When Zenú farmers in San Andrés de Sotavento, Colombia, have given colourful names to their maize varieties. These includsangre toro (bull’s blood), cucaracho (striped like a cockroach), huevito (little egg), piedrita (little stone), panó, tacaloa, berrendo. These names encode generations of knowledge: culinary properties, ecological adaptations, ceremonial significance, relationships between seed and soil, between plants and people. Both the names and the crops they represent are irreplaceable (fig. 1).
Nevertheless, these same farmers frequently state that their multicoloured maizes “do not have market acceptance.” Yellow and white varieties sell. The violets, pinks, reds, and mottled grains of traditional varieties do not. This is not a neutral economic fact. Rather, it is the result of an agricultural system built on colonial logic that decides which knowledges matter, which seeds have value, and which ways of relating to the land are deemed productive.
Forty-two races and counting
Colombia is one of the world’s centres of maize diversity. Until recently, official science recognised 23 distinct races of Colombian maize. In 2024, participatory research conducted by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, working alongside seed guardians and farming communities, expanded that number to 42. This upwards revision matters not only in terms of methodology as it was the inclusion of Indigenous and campesino knowledge that rendered what had been previously invisible visible.
This expansion pushes back against a longer history of erasure. Twentieth-century botanical classification had previously organised Colombian maize primarily based on morphological characteristics such as shape, colour, and kernel arrangement. What traditional scientific classifications could not capture was what the names sangre toro or huevito actually bear: use values, cultural meanings, ecological memory. When official systems fail to see this knowledge, it does not disappear. It goes unprotected.
Two court sentences, one constitutional argument
In 2023, the Colombian Constitutional Court issued two landmark decisions that directly address this gap. The first ruling, Sentencia T-247/23, arose from a tutela (an urgent constitutional legal action to protect legal rights) brought by the Cañamomo-Lomaprieta Reserve together with nine other Indigenous authorities against multiple government ministries. The communities presented scientific evidence of genetic contamination: transgenic maize, both Bt and glyphosate-tolerant varieties, had entered their traditional seed stocks. The Court found the State had violated Indigenous peoples’ fundamental rights to ethnic and cultural identity, to a healthy environment, and to effective participation. Critically, the Court framed native seeds not as agricultural resources but as patrimonio biocultural (biocultural heritage) that is inseparable from cultural identity itself. Protection was extended, via inter comunis ruling, to all Indigenous communities in comparable situations, and the ruling was not only applicable for the original plaintiffs.
The second decision, Sentencia C-349/23, issued two months later, reviewed the constitutionality of Colombia’s ratification of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (from 2001, in force since 2004). While this type of ruling raises a different kind of legal question and is of a more abstract and structural inclination, it engages the same tensions: food sovereignty against intellectual property regimes, national control over genetic resources in the face of asymmetric international trade relationships, the particular vulnerability of a megadiverse country to frameworks designed by and for wealthier, less biodiverse nations.
Together, these decisions mark a significant shift in Colombian jurisprudence. By constitutionalising the concept of biocultural rights, the Court acknowledges that biological diversity and cultural identity cannot be separated and that huevito maize is not merely a genetic variant but rather it represents a living relationship between a community and its land, that has developed across generations.
The limits of juridical recognition
While this constitutional recognition matters enormously, it is worth asking what constitutional recognition alone can achieve.
The Zenú farmers’ observation that multicoloured varieties lack markets because industrial food systems require standardisation reveals a circular logic: varieties are being abandoned as they seldom find buyers; they seldom find buyers as the infrastructure that would value them does not exist; their disappearance then confirms that they were, apparently, obsolete. While Constitutional Court decisions can interrupt this logic at the level of rights, by themselves they will not transform the price signals, procurement contracts, and processing requirements that make maintaining berrendo or tacaloa economically unviable for farming families whose survival depends on market participation.
What genuine protection of maize diversity would require goes beyond litigation. What is needed are agricultural policies that actively support the full 42 recognised varieties; research institutions that learn from and work with seed guardians, and markets that value difference rather than penalising it.
Why the names matter
The persistence of the names themselves is not incidental. Every time piedrita or panó is planted, named, exchanged, and harvested, it constitutes a refusal of the logic that would render such crops worthless. The recent expansion to 42 recognised varieties, achieved through collaborative methodology, demonstrates that this persistence is not merely symbolic, it is also scientifically generative.
The colours that commercial agriculture cannot see turn out to contain exactly what industrial monoculture has eliminated: resilience, diversity, memory. The Constitutional Court has begun to give this a legal name. Nevertheless, the harder work of transforming the conditions that continue to make these varieties economically precarious remains.
References:
Constitutional Court of Colombia (2023). Sentences T-247/23 and C-349/23. Bogotá: Constitutional Court of Colombia.
Cusicanqui, S.R. and R. Barragán (eds) (1997). Debates Post Coloniales: Una Introducción a los Estudios de la Subalternidad. La Paz: SEPHIS/Aruwiyiri.
Grosfoguel, R. (2011). ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality’, Transmodernity 1(1): 1–36.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). ‘On Coloniality of Being’, Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 240–270.
Roberts, L.M., Grant, U.J., Ramírez E., R., Hatheway, W.H. and Smith, D.L. (1957). Races of Maize in Colombia. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council Publication 510.
Semillas (n.d.). ‘Los maíces criollos y la soberanía alimentaria de la región Caribe’. Available at: https://semillas.org.co/es/los-maces-criollos-y-la-soberana-alimentaria-de-la-regin-caribe (accessed 13 December 2025).
Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2024). ‘Diversidad del maíz colombiano se amplía con la caracterización de nuevas razas’. Agencia de Noticias UNAL. Available at: https://agenciadenoticias.unal.edu.co/detalle/diversidad-del-maiz-colombiano-se-amplia-con-la-caracterizacion-de-nuevas-razas (accessed 13 December 2025).
Katherine M. West is a doctoral student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
RA Kashanipour (September 18, 2026). The Colours Capitalism Cannot See: Maize, Rights, and Colonial Logic in Colombia. The Recipes Project. Retrieved October 6, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16sz0