Cooking paradoxes: Cannabis cultivation and Thul Nasa in the indigenous community of Tierra de Niebla in Cauca, Colombia.

The SEGURA project aims to understand the relationship between food security and conflict by studying the mechanisms, dynamics, dependencies, and correlations between the two. At one end of this relationship is food security. According to the FAO (1996), food security exists when households have regular access to safe, sufficient, and culturally appropriate food. Households can access food through many mechanisms, such as the market, state social programs, or subsistence farming. In this presentation, I focus on this latter mechanism, the production of food items for self-consumption. On the other end of the relationship, there is conflict. Many causes have contributed to the extension and degradation of the armed conflict in Colombia, among them drug trafficking and its counterpart, the "war on drugs." In this war, smallholder farmers who grow crops for illegal use have suffered the most because they find themselves in the crossfire between the state and the insurgent groups, actors who follow a strategy of "anything goes". These families are usually trapped in poverty, abandonment, marginality, and weak institutional presence. This presentation focuses on them and aims to echo their experiences and perceptions. I address the relationship between subsistence crops and crops of illegal use using a case study, that of the indigenous community of Tierra de Niebla in the department of Cauca. Tierra de Niebla is located north of the Cauca department and has a majority Nasa population. This community is the ideal place to study this relationship because, since 2020, it has experienced a territorial and social emergency triggered, in part, by the decision of approximately 600 families to grow cannabis on communal land. Moreover, Tierra de Niebla has a solid agricultural profile since at least 86% of households grow food for self-consumption in the Thul Nasa.