‘Better to Call Them Flower Vultures': The Colombian Cut Flower Industry and the Fight over Water on the Sabana de Bogotá

• In Event: Extracting and Commodifying Aquatic Resources

Abstract

Residents on the Sabana de Bogotá had no water. And they knew who to blame – cut flower exporters. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, commercial floriculture, a water-intensive agricultural industry, exploded onto the Colombian economy with surprising force. Within 15 years, it had expanded from a small shipment of carnations in 1965 into a $200 million industry and the nation’s third largest agricultural export behind coffee and bananas. But as commercial flower production blossomed across the Sabana – the highland plateau on which the capital city sits – the region’s limited water supplies began to dry up. With much of the Sabana’s water already diverted to the metropolitan center of Bogotá, the rise of commercial floriculture exacerbated extant water shortages and left many living on the outskirts of the capital without potable drinking water or irrigation for food crops.

My paper examines the often-heated negotiations between Sabana residents and flower farm owners over who had the greater right to use and control the inadequate water supply. Small-scale farmers argued that they needed the water to fulfill their role as food producers for both local communities and the capital city. Flower farm owners, in contrast, contended that as a major employer for the region and an economic powerhouse within the local and national economy, they should be able to use the water necessary to provide beautiful flowers for international consumers. Caught in the middle, community leaders worked to appease both groups and preserve the region’s rural identity without sacrificing the economic benefits brought by commercial flower cultivation. In recounting these struggles over water usage on the Sabana, my work demonstrates the environmental impacts of intensive, export-oriented agriculture on the border between urban and rural spaces.

Author

• Kaitlin Amanda Simpson, University of Tennessee, Knoxville