The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

78 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
dants, in the mid-forties, for example, and also in 1961 (cfv Institute
de Parcelaciones, 1950).
The Commercialization of Peasant Agriculture
The bandit-led struggle was transformed into a more
modern political movement in the 19203 as peasants created militant
syndicates. These spread over Colombia in the 19205 and early
19305, but subsided thereafter with the election of a reformist national
government (Gilhodes, 1970:411-22). At the same time peasant
cultivation became increasingly oriented toward cash crops. In
1833, according to a census of the province of Popayan, the annual
production of cocoa in the Puerto Tejada region was a mere 11.4
metric tons and there was no coffee (compare this with figures for
the 18505 in Codazzi, 1959, 2:69). In 1950 all peasant plots were
planted in cocoa and coffee with, of course, some plantain as well.
Around 6,000 tons of cocoa were produced annually, all of it from
peasant holdings. Monsalve's (much criticized) census of 1925 reported
59,000 coffee trees in the municipality of Puerto Tejada. The
National Federation of Coffee Growers reported 576,000 in 1932; an
increase of almost 1000 percent in seven years. As peasants turned
to more intensive cash cropping, they also became more dependent
on money, to the detriment of their earlier autarky; they boarded
a treadmill on which they sold most of what they produced and
bought much of what they consumed. Increased production of cash
crops was caused by the declining size of plots, by the new monetary
demands of landlords determined to squeeze out in rent what they
could not get through dispossession, and by the legal and de facto security
to land that perennials bestowed. Cash cropping was also a
response to the inducements and pressures of incoming merchant
traders representing large business houses, the tentacles of which
sprouted from the national capital and the northern hemisphere.
A part-time resident of the valley and descendant of the Eder family,
Phanor Eder, has left us the following description of rural commerce
around 1910. He said that the bulk of the country's business
was done by general stores, which functioned as exporters and importers,
wholesalers and retailers. Foreign trade worked through
commission houses of the United States and Europe. Even a large
part of the gold and silver went through the same firms. In the coffee
trade, the larger planters shipped directly to the commission merchants,
to whom they were often indebted for advances. The smaller
planters sold to the general stores, which financed the purchases by