The government of Abelardo De La Espriella in Colombia, which has just completed a month since taking office, aims to modify the economic and social life of the population and has shown that this depends on the way it communicates with society. Last week, Indalecio Dangond, the new Minister of Agriculture, told Congress that the administration will abolish the use of the word “campesino,” which it considers demeaning.
For the government, the country’s food producers should be referred to by expressions such as “agricultural producer” and “small rural entrepreneur.” To representatives of the Senate and House economic committees, he said the measure seeks to “raise the status” of rural workers and dignify their work.
Immediately, there were criticisms from opposition lawmakers and constitutional rights experts, who recalled that the expression “campesinos” appears in Article 64 of the Colombian Constitution, which recognizes peasantry as a subject of rights and of special constitutional protection.
To clarify the issue, Dangond went to social media: “To end the discussion: ‘peasant’ and ‘agro-producer’ are not synonyms. ‘Peasant’ identifies a social, economic, territorial, or family farming condition. ‘Producer or agro-businessman’ is a broader productive category: it includes everyone from the small producer to the rural entrepreneur. Recognizing the differences does not divide the countryside. On the contrary, it allows us to design better policies for everyone,” he wrote on X.
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But other information about changes in communication emerged after the congressional controversy. The National Land Agency (ANT) would have received instructions on the language they should use in reports and communicative content. The term “land reform,” for example, should be replaced with “land access” or “formalization,” according to reports from Colombian websites.
Indalecio Dangond is a business administrator and has about four decades of experience in agricultural financing and rural development projects in Colombia.
According to information released when his name was made official at the Agriculture Ministry, Dangond will focus on three main axes: facilitating banking inclusion for 2.5 million peasants, advancing the legalization of rural property titles, and promoting the construction of irrigation districts to strengthen the productivity of Colombian countryside. The government wants, through these initiatives, to broaden access to credit, technical assistance, and opportunities for rural producers.
Among the proposals the new minister will push are conducting a national agricultural census, creating 700 rural entrepreneurship schools to foster generational renewal, and a program to substitute 50 thousand hectares of crops used illicitly, with palm projects in Tumaco and cocoa in Tibú.
On Monday, while taking stock of a month in office, the minister said that one of the objectives is to enable Colombia to position itself among the benchmarks of agricultural trade by 2030. He noted that, while countries like Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina have made significant progress in the last decades, Colombia lags behind with about 5.5 million hectares cultivated, while 2.4 million small producers face serious productivity challenges.
