Abundance and Starvation

Colombian meals are big, and there’s a simple reason why. In rural areas feasts fall from trees, and regardless how much (nuclear) families of up to 20 people eat, food inevitably rots on the ground, nourishing the dark, moist humus. Although a majority of Colombians now live in cities, the countryside is still the cradle of national culture and tradition. Most city restaurants serve country-style meals.

A $3 lunch also comes with soup, coffee and fresh fruit smoothie

It is curious then that in spite of such abundance, Colombians eat as though their food might disappear if it’s left on the plate too long.

Beyond curious, however, is the fact that in such a bountiful country children die of hunger. Three kids a day. Not in the countryside, but in city outskirts where blocks of land that measure six metres by two metres are sold to displaced and marginalised families for $400. Twelve square metres to build a family home, and the families rarely have $400.

Corrupt politicians and businessmen know this. Families who can’t afford to pay for the land work in indentured labour for whoever might ‘own’ the land. ‘Own’ because men with power and influence claim public land as their own, and rent it to families in need of shelter, even though they themselves have no legal right to it.

In reality, the families do not actually buy the land, since there is no owner; instead they pay a kind of feudal tax. At the end of the first year, when the family may have nearly payed the $400,
they are charged $800 for the right to live there a second year. In the poor and rapidly expanding south of Bogotá, this is an unspoken normality. Nobody says or does a thing, because corruption is institutionalised. Land is the source of power in Colombia, and the key to understanding a conflict whose beginning nobody remembers, and whose end few can see.