Colombia’s Agricultural Land Conversion, Expansion, and Policies

Colombia currently imports roughly $5.6 billion worth of agricultural and food products each year. Colombia is the third largest of the South American markets in terms of population and the largest market for U.S. agricultural exports to South America at $2.4 billion. Colombian agriculture is at a historical turning point because of a convergence of several positive factors, including the United States-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA), ongoing efforts to increase agricultural production and improve efficiency, and the prospects for fuller involvement of the Colombian population in their country’s food system, both as consumers and as producers. In Colombia, conversion of range, pasture, and forest land into cropland is an important factor in the growth of agriculture. This study seeks to examine how rapidly and to what extent might crop and livestock output in Colombia expand into traditional and agricultural frontier regions and the implications of such an expansion for agricultural trade. This assessment will be done using a partial equilibrium model of the Colombian agricultural and food economy. The model takes market-clearing world prices as given, both in the historical and projected years. The world prices feed into determination of Colombia’s commodity prices, which in turn generate, for ten or more years into the future, supply and demand balances for modeled commodities.