*3.2.3 From peasant agriculture to wheat-barley monocultures fourteenth and twentieth centuries*

Prior to the arrival of the Hispanic occupation, the most characteristic indigenous peoples of the high equatorial mountains were the various peoples of the Cauca River, the Patía and the Putumayo, the Quimbaya peoples of the Central Mountain Range, the Pijao people in Tolima, the great Muisca people in the Cundiboyacense highlands and the Arawak peoples. Tairona, kogi, arsarios, and others in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

From these peoples and their miscegenation with the Hispanic element, a mestizo peasant people emerged that today characterizes the majority of the Colombian population in the highlands.

From the sixteenth century with the Hispanic occupation, cereal crops such as wheat and barley and deciduous fruit trees were introduced, which displaced, either by intensity or by express prohibition of the Spanish crown to indigenous crops. Cattle and sheep also entered, which became an element of high importance for peasant life, due to its milk, meat and wool products, the latter replacing cotton in blankets throughout the highlands of Cundiboyacense and Santander mainly. In this way what brought the Hispanic invasion to the Colombian Andean zone was not its culture but its Mediterranean nature forged by long centuries of Roman, Mongolic and Arab occupation.

Throughout the period from the sixteenth century until the first half of the twentieth century, the occupation of these peoples was made in the areas of the equatorial forests of high mountain. During the Colony, it was these forests that provided wood inputs for the nascent and flourishing peoples during this period and the first phase of the birth of the Republic between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The occupation of species such as oak encenillo, tuno, cucharo el cedar, and guayacán stands out.

Peasant agriculture in these high mountain areas was characterized by crop rotation between corn, potatoes, quinoa, and legumes typical of the area and others brought from the old continent such as barley, wheat, and oats.

In particular, these last two crops formed the basis of peasant economies that provided for a long period of inputs for bread and beverages in urban areas of towns and cities. Whole wheat bread, soups of various varieties of wheat and barley were staples of families in the cold lands and especially in cities such as Bogotá, Tunja, and Popayán. The peasant arepa based on corn and its multiple forms of preparation is today one of the staple foods of the Colombian population.

#### **3.3 Industrialization of the countryside and extractivism**

#### *3.3.1 Industrial potato monoculture and its impact on high Andean ecosystems*

Since pre-Hispanic times, the peoples of the highlands of the Andes and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta cultivated potatoes as one of their most precious products along with corn and arracacha. Until the early twentieth century in Boyacá, various varieties of wild potatoes were collected, which were born spontaneously in the clearings of the high Andean forests. Due to the population growth of urban areas after the 1950s, the demand for this tuber grew and with it research on new varieties. Prior to the Green Revolution that emerged strongly in the 1960s, potato crops were fertilized with organic materials resulting from the composting of livestock and poultry manure, as well as ash from the burning of firewood as fuel in peasant homes. At this time, potato crops were made in the area of Andean forests up to 3000 m above sea level. The introduction of new varieties of potato dependent on agrochemicals for fertilization and control of pests and diseases, generated during the Green Revolution, was propitiating the occupation of moors and areas of high Andean forest, encouraging the monopolization of land in fewer and fewer smallholder owners or tenants of peasant plots, which altered the mosaic of high Andean mountain ecosystems where the main victim was the forest. In this way, the large forest masses have been disappearing at the expense of the agricultural frontier for potato planting with rotation with semi-extensive livestock that today characterizes much of the territory. During the 1990s, especially in the Central mountain range, poppy crops proliferated in these areas. One of the great socio-environmental problems of today is the uncontrollable growth of industrial potato crops, with high consumption of biocides that affect the recharge areas and birth of water resources of thousands of streams and hundreds of rivers. During this process, the peasant went from small smallholder with his plot of multi-stratum crops to day laborer in potato crops and cattle farms in these mountainous regions.
