The green mountains surrounding the city of Medellín, in the Antioquia region of Colombia, are home to a broad network of cooperatives that continue to serve as a testament to perseverance and creativity over three decades after their founding.

To describe this social weaving, I’ll choose one of its threads and trace it, so as to illustrate the richness of collaborative work, cooperation, and trust that have endured over time. In this region, a long-standing commitment to collective endeavors centers the reproduction of social weavings within collaborative relationships.

The thread I’ve chosen is a small shop called ColyFlor, located in central-west Medellín. Every week, a significant quantity of agricultural products pass through the shop before being distributed around the city.

Visitors to ColyFlor are greeted by the aroma of produce and mint, coffee and cookies in two spacious, neatly organized rooms. Several women work in the store, handling retail sales as well as the much more considerable task of maintaining weekly food distribution via bundles that are pre-sold to customers.

This system creates a stable form of linkages through a variety of delicious organic foods and nourishes the immense efforts to promote agroecological production in small farms around the city of Medellín. It allows city residents to escape, at least a little, from the poisonous agro-industrial system that damages ecosystems and impacts the well being of those who consume its products.

There is a tremendous amount of logistical and organizational work behind every tomato, carton of eggs and pound of coffee that reaches many tables in Medellín’s neighborhoods.

The processes of receiving, organizing, cataloging, and distributing different types of food were perfected over many years, they can now be quantified precisely. This is an initial thread in the cooperative fabric, which can also yield its own valuable information.

Every month, an average of 15,000 eggs and one tonne of poultry produced by women are distributed. An additional 5.5 tonnes of fresh produce, including vegetables, tubers, and fruit, all grown by farming families, are also delivered monthly. Crop production is planned collectively among farmers, and around 635 consumers in the city get scheduled deliveries once a month.

Gathering and sharing life

ColyFlor is an essential node in a much larger cooperative network that consists of around 90 small farms. The products of the many activities carried out by this group of small farmers are periodically consolidated at ColyFlor.

Over the past decades, small farms in Antioquia, most of which are no larger than 1.5 hectares, have been besieged and attacked by various paramilitary groups and the Armed Forces.

In this context, long-held agroecological practices have helped restore practices that sustain the soil, the villages, and the farming families themselves.

For many of these farmers, belonging to a stable distribution system that breaks the control of abusive middlemen offers a feasible way to stay put and get better value for their work and skills.

Each farm is, in itself, unique. Some produce organic chicken and eggs, others focus on coffee or vegetables. Some of the most successful farms manage to combine several activities. Farmers produce their own food and have a stable way to get their surplus distributed through ColyFlor.

In order to put these valuable organic agricultural surpluses in motion, farming families regularly gather their goods in storehouses near their farms, in anticipation of the arrival of a truck from the Solidarity Economic Circuit. The truck takes their produce to ColyFlor, where the distribution process begins anew.

Several women I spoke with when I visited the project happily shared their knowledge of how to organize the intertwined production cycles that nourish their crops, about which they had become experts.

They also emphasized how important being part of the distribution cycles coordinated by ColyFlor is to them. The continuity of the food production and distribution process can only be ensured through intense collaboration.

Beyond fair trade

ColyFlor is part of an even larger network called the Penca de Sábila Ecologist and Feminist Corporation, a long-standing environmental and feminist organization in Antioquia.

Although Penca de Sábila was founded as an “environmental” cooperative almost four decades ago, it has had the knowledge and wisdom to change, rebuild, and adapt to the times.

Defending water and its community uses has and continues to be one of Penca de Sábila’s main priorities. The “community aqueducts” in this mountainous region are frequently threatened by repeated attempts at privatization or by excessive water drainage for real estate or tourism projects, which weaken small-scale farming. In this context, Penca de Sábila’s activities and experience in defending and managing aqueducts are even more significant.

After years of nationwide coordination, advocacy, and lobbying by regional community aqueduct networks , as well as social and university organizations, community water management in Colombia was legally recognized through Decree 0960, which was signed in September.

Today, the challenge is to make policy into a reality by demanding its implementation and working on the regulations it requires.

This is why Penca de Sábila has been encouraging agroecological production through its “social intervention” programs. They’ve built a powerful dynamic that provides resources to establish a team of agronomy professionals and agroecologists who support small farmers.

Since its foundation, Penca de Sábila has advocated for feminist causes. Its day-to-day efforts focus on helping the women on each farm increase their economic autonomy, primarily through chicken farming and egg and poultry production.

Penca de Sábila itself is part of an even larger network in Antioquia called Confiar, a financial cooperative that grew out of workers’ savings and mutual aid associations. Confiar has weathered the storm of financialization and the concentration of banking power, consolidating its presence over more than four decades by constantly adjusting and adapting to conditions on the ground.

All of these initiatives are autonomous and function under cooperative guidelines that are not without their tensions. But common among them all is the constant exchange of goods, products, energy, and knowledge that keeps the whole thing running smoothly.

When I visited Penca de Sábila in Medellín, I got a bird’s-eye view of the social weaving I’ve just described, and I could not help but wonder how such a dense cooperative network has been able to survive in a city that, until fairly recently, was among the most violent and dangerous in the world.

It seems that mutual aid, life-sustaining cooperation, the recovery of deteriorated land, and perseverance in refining and adapting these systems and processes were, in fact, a brilliant response to the most difficult times, when violence was rampant.

In any case, it is now clear that this cooperative fabric is capable of solving many problems—which are never lacking—and that there is energy to continue to center life and organize collectively in its favor.

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