Through a diplomatic note sent to the General Secretary of the United Nations, the Colombian State expresses its decision to support and implement the United Nations Declaration of Peasants Rights. With this note, sent by the Government at the end of 2022, Colombia joins the list of countries committed to respecting and guaranteeing the rights of rural populations.
In mid-August, the Government filed before Congress the bill that seeks to recognize the peasantry as subject to rights, including the right to land and territoriality. This project, which was already approved in the first of eight debates in the legislative body, also provides for the integration of the United Nations Declaration on Peasant Rights into the constitutional block, granting it a normative hierarchy within the internal legal system.
Advances in the recognition and guarantee of peasant rights have not been limited to regulatory actions, the processes of formalizing land for small peasants and recognition of Peasant Reserve Zones (PRZ) also move forward. In the last 6 months, 1.4 million hectares of land have been formalized and 4 Peasant Reserve Zones have been approved, which represents an important advance since in the last 20 years only one PRZ had been approved in Montes de María.
Currently, Colombia has 11 Peasant Reserve Zones, which function as a figure of the social ordering of the territory that seeks to correct the phenomena of inequitable concentration of land, consolidate the peasant economy and protect food sovereignty.
It is important to highlight that the land handover process agreed in the 2016 Peace Accord finally began: last March 2, 6,195 peasant families received 3,532 hectares of purchased land.
