Category Archives: General

General issues.

Presenting my Colombian case study area

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During the last two weeks, I was in Bogotá to talk to experts from the IER at the Javeriana University as well as the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development to find out about public support for joint capacity building in rural Colombia. Now, I am back in the department of Santander to start my field work.

In order to be able to do an in-depth study of a) how support for joint capacity building in rural areas is organized and b) how this support is evaluated by its beneficiaries, I narrowed my case study area down to one municipality: Floridablanca.

Main square in Floridablanca

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Excursion to Los Maklenkes nature reserve

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Last Monday (21st of November), I participated in a field trip to Los Maklenkes nature reserve on top of the mountain La Judía in the municipality of Floridablanca, close to Bucaramanga. This nature reserve is managed by the peasants living around the reserve and, amongst others, sponsored by the Dutch state lottery. The field trip was part of the festival for urban-rural dialogue, in which I participated the previous weekend.

Los Maklenkes Nature Reserve, Floridablanca, Colombia

The day started with a gathering of all participants to make our way up the mountain to the nature reserve. It was an adventurous drive with 16 people in one Jeep, going up steeper and steeper mud-paths. I dared not to look to the right where the mountain was falling as steep to the ground as the road was crawling up.

Upon arrival at the entrance of the park, we were greeted by the local peasants and informed about the history of the nature reserve and its aim to protect biodiversity and water reservoirs. Following the introduction, we switched into our rubber boots and commenced with a three hour hiking tour through the reservoir.

Getting ready for our hike

Here, we saw the organic agro-forest farming activities which are being initiated under the facilitation of Fundaexpresión, a local NGO for promoting participatory research activities and education in peasant communities. I saw plantain and banana trees, coffee plants and avocado trees.

Banana tree

Following our hike, we settled in the communal house of the reserve to discuss nature protection activities in the high Andes and their impact on the livelihoods of peasants. At the end of the discussion, it was agreed that the provision of information and the creation of knowledge at local level was the most crucial point in enabling local peasants to deal with the resulting pressures on their livelihoods. The provision of information and the facilitation of capacity building were, however, regarded as poor. It was agreed that more attention must be given to the provision of information and the facilitation of capacity building at local level should peasants be enabled to deal with pressures on their livelihoods resulting from nature protection activities.

II Festival de Expresiones Urbanas y Rurales: Diálogo por la Diversidad y Buen Vivir, Bucaramanga, Colombia

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Last weekend (18-20 of November 2011), I was able to participate in the II Festival for urban-rural dialogue in the barrio La Joya in Bucaramanga, Colombia. The festival was visited by peasants (such as fishers, women groups, and farmers), indigenous groups as well as knowledge brokers from all over Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Cuba. In addition, urban citizens from Bucaramanga, and La Joya in particularly, participated in the event. This mix of participants created a valuable learning environment for everyone (including me), and resulted in new ideas and organisations amongst the participants. In a way, this festival reminded me of the rural cafés I visited in the Westerkwartier, the Netherlands.

The overall theme of the event was the environmental conflicts in rural Colombia resulting on the one hand from the numerous (and often multinational) economic exploitation activities (e.g. gold mining, hydroelectric power activities and monoculture) and on the other hand from conservation activities.

Poster presented at festival

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On the trail of regional learning in rural Colombia

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Over the last two and a half years, we have been investigating arrangements to support regional learning in various rural areas across Europe (EU-project DERREG). This intense period of field work and data analysis has given me a first idea of just how complex this subject is, how diverse supportive arrangements can be, and how dependent their success is on the regional contexts in which they are implemented.

As if this complexity is not already enough to ponder about, my curiosity and interest in mutual learning for development has urged me to also investigate this topic outside the European Union. I was particularly interested in questioning how rural regional learning is supported in, what is commonly referred to as, “developing” countries. So, here I am in Colombia,

Downtown Bogotá, Colombia

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Bruno Benvenuti – in memoriam

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Bruno Benvenuti

 On the 15th of September 2011 we received the sad news that Bruno Benvenuti has passed away. For several of us working in the Rural Sociology Group, Bruno Benvenuti has been a professor who left a strong imprint on our academic formation and research work. Benvenuti enriched the body of rural sociological theory with his analysis of the Technological-Administrative Task Environment (TATE) within which farmers have to operate – an analysis that proves to be even more valuable today than at the moment it was formulated for the first time. 

For Benvenuti the interest in TATE relations and the way they ‘discipline’ farmers, whilst simultaneously standardizing farm practices, represented a wider concern, i.e. the general relations between structure and agency. This wider interest resulted in a range of scientific papers, some still very well known. The same interest reflected, on its turn, part of the complex biography of Benvenuti. After the horrors of war and fascism (being an adolescent he lost his father during a bombardment after which he had to take care of the family) he met, as angry young man who was extremely worried about the agricultural situation in Italy, the later EU commissioner for agriculture, Sicco Mansholt. After considerable quarrels about the role of politics, the latter invited Bruno Benvenuti to come over to the Netherlands in order to get acquainted with Dutch agriculture and the Dutch agrarian policy. He came to know Evert Willem Hofstee, the founding father of rural sociology in the Netherlands who invited Benvenuti to study the ‘modernization’ of agriculture and to write a Ph.D. about it. 

The successful defence of his thesis was followed by a career, first in the then emerging European Commission, then in Mogadishu. This was followed by path-breaking research in the North of Italy where Vito Saccomandi, who later became Minister of Agriculture, was one of Bruno’s young research assistants. This was followed by a period of teaching, first in Italy, then again in Wageningen and finally, before his retirement, in Viterbo in Italy. 

Bruno Benvenuti experienced, as it were, in his own life, the overwhelming powers of e.g. fascism, neo-colonialism (in his Mogadishu period) and the supra-national state. At the same time he knew, from his own experiences, that differences could be made: that agency matters. This turned him into a very serious and dedicated man, permanently worried about the big contradictions of our time. Superficiality was a horror to him and as a teacher he made us feel, time and again, our responsibility in this ‘age of extremes’.

Bruno Benvenuti died in the Italian village Pietrasanta, where he spend the last years of his life in joy. We lost an important and thoughtful colleague. Several of us also lost a very good friend and a source of inspiration.

Che la terra che ha amato tanto, gli sia lieve.

On behalf of my colleagues,

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg