Take back your fish: questioning NGO-mediated development in Caquetá, Colombia

Could aquaculture lift farmers out of poverty and provide stability and an alternative livelihood to coca farming? Currently, aquaculture is pursued on a moderate scale, with the involvement of around 1500 small-scale farmers, in Caquetá, a department located in the Amazonian bioregion of Colombia. Some 400 farmers are organised in a grassroots non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Acuica. Cultivation and sale of fish provide a means for local fish farmers to move away from coca production and diversify their economic activities beyond cattle ranching and dairy production. In this article, we analyse the relationships among fish farmers, the state and Acuica. We argue that NGO success in securing donor funding can be underpinned by an NGO developmentalist gaze that homogenises its constituencies, which in the case of Acuica obscures different logics of fish production. This not only helps explain the mixed results in achieving development objectives but also suggests that initiatives that are intended to help farmers can imperil those who are already vulnerable. On the other hand, we argue that farmers’ strategic dependency on development initiatives displays their complex agency, as they are active consumers both engaging with and resisting the state’s NGO-mediated project of development.