Colombia: Only 26% of rural women own the land they work
In the furrows of the earth, where life and hope germinate, Colombian peasant women have forged a path of struggle and resistance. Through the National Unitary Agricultural Trade Union Federation (Fensuagro), along with other rural Colombian organizations, we are protagonists in the construction of peasant and popular feminism, a feminism that is born from the land and strengthened by solidarity and collective struggle.
The peasant women who fuel change not only produce nearly 50% of the food in rural areas, but have also been guardians of native seeds, water, and ancestral knowledge. Their work is fundamental to food sovereignty, understood not only as the right to decide what to plant and how to feed their communities, but also as a tool of resistance against the agribusiness model that expels people from the countryside, especially women who bear the consequences of dispossession.
Fensuagro has expressed it clearly: “Peasant and popular feminism is women’s struggle for land, for water, for the right to live with dignity. It means confronting the patriarchy that intersects with the neoliberal model that wants us out of the countryside.”
Peasant and popular feminism is a struggle from the land. It has been built by the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations, CLOC Vía Campesina, and La Vía Campesina. It is a response to the multiple forms of oppression faced by women in the countryside. This struggle not only combats machismo, but also land dispossession, state and paramilitary violence, and the precariousness of rural life. It is based on the conviction that structural changes are necessary, in which social justice and gender equity are essential priorities.
The women of Fensuagro have denounced the lack of access to land, which remains one of the greatest barriers to their autonomy. Although they represent 40% of the agricultural workforce, only 26% of rural women in Colombia own the land they work. Despite this, they have managed to consolidate popular education processes, agricultural cooperatives, and political training spaces where leadership is built from the community.
Throughout Colombia, from the Cauca Mountains to the Llanos del Meta, the Caribbean mangroves, the highlands, and the Amazon, peasant organizations and organized women have promoted peasant markets, led struggles for land restitution, and built collective care networks that challenge the patriarchal logic of invisible labor. The struggle of rural women goes beyond their own recognition; it is a struggle for the transformation of the agrarian, social, and economic model as a whole.
As La Vía Campesina has pointed out: “With feminism, there is food sovereignty.” With every seed they protect, every plot they recover, and every march they participate in, they firmly demonstrate that the future of the Colombian countryside will be feminist, or it will not be at all.