Climate-smart Farming in Colombia’s Last Agricultural Frontier
When cattle rancher Jorge Rodriguez established his farm years ago in the Meta Department of Colombia’s Orinoquía region, he decided to call it La Esperanza, meaning hope.
Rodriguez was not alone. Between 1990 and 2015, more than 1 million hectares of Orinoquía’s forests, mostly in the Meta Department, were cleared to create pasture land. Colombia’s Orinoquía region is a massive, 25-million-hectare savanna and wetland area in the east of the country, bordering Venezuela. It is home to almost 1.5 million people. In recent years, large-scale land conversion has happened throughout the region to increase the production of livestock, palm oil, cacao, rubber, and rice.
