Ethnohistorical and socio-economical variables in fruit and vegetable development processes

Abstract

The Universidad del Valle —Faculty of Natural and exact Sciences— submits to Colciencias a research project under the title of Development of a competitive rural agroindustrial system starting from promising crops in a bioregion of the Cauca Valley (which from this point forward will be called here Bioregion Project), for searching, within the fruit and vegetable regional sector,  the crops of Chili, Pumpkim and Curcuma in the municipalities of Guacarí, Ginebra, Yumbo and Dagua, in order to get funds from the National System of royalties (“Regalías”) from Colciencias.

Bioregion Project was carried out through the Faculties of Sciences and Engineering (for the technological development of the crops) and the Faculty of Humanities —History Department— for the anthropological and historical studies of the communities, the social support to them and the citizen participation and prior consultation processes, trying to articulate the technical and social dimensions for the development of the research proposal.

The aim of this report is to show, through the ethnographical account of the social component, the approach made to the diverse communities inhabiting the different ecosystems of the chosen municipalities, the historical search on the settlement process, the state of migration, the traditional productive processes, the local search for innovative technologies –if any--, the settlement infrastructure, the kin, family and organizational structure, and the levels of political action in their local and regional relationships.