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Exports and Economic Development in Colombia: A Regional Perspective, 1830–1929

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The First Export Era Revisited

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Economic History ((PEHS))

Abstract

From the immediate postindependence period to the Great Depression, Colombia went from having a mining-based export sector to being a mono-exporting coffee country. In the meantime, several relatively short export cycles were based on agricultural and forestry products. Although the different export cycles occurred in specific regions that combined different agricultural structures, socioeconomic stratifications, and production systems, none of them survived the fall in prices resulting from growing globalization pressures, except in those cases where production could be adapted to forms of production based on peasant workforce. Based on this idea, Ocampo and Colmenares analyze the evolution of exports for a century and its contribution to industrialization and economic modernization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Melo (2015), the most densely populated areas were: the plateau of Cundinamarca and Boyacá and the Suárez River basin in the eastern part of the country; the area composed of the populations of Pasto, Túquerres, Popayán, and Cali, in the southwest; the central zone of Antioquia; and the coastal region around the nuclei of Cartagena, Mompox, and Santa Marta.

  2. 2.

    Botero and Vallecilla (2010) tried to refute the idea that in the mid-nineteenth century the regions of Colombia were “economic archipelagos”, based on evidence of interregional trade that can be observed in the reports of the Choreographic Commission directed by Agustín Codazzi. Their results are interesting, but not conclusive, as they do not have information on the volume or value of interregional trade flows.

  3. 3.

    Concertaje makes reference to a type of labor relation in which workers of a hacienda were paid with money but were also attached to the hacienda by different means, such as the placement of dwellings for the worker and his family inside the hacienda, the authorization for using grazing lands of the hacienda in order to raise some cattle, the allowance for harvesting food crops, among others. In exchange, concertados were demanded to do paid work for the landowner a certain number of days during the week.

  4. 4.

    In rural societies gamonal makes reference to a local political boss who also owned large portions of land. A strong local master that concentrates political and economic power at the local level.

  5. 5.

    It is important to qualify this idea with the case of banana production in the department of Magdalena, from the early years of the twentieth century. However, this is a case that must be examined under different parameters, for here the entire production and marketing process was carried out by foreign capital, who directly owned the land on which the plantations were established, in addition to entering into agreements with the peasants of the area for the provision of fruit. According to Bucheli (2005), banana production ended in this region as a result of the high labor conflict in the plantations, which led the company to specialize in commercialization and to abandon production.

  6. 6.

    Ideally, we should calculate from 1850 instead of 1841/1845, but we lack data for the years 1846–1854.

  7. 7.

    For an analysis of micro-export cycles during the second half of the nineteenth century, see Ocampo (1984, pp. 105–118). The tobacco and coffee cases are discussed in the last section of this essay.

  8. 8.

    Note that due to the unfavorable behavior of the terms of trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the poor performance of exports in those years, the general balance of the nineteenth century changes according to whether we take 1898 or some early year in the twentieth century as a cutoff date.

  9. 9.

    Two other regions of Colombia that exported tobacco during the second half of the nineteenth century were Palmira and Santander. However, their share of exports was relatively modest.

  10. 10.

    According to René de la Pedraja (1979, p. 48), in 1833 57% of the farmers planted 6000 bushes or less.

  11. 11.

    In this region, the abundance of free lands and the effect of the agrarian structure on the forms of production were evident to contemporaries. See the report of the Governor of the Province of Corozal for the year 1874, Gaceta de Bolívar, 30 July 1874, pp. 158–160.

  12. 12.

    See the report presented by the Prefect of the Province of El Carmen to the Governor of the Department, Registro de Bolívar, 23 October 1906, pp. 461–462.

  13. 13.

    For an analysis of the credit system of merchants to the harvesting families, see Colmenares (2017).

  14. 14.

    It is important to clarify that the export price (upper line) is not strictly comparable to the prices for peasants and traders: while the latter corresponded to tobacco leaves after having been harvested and dried on the peasant farm, the export price included all the costs of classification of the leaf into three types, fermentation and packaging, so that tobacco, in this latter form, incorporated a higher value added.

  15. 15.

    In any case, it could not be said that the livestock industry was driven directly by the export of tobacco, since its final destination was the consumption of meat, independent of the production of leather.

  16. 16.

    It should not be unknown, however, that in the zone of Antioquia’s colonization also existed other labor systems, similar to the sharecropping, but adapted to the conditions of small- and medium-sized farms. These were the systems of contracts for “company”, “profit company”, and “purchase”, which in any case were minority against individual family property. For an analysis of all these systems, see Machado (1988, pp. 150–159).

  17. 17.

    Arango (1977, pp. 192–197) estimates that the peasants were exploited by small traders (fonderos), only receiving for the grain 50% of the current prices in the commercial plazas of the region.

  18. 18.

    Still in 1953 a high proportion of the demand for industrial goods in this region came from the rural sector. See CEPAL (1957, Table 222).

  19. 19.

    For an account of the creation of textile enterprises by notable merchant families of Antioquia such as Vásquez, Restrepo, Echavarría, Ospina, Medina, and Mejía, see Brew (1977, pp. 378–385).

  20. 20.

    Since what is of interest here is the relationship between the export sector and industrialization, we leave aside other factors that are no less important in the explanation of textile development in the first decades of the twentieth century in Antioquia. These are the resources available in the region to obtain hydraulic power, availability of cheap labor (women and children), natural protection given by transport costs, tariff protectionism, the Civil War of 1899–1902, WWI, and the devaluation of the currency. In this regard see Brew (1977, pp. 373–375).

  21. 21.

    The following analysis is based on Ocampo (2015) and Ocampo and Montenegro (1984).

  22. 22.

    Oil and bananas, on the other hand, experienced little growth, and the second experienced the effects of the strike on plantations in 1928 and black sigatoka thereafter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    José Antonio Ocampo

  2. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Santiago Colmenares Guerra

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  1. José Antonio Ocampo
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  2. Santiago Colmenares Guerra
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  1. El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Sandra Kuntz-Ficker

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Ocampo, J.A., Colmenares Guerra, S. (2017). Exports and Economic Development in Colombia: A Regional Perspective, 1830–1929. In: Kuntz-Ficker, S. (eds) The First Export Era Revisited. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62340-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62340-5_6

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