Formally owning land provides rural family wealth, which can be used as an inheritance or as collateral for a loan. Landowners are less likely to fall under the sway of revolutionary Marxist groups, such as the FARC: “People with nothing to lose are trapped in the grubby basement of the pre-capitalist world,” de Soto wrote in 2001 in an article for the International Monetary Fund. .

In addition, from the government’s point of view, the granting of land titles allows it to collect property taxes and gives more weight to illegal behavior. “Once someone who has an illegal activity owns that piece of land, the incentive to do this illegal thing decreases dramatically as it becomes their asset,” Botero told me.

To save time and money, the Dutch government is helping Colombians with a surveyor project modeled on the Chinese barefoot doctors – health workers who have received basic training and then sent to areas where there were not enough doctors. Here is how the survey project is described on the Land in Peace website:

The farmers themselves do a lot of the work: with a special application on smartphones or tablets, they walk along the boundaries of their land to demarcate their plot. Photos are also made of documents (ID, tax bills, electricity bills), which connect the people on this particular plot to this land and are digitally combined with the GPS measurements of the polygons for subsequent municipal public inspection. . When the farmers in the community agree on the map they have drawn up, the land title can be formalized.

Five years after the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC, Colombia remains fragile. The violence continues, albeit at a slower pace than before the deal. According to the Financial Times, 71% of people polled in a recent poll said the implementation of the peace agreement was going badly. The stakes for the cadastre and the land title are therefore important.

During his visit to The Times, Duque said with a smile that Lawrence Sacks, USAID’s mission director in Colombia, had tears in his eyes as they both attended a ceremony to mark a successful pilot in the program. cadastre in the northern city. of Ovejas. “It was a very emotional event,” Sacks told me today on a phone call from Colombia, where he was waiting for Blinken. “We believe that land is at the heart of the Colombian conflict, so we have always believed that it should be at the heart of the solution.

“It is dear to our hearts,” Botero, the head of Colombia’s planning department, told me. “We want to keep this as advanced as possible before we leave government next year.”

Somewhere else

For people with end-stage liver disease, transplant eligibility depended on the donation service area and the 11 transplant areas in the United States the patient lived in: some had more livers available. that others. In December 2018, the Organ Supply and Transplantation Network approved a new system that calculates the number of kilometers between potential liver recipients and the nearest donor, regardless of the region. On September 28, the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the federally contracted transplant system, reported on the results of new rules for liver transplants, which came into effect in February 2020, and a related change to kidney transplants, which took effect in March 2021. He said the policies “extend equitable access to vital organs.” Liver transplants increased by 3% and kidney transplants by 16%, he said, “even in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic”.