‘Break the fiscal framework’ to achieve peace, Petro’s proposal

According to President Gustavo Petro, in order to comply with the peace agreements with the FARC, with the first point on agrarian reform, it will be necessary to reform the Medium-Term Fiscal Framework and prioritize the purchase of 3 million hectares of land.

(Royalty budget would be 2.1% of GDP).

“We must reform the Fiscal Framework, we must accept that a budgetary effort must be made to buy the land and that this effort must not be subsumed by an increase in the price of the land that its owners would make, given that their property is concentrated in a way horriblePetro pointed out.

Therefore, the president asked both the Commission for Follow-up, Promotion and Verification of the Implementation of the Final Agreement (CSIVI), as well as economic and political analysts, to evaluate these alternatives to achieve peace in the country.

(They warn that the country’s public finances would be reaching their limit).

And what does it mean to ‘break the fiscal framework’ to achieve peace?

to August, the government’s gross debt reached 58% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and by 2022 the Ministry of Finance expects it to be 56.5% of GDP.

Therefore, the objective of the Government, contrary to the recent recommendations of the Autonomous Committee of the Fiscal Rule (Carf), is have a greater debt to be able to buy those lands and give them to the peasantsa process that would cost $60 billion.

Petro proposed the implementation of instruments such as the multipurpose cadastre and an increase in the land tax, “of great fertile but unproductive possession.” In addition, to prioritize the purchase of land as a public investment in the country.

(Debt management, the difficult task of the Treasury for 2023).

To this end, he pointed out that “buying the land means not attacking the person who owns the land today, regardless of his history, because the history of the land of Colombia -of the fertile land- is a bloody history, it is a violent history. , but regardless of that history of violence, what we are proposing today is that we buy it, we buy the land at market price. That must be a condition of peace.”

BRIEFCASE
*With information from EL TIEMPO