosystems such as forests. These accounts are in line with the predictions of political economists who in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s observed state policies and market forces transforming traditional haciendas in non-marginal areas into large, highly productive farms connected to global markets. However, these accounts do not explain the rural political economy of Colombia, which is a deviant case within Latin American large countries' transition to intensive agriculture. First, extensive cattle ranching in Colombia has shown a persistent tendency to occupy most of the arable land, including non-marginal livestock areas where intensive agriculture could be more profitable. Second, large-scale commercial agriculture did appear, but the regional patterns it adopted did not follow the trend delineated by the literature (areas with better soils are occupied by intensive agriculture and those with worse soils specialize in extensive cattle ranching). In short, if we adopt a long-term viewpoint and incorporate a sub-national perspective, the Colombian case does not meet the expectations of the literature. Why is extensive cattle ranching so persistent in non-marginal areas and agro-industrial development constrained in Colombia? In this paper, I present an answer to this puzzle based on a subnational comparison. I argue that the persistence of low-productivity economies and the uneven development of large-scale commercial agriculture in Colombia are rooted in the historical relationship between the state and agrarian elites. Unlike other Latin American countries, where landed elites were primarily shaped into modern economic agents, Colombia's state-building process relied on delegating coercive and governance functions to large cattle ranchers, reinforcing their dominance over an extensive, low-productivity agrarian economy. This governance model created a structure of incentives that shielded ranchers from market pressures, limiting agro-industrial expansion.