‘We now live without this violence’: the Colombian farmers giving up coca for palm oil

Subsidies and a crackdown on armed groups are helping smallholders rebuild their lives, leaving behind decades of conflict and fear Surrounded by towering oil palm trees on his farm in the small village of Caño Barbú, near San Pablo in northern Colombia , Yoger Payares uses a malayo – a pole-mounted iron tool with a hook – to hack at the fronds of one, freeing a bunch of its vibrant reddish-orange fruit so it falls to the ground.

Today, Payares proudly works in the oil palm industry.

But for more than a decade, just yards away, he grew coca leaves, becoming embroiled in the illicit industry in 1990 after leaving his job as a cattle farmer.

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