In Peace and Rural Development in Colombia: The Window for Distributive Change in Negotiated Transitions, Andrés García Trujillo investigates whether peace agreements geared towards terminating internal armed conflicts trigger rural distributive changes.

This review assesses the performance of Colombian agriculture over the last two decades, evaluates Colombian agricultural policy reforms and provides recommendations to address key challenges in the future.

Faguet identifies the factors that determine the outcomes of national decentralization on the local level

What is responsible for the persistence of underdevelopment in rural Latin America? Merilee S. Grindle analyzes the role of public policies in stimulating agrarian change in Latin America from 1940 to 1980.

A fresh perspective on the way the Peruvian government's major 1969 agrarian reforms transformed the social, cultural, and political landscape of the country.

This book explores food provisioning in Colombia by examining the role and impact of the agrarian negotiations which took place in the aftermath of the 2013–2014 national strikes. Most of the research in the field of agrarian studies in Colombia has focused on inequalities in land distribution, the impacts of violent conflict, and most recently, the first phase of the peace agreement implementation. This book links and complements these literatures by critically engaging with an original framework that uncovers the conflicts and politics of food provisioning: who produces what and where, and with what socio-economic effects. This analytical lens is used to explain the re-emergence of national agrarian movements, their contestation of the dominant development narratives and their engagement in discussions about food sovereignty with the state. The analysis incorporates a wide range of voices from high-level government representatives and leaders from national agrarian movements. Their narratives of food provisioning and the broader role of the food industry are reviewed and the key findings show an underlying conflict within food provisioning based on the struggle of marginalised smallholders to develop alternative agri-food systems that can be included in the local and domestic food markets in the context of a state dominated by an export and import approach. Overall, the book argues that the battle ground of agrarian conflicts has moved to the fi eld of food provisioning and using this approach has the potential to reframe the debate about the future of food and agriculture in Colombia and beyond. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and agriculture, rural development, peasant studies, and Latin American Studies.

Based on a large survey to compare the effectiveness of land markets and land reform in Colombia, Deininger finds that rental and sales markets were more effective in transferring land to poor but productive producers than was administrative land reform. The fact that land transactions were all of a short-term nature and that little land was transferred from very large to small land owners or the landless suggests that there may be scope for policies both to improve the functioning of land markets and to facilitate greater land access by the most disadvantaged. Analysis of the factors associated with success in a sample of land transfers from large to small producers helps to identify key elements for policies in both respects. This paper--a product of Rural Development, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to analyze the impact of land policies.