A Living Territory
How the women of Colombia’s Pacific Coast are building a food future that the world is searching for
The silent sea does more than the Magdalena speaking.
The poetry interspersed throughout this piece is by Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente.
Black and Indigenous women
women of land and sea
From the Colombian Pacific
who sow the future
Building present and future
a food future
That through comadreo have forged
the world wants to follow
On the afternoon of 26 September, 2008, Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente was travelling along the Timbiquí River on Colombia’s Pacific Coast. An Afro-Colombian feminist, community leader, educator, and human rights defender, she was accompanied by a group of international cooperation representatives linked to the BioPacífico Project, funded by the Global Environment Facility, on a tour of her home region.
As they travelled down the river, they visited communities, and talked about local organizational processes, traditional food production, and living conditions.
Most of all, Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente wanted to inform these international observers about the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, a network of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous women, working to maintain ways of life that had come under threat from neoliberal economic policies backed by the then-repressive Colombian state.
The sun was starting to set when small planes appeared in the sky. A sound came from above, sudden and heavy, cutting through the stillness of the river.
At first, there was confusion. Then, a foul-smelling haze descended. The aircraft flew low, releasing chemicals over the area where Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente, community members, and the international delegation were.
Without warning or explanation, the planes had sprayed them with glyphosate, a blockbuster herbicide invented by Monsanto (bought by Bayer in 2018) under the brand name Roundup. The toxic droplets fell onto the river, surrounding vegetation, including crops, and the people themselves. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency determined it to be “probably carcinogenic,” with links to blood cancer, Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as other health issues.
The spraying was carried out under Plan Colombia, a joint initiative of the then-government of Colombia and the United States. Operating from 1999 to 2015, and funded with roughly $10 billion from the US Treasury over its lifespan, Plan Colombia sought to reduce illicit cocaine use in the United States by eradicating coca crops in Colombia. In the end, it did little to affect US cocaine consumption but generated enormous ecological and public-health damage in rural Colombia, where it destroyed food crops and poisoned water.
Mirna Rosa Herra Vente and her guests had found themselves literally beneath one of Plan Colombia’s toxic deluges. The United Nations (UN) representatives looked at one another, shocked, Mirna Rosa Herra Vente remembers. She immediately understood that she was operating in a new reality. Her work as a community leader had already exposed her to threats. The fact that she had been through the territory with foreign observers made her more visible and, therefore, more vulnerable.
After that incident, Mirna Rosa Herra Vente began to receive stark warnings from right-wing militia groups. They told her she had to stop speaking up and stop organizing coastal communities to demand better conditions. They told her unequivocally that she had become a “military target.” Like many environmental defenders across the globe—particularly in Colombia, where murders of social leaders occur at some of the highest rates globally—she was forced to leave her home territory under threat of violence. What had begun as a visit to document and support community processes ended with Mirna Rosa Herra Vente being expelled from her own land.
For her, the aerial fumigation that afternoon marked a turning point. It revealed, in the most direct way, how food, territory, environmental destruction, and violence were inseparable. It also showed the cost of defending life in a context where speaking up, organizing, and protecting food systems can turn one into a target.
And yet today, as Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente walks again on the land she was once forced to leave, she knows that those attempts to uproot her never succeeded: “The territory remembers its people, just as its people remember the territory,” Mirna says.
“It is from the strength of those deep roots, cultivated by generations of women, that the wealth of the land, the rivers, and the sea can grow again and reproduce life.”
“This territory is not poor. It is rich,” she adds.
When she’s speaking about roots, she’s not speaking metaphorically; she is naming a lived territory that has sustained food production, health, culture, and social cohesion through the land, the rivers, and the sea on the Pacific Coast for generations, and that today survives despite extreme pressure from the same forces of globalization and right-wing militia activity she was fighting against when the poison chemicals fell from the sky.
Where there is a clean river and a living forest,
there is food and there is a path.
A territory full of life once existed freely
Indigenous people had lived in Timbiquí, a town on the estuary of the Timbiquí River on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, for millennia when Spanish invaders arrived in the 16th century. Soon after, the Spanish rulers began exploiting the area’s gold reserves, running its mines with forced labour from Indigenous residents. By the end of the 17th century, enslaved Africans had been pushed into the mining workforce. As often happens in regions with underground treasure that requires loads of labour to exploit, the wealth generated from mining in the centuries since has accrued mainly to outside investors, leaving the local population to fend for themselves, which they largely did through artisanal fishing and small-scale agriculture.
In the 21st century, Timbiquí is often described in conventional development terms in the language of what is lacking: lack of infrastructure, lack of opportunities, lack of development. However, the testimonies of the women of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá reveal a very different reality. What has existed here is not scarcity, they say, but rather the opposite: an abundance of fish, water, biodiversity, knowledge, and collective care. A complex food civilization that has been disrupted by extractive economies, armed violence, and environmental destruction.
Founded in 1994 by Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente and her peers, the Red is an interethnic network led by women that brings together 22 groups of Afro-descendant and Indigenous women from rural communities in Timbiquí, Guapi, López de Micay, and Saija, along Colombia’s Pacific Coast. It grew from a community response to violence. From the beginning, it functioned as social infrastructure, creating spaces for women to meet, reflect, and act collectively in defence of their lives and territories. Over time, it has become one of the most sophisticated community models of food sovereignty, care-based governance, and cultural resilience in the Colombian Pacific.
Until the late 1990s, daily life in Timbiquí and its surrounding coastal and riverside communities was organized around water and land. Its rivers were clean and drinkable. Fish were abundant and diverse. Children bathed freely. Food was produced locally through a network of practices led largely by women: raised gardens known as azoteas, subsistence agriculture, artisanal fishing, mollusc gathering, and the cultivation of ancestral and medicinal plants.
Food was never separate from culture. Collective meals were spaces of transmission of knowledge. Women taught children how to plant, how to fish, how to prepare food, and how to heal using ancestral medicine. Knowledge moved orally and practically, embedded in everyday routines. Fishing techniques adapted to tides, rain, and the seasonal abundance of different fish species. Agriculture followed seasonal rhythms that respected the soil, the water, and the forest. Life in the territory prospered because it was relational and respectful, rather than extractive and destructive.
Conventional development theory might characterize this mode of food provision in terms of subsistence. But there was no sense of deprivation. It was a regenerative system that balanced human needs with ecological limits and seasonal cycles.
“There was a lot of unity, because what existed in one house also existed in the other,” says Nydia Elena Longo Alegría, member of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá and legal representative from the community of San José. Markets were informal but stable. Food circulated locally and was shared among families.
Edible and medicinal plants growing in the community azotea. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Edible and medicinal plants growing in the community azotea. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Mincing plantain with a shell. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Mincing plantain with a shell. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Grinding leafy greens grown in the community garden. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Grinding leafy greens grown in the community garden. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Nydia Elena Longo Alegría, member of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá and legal representative from the community of San José. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Nydia Elena Longo Alegría, member of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá and legal representative from the community of San José. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
We feel an immense sadness
in the deepest part of our being,
for all the devastation done
to the land that saw us grow.
When the forest is broken,
it is not only wealth that is lost,
life itself is broken.
The rupture: When extractivism breaks ways of life, not only economies
The US-backed glyphosate-spraying program, mechanized mining, and paramilitary repression did not simply introduce violence. Mechanized mining diverted rivers, contaminated the water with mercury, and eliminated fish species.
As Luz Nelly Flores, legal representative of Organización El Cebollal, one of the community groups that make up the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá and that has focused on defending and reclaiming responsible artisanal mining practices in the territory, explains: “This river had very clean, very beautiful water. From here we got water for cooking, for drinking, for washing, for everything. We never got sick, no diarrhea or anything. But with the backhoes and the dirty water … now when one goes into the river, one comes out sick, with itching and other problems.”
Fishing collapsed as the rivers became toxic. The species that had sustained families for generations disappeared. Artisanal fishers could no longer rely on traditional knowledge because local ecological conditions had changed beyond all recognition. Agriculture also declined as soil fertility decreased and water quality became unpredictable.
Food chains crumbled. Women who had once fed their families through gardens and fishing lost access to suitable land and clean water. Young people, disconnected from traditional practices, were pushed toward mining as the only visible source of income. Monetary income also became a necessity, since community members now had to buy food and even water in order to live. What was broken was not only the environment but the very transmission of knowledge, Red members say.
Violence ramped up amid ecological destruction. Armed groups imposed restrictions, displacement, and threats. Families fled to urban areas, leaving behind land, crops, and homes. With men taking up arms or pursuing money by whatever means were available, women became heads of households isolated in unfamiliar urban contexts, disconnected from their food systems and from their traditional support networks.
It was against this context that Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente emerged as one of the most influential voices in community leadership on Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Born in Timbiquí, she grew up in an environment in which women sustained families and communities while navigating economic precarity, state abandonment, and everyday forms of violence. From a very young age, she understood that these inequalities were not normal. Her own experience with domestic violence deeply shaped her political consciousness and pushed her to question the silence that often surrounded these realities in communities. It was in conversations among women, “between gossip and more gossip,” that a collective awareness began to emerge: When women spoke with one another, they discovered that many were living through the same forms of violence, and that together they could begin to transform them. There’s a Spanish word with no English equivalent for such deep solidarity and constructive interdependence among women: comadreo. It could be briefly defined as an ancestral practice of collective care, trust, and shared responsibility among women, rooted in everyday relationships and mutual support.
From her land and her seed
life and dignity are born,
because when women come together
freedom walks.
The woman of the Pacific does not walk alone,
she walks with her people.
Women defending the territory—and transforming public policy—with comadreo
Over time, this organizing translated into one of the network’s most significant political achievements: the creation of public policy for women in Timbiquí. The adoption of the municipal public policy Potrillando y Comadreando por la dignidad de las mujeres de Timbiquí in 2025.
This policy formalizes comadreo as a framework for violence prevention, food security and sovereignty, women’s economic autonomy, and care for the territory, addressed as interconnected elements and not as isolated sectors.
Comadreo recognizes that food sovereignty cannot exist without safety for women. It recognizes that agriculture and fishing depend on care networks that go beyond food as an integral part of the reproduction of life. It places ancestral knowledge at the centre of public action and institutional responsibility.
Few territories globally have managed to translate community-rooted care practices into formal public policy. Timbiquí has done so through the sustained organization of women against all odds, offering a model of governance that integrates food, care, and justice.
While the adoption of Potrillando y Comadreando represents a historic achievement for the women of Timbiquí, its true impact will depend on the challenges of its implementation. Ensuring that the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá retains autonomy and meaningful participation in carrying out the policy will be essential for it to reflect the realities and priorities of the communities it was designed to serve. This also requires the creation of clear mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation, and accountability that allow the process to remain transparent and responsive over time. Strengthening these governance structures is not only crucial for the policy’s success, but could also become a strategic element for mobilizing long-term support and funding for the network and the initiatives it sustains.
Nelly Canchimbo Carabalí, participant in the Red Amante de la Paz. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Nelly Canchimbo Carabalí, participant in the Red Amante de la Paz. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Luz Mila Sinisterra Alegría, representative of Grupo La Fortaleza. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Luz Mila Sinisterra Alegría, representative of Grupo La Fortaleza. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Tomasa Vente Sinisterra, legal representative of the Asociación Regocijo de Amor and member of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá network. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Tomasa Vente Sinisterra, legal representative of the Asociación Regocijo de Amor and member of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá network. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
The process took years and had to overcome opposition, as Nelly Canchimbo Carabalí explains. “For more than twelve years, we have been designing and creating inputs for public policy for women in Timbiquí,” Nelly adds. “Other women said, ‘That does not work, that is useless.’ But we said, ‘This is public policy, it is for the problems and needs of women. We include all sectors.’”
This insistence was also a struggle over meaning and representation. As Luz Mila Sinisterra Alegría notes, “We have worked many years on the public policy that was regulated by the mayor’s office. They wanted it to look like just another document from the mayor’s office, but it did not reflect what the women wanted. We needed a document that women could identify with.”
The network rebuilt food systems through azoteas, seed preservation, and the cultivation of medicinal plants. It created spaces for women to recover economic autonomy by controlling the means of production, crafts, and local trade. It defended traditional fishing and agriculture as cultural practices and ways of life, not simply as income-generating activities “for the poor.”
At the same time, the network documented human rights violations, denounced fumigations, and defended the territory, even when that meant receiving direct threats. Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente's chilling testimony about the threatening calls she received and the warnings to stop organizing reveals the true cost of leadership. And yet, collective protection made continuity possible. These women demonstrate how to earn respect through consistent actions, underpinned by a moral compass and passion—not through violence.
Women such as Luz Mila Sinisterra Alegría, representative of Grupo La Fortaleza, and Nelly Canchimbo Carabalí, participant in the Red Amante de la Paz, describe how participation in the network transformed their lives. “Before, I was very afraid to speak. I did not participate. Now I speak, now I defend myself, now I know I have rights,” says Sinisterra. “Being part of the network helped me lose my fear and understand that as women we can organize and support one another,” adds Canchimbo.
Tomasa Vente Sinisterra, legal representative of the Asociación Regocijo de Amor and member of the network, emphasizes how collective organization became a form of survival: “We began to organize because we could not keep living the way we were living. We had to support one another as women.”
Her testimony points to a key issue: The network does not arise from external interventions but from the urgent need to rebuild life amid dispossession, fear, and abandonment.
Before, fear silenced us
Black and Indigenous women
and tightened the heart,
walk firmly when they speak,
but Matamba and Guasá
because in the network we learned
filled us with courage
that fear can be let go.
Women weaving life
with seed and with hearth,
they care for forest and tradition
so that it is never lost.
In every sowing there is remembered
the memory of living,
and they teach how to resist
with the strength of the earth,
for wherever a woman sows
life arises again.
Fishers repair nets. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Fishers repair nets. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Women clean crayfish. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Women clean crayfish. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Meal of crayfish, plantain, maize, and herbs from the community azotea. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Meal of crayfish, plantain, maize, and herbs from the community azotea. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Women reproducing ways of life
The role of women in the reproduction of ways of life is particularly evident in the defence and reconfiguration of artisanal fishing. Fishing in Timbiquí has never been an isolated economic activity. Fishing is governed by tides, lunar cycles, river currents, and collective norms regarding use and care, all of it produced and reproduced through ways of knowing and relating to the river and the sea rooted in place. Women have traditionally played a central role in artisanal fishing, not only as piangüeras and concheras (manually collecting molluscs during low tides in mangrove areas and along the coast) or in fish processing and trading, but also through the transmission of ecological knowledge and the regulation of consumption within households.
As rivers became contaminated and species disappeared, women were often the first to identify changes in the taste, texture, and availability of fish. These observations were not anecdotal. They were early signs of ecological collapse. Through the network, these observations became collective knowledge and, later, political arguments for defending the territory.
Sixta Tulia Baltán, participant in community processes linked to the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, puts into words the deep relationship between territory, knowledge, and sustenance: “Everything we know comes from the land and the river. That is what has sustained us.”
Her statement condenses an entire system of life. The river is not only a source of food, but also a space of learning, movement, and memory. The land is not merely productive soil, but a living archive of seeds, medicinal plants, and ancestral practices. What Sixta names is not only knowledge, but a way of inhabiting the world in which food, culture, and territory are inseparable. When these ecosystems break, not only are livelihoods affected, but also the ways of knowing, teaching, and sustaining life across generations.
Today, wherever fishing is still possible, women defend artisanal methods that protect riverbeds and mangroves, and allow nature to regenerate. They resist industrial logics that prioritize short-term extraction over long-term food security. In this sense, fishing is understood not only as a livelihood, but as a culture and a way of life essential to the reproduction of life, one that allows communities to live and prosper collectively. They also sharply recognize the interconnectivity between practices on land, such as fumigations or mining, and the health of rivers, mangroves, and the sea, all central to their cultures and food sovereignty.
This approach resonates far beyond Colombia’s Pacific coast. As fisheries are threatened and decline under industrial pressures elsewhere, the experience of Timbiquí offers a crucial lesson: sustainable fishing is inseparable from community governance, gender equity, and care-based relationships, all of which are integral to food sovereignty. What the women of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá defend is not a nostalgic past, but a viable future rooted in relational economies that respect the rhythms and limits of nature.
Softly, calmly, and slowly
woman sows and gives again.
Caring for Mother Earth
and also humanity (bis)
In the forest the song is born,
in the river the truth,
Black woman goes on caring for
the root and the path (bis)
Softly, calmly, and slowly
woman sows and gives again.
With her hand and her word
she consolidates unity (bis)
What the world had already forgotten
she weaves again,
with her song and her memory
she makes it live and be reborn (bis).
Whoever draws near to a good tree
is sheltered by good shade.
Alive remains the song
born on the riverbank,
the grandmother’s word
that was not left in oblivion.
Alive remains the fire
lit on the hearth,
where coconut and memory
become strength and reason.
Alive remains the sowing
in the hands of women,
who with seed and hope
do not let life fall.
Alive remains the forest,
even though they want to cut it down,
because with every firm step
we plant it again
And in us remains
what they could not break:
the root, the territory,
and the right to flourish.
What remains alive
Despite contamination, violence, and economic pressure, the territory is alive.
The azoteas continue to function. Medicinal plants are cultivated and used, central to local healing practices and public health. Women-led initiatives seek to reestablish local and circular economies. Artisanal fishing continues in rivers, mangroves, and the sea, despite all the violence, with the ambition of restoring and healing destroyed fishing grounds and waterways. Elders pass knowledge on to younger generations whenever possible. As Elida Mireya Herrera Vente, teacher and coordinator of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, explains, “The network helped us understand that what we were living through was not normal, and that we had the right to organize, to speak, and to defend our ways of life.” That collective understanding is what allows knowledge to keep circulating, even under pressure.
Cindy Málaga and Josefina Chirimía Tovar, Indigenous Emberá women leaders from the region, speak about handicrafts, basketry, and chaquira as part of this broader “territory of life” that the network has protected. These practices are inseparable from forest conservation, access to native plants, and the protection of ecosystems that sustain both food and culture. For Emberá women, weaving is not only an economic activity but a way of maintaining relationships with the land, transmitting knowledge across generations, and affirming food sovereignty as a cultural and territorial right.
“We also live from handicrafts. From there we get what we need to support the family,” they say. Their words show that weaving, basketry, and beadwork are not isolated or decorative expressions. They are practices deeply connected to the territory, to knowledge of plants, and to the organization of time and labour. Through them, women not only generate income, but also keep alive ways of relating to the forest and transmit knowledge that sustains both culture and food sovereignty.
What exists today is fragile, but it is maintained by interethnic and intergenerational collective action and by the political mobilization of women. This mobilization is built through everyday organizing, collective reflection, and continued engagement with institutions. Women gather, analyze what is happening in their territories, and turn shared experience into coordinated action.
Medicinal plants growing in the azoteas. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Medicinal plants growing in the azoteas. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Traditional weaving, basketry, and beadwork on display. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Traditional weaving, basketry, and beadwork on display. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Woman weaving a basket wearing a beautiful beaded bracelet. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
Woman weaving a basket wearing a beautiful beaded bracelet. Credit: María F. Fitzgerald
As Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente explains, this process began by refusing silence: “We began to organize ourselves more strongly. We began to meet, to talk, to analyze what was happening. We realized that we could not remain silent because what was happening was affecting our lives and our territory.”
From there, mobilization took concrete form through documentation and advocacy. “We began to make complaints to institutions, to the mayor’s office, to national entities, and also to international organizations. We began to document what was happening.”
Over time, these actions expanded into structured political engagement. Women have spent years developing proposals, participating in institutional processes, and demanding recognition of their priorities. As Nelly Canchimbo Carabalí notes, this has required persistence in the face of social resistance: “We had many enemies … people said those women were idle. But we insisted.” That insistence translated into territorial expansion and organizational strengthening, building a network that now spans dozens of community groups.
Globally, industrial food systems are showing strain under pressure from climate chaos, biodiversity loss, and armed conflict. In Timbiquí, these conditions are lived realities. As the world searches for alternatives—often in the form of capital-intensive novel technologies— these women demonstrate that collective action and solidarity are solutions. Local communities deserve more respect and authority; it is evident that those who live in and are part of the territories day by day are the ones who know them best.
The success of the Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá network shows how the future of food depends on protecting, learning from, and expanding living systems that already exist—as Mirna Rosa Herra Vente says, this territory is rich. The question for her and the women with which she organizes is whether the world will listen to the lessons of those showing the way.
Thanks from the heart
and now to finish
To those who took part
here we are inviting you
The women of Timbiquí
come to the territory
We will continue in this challenge
we are eagerly waiting for you
With this we say goodbye
Very truly happy
We hope that very soon
you may be able to visit us
Key Takeaways
The Network’s women have built organizational, economic, and political capacities that position them as central actors in defending their territory and guiding its future. They influence decisions, propose solutions, and sustain long-term processes that shape both the present and the future of their communities’ food systems across the land–water nexus.
Practices such as farming, fishing, weaving, and the use of medicinal plants sustain economies and transmit knowledge while maintaining ecological balance and cultures. In this context, cultural loss is not abstract: It leads to the breakdown of entire systems of life.
More than an organization, the Network functions as a dynamic system that links communities along the river-to-sea continuum, integrating fishing, agriculture, knowledge exchange, and collective action. In doing so, it not only produces food but also organizes the social, economic, and political life of the territory. Its strength lies not only in territorial coordination, but in the circulation of knowledge among women. Across the network, women pursue training in areas such as social work, early childhood education, community health, artisanal production, and technical skills, then bring that knowledge back to their communities and share it collectively. Learning moves horizontally through the Network: Women teach one another, adapt experiences to local realities, and collectively strengthen organizational processes. Initiatives developed in one community are shared with others across the territory, creating a peer-to-peer learning system that has become central to the Network’s political organizing. In this sense, knowledge is understood not as something to accumulate individually, but as a collective tool for territorial defence, autonomy, and social transformation.
Afro-descendant women in the Pacific have not only resisted oppression, they have demanded the protection of their human rights and territories. Their involvement in processes such as the development of Law 70 in 1993 reflect their effective role in securing territorial rights and shaping mechanisms like community councils, which provide essential support to territorial governance and protection.
Protecting artisanal fishing, seeds, and water is not simply about production. It involves confronting extractive economies, the privatization of public goods, monocultures, large-scale mining, and even armed forces that counter community efforts. In this context, food becomes a site of political struggle over territory, resources, local agency, and autonomy.
What began as a form of connection, trust, and mutual care among women has become a framework for public action. Its incorporation into public policy demonstrates how community-based practices can reshape governance from the ground up. Rooted in listening, collective responsibility, accompaniment, and horizontal decision-making, comadreo offers an alternative political model in which care is understood as a form of social infrastructure rather than a private burden placed on women. This care-based approach also offers important lessons for the world: It demonstrates how food systems, violence prevention, economic autonomy, environmental stewardship, and community well-being cannot be treated as isolated sectors but must be addressed as interconnected realities. It shows the importance of collective leadership over individualism, of peer-to-peer learning over centralized expertise, and of governance models grounded in trust, reciprocity, and territorial knowledge. At a time when many institutions globally are facing crises of legitimacy, fragmentation, and social disconnection, the experience of the women of Matamba y Guasá suggests that sustainable futures depend as much on rebuilding relationships of care and collective responsibility as on technological or economic solutions.
For more than a decade, women across the Network developed proposals, organized consultations within their communities, navigated institutional resistance, and pushed local authorities to recognize women’s priorities as a matter of public policy. Their efforts ultimately led to the adoption of the municipal public policy Potrillando y Comadreando por la dignidad de las mujeres de Timbiquí, backed by a public budget allocated through the local government. This process reflects both their political persistence and their long-term strategic vision. Comadreo has achieved public funding for activities connected to women’s organizing, leadership formation, training processes, territorial participation, initiatives connected to food production and economic autonomy, and actions aimed at preventing violence against women.
Faced with violence, dispossession, and environmental degradation, women did more than resist. They documented, reported, built alliances, and developed their own solutions; not only did they halt issues at the time, but they also got ahead of challenges foreseen for the future. Their work combines immediate response with the long-term visionary application of local solutions designed to outlast the whims of any political or military regime.
The Network advances relational economies, shared knowledge, care-based practices, and respect for ecological limits, providing a functioning and lived model already in practice that holds important lessons for global food and political systems. The experience of the women of Matamba y Guasá demonstrates that resilient food systems cannot be separated from community governance, collective care, and territorial autonomy. Their organizing challenges development models that prioritize extraction, individual accumulation, and centralized expertise, showing how long-term sustainability depends on reciprocity, interdependence, and locally rooted knowledge.
The Network also offers lessons on how political participation can emerge from everyday life rather than formal institutions alone. Through practices like comadreo, peer-to-peer learning, and collective decision-making, women have built governance structures grounded in trust, accompaniment, and shared responsibility. Their work shows that knowledge becomes more powerful when circulated collectively rather than concentrated, and that communities themselves often hold the most sophisticated understanding of how to manage ecosystems under pressure. At a time when industrial food systems are contributing to climate collapse, biodiversity loss, and social fragmentation worldwide, the women of Matamba y Guasá offer a different framework: one in which food production, environmental stewardship, cultural continuity, and social well-being are understood as inseparable.
After achieving recognition and policy advances, the critical issue is ensuring meaningful participation, accountability mechanisms, and respect for the Network’s autonomy. This also requires ensuring that funding models strengthen existing processes rather than imposing external agendas.
Acknowledgements
Storytelling
Red de Mujeres Matamba y Guasá, Colombia
Mirna Rosa Herrera Vente, Colombia
María F. Fitzgerald, Journalist and Photographer, Colombia
Paula Satizábal, Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Germany/Colombia
Laura Rodríguez Castro, Vice-Chancellor Senior Research Fellow, Southern Cross University, Australia/Colombia
Roy Bealey, Lead Researcher, Pelagic Fisheries Consulting Ltd. (PFC), Kenya
Tom Philpott, Journalist, John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, USA
Meena Nallainathan, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, Canada
Beacons of Hope Advisory Committee
We would like to give special thanks to Imani Fairweather-Morrison (Oak Foundation) and Beatrice Gorez (Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements) for the inspiration to keep fishers at the centre of this work and for their wise steering and steadfast support. And special thanks to Leslie Hatfield (GRACE Communications Foundation) for bringing us closer to fisher movements and their stories. And appreciation to Katy Taylor for mentorship, anti-oppression coaching, and helping us grapple with what it means to have an authentic Global North-South partnership.
Pak Salman, Fisher, Indonesia
Ahmed Imere, Fisher, Kenya
Gaoussou Gueye, CAOPA, Senegal
Nadine Nembhard, World Forum of Fisher Peoples, Belize
Beatrice Gorez, Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, Belgium
Nireka Weeratunge, International Center for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka
Niaz Dorry, North American Marine Alliance, USA
Javiera Calisto, Oak Foundation, Chile/Switzerland
Josh To, A Growing Culture, Canada
Global Alliance Aquatic-Terrestrial Foods Nexus Working Group
Oak Foundation
GRACE Communications Foundation
Walton Family Foundation
Erol Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation
We also want to thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting the evolution of Beacons of Hope.
Global Alliance Secretariat
We appreciate the support of Dharini Parthasarathy and Melanie Moran for their strategic, technical, and creative communications expertise, and to Lauren Baker and Anna Lappé for editing support. We extend our thanks to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food secretariat for making this publication possible. Thanks as well to Tracy Bordian for copy-editing, Cultivate Communications for strategic direction, design and video production, TINTA The Invisible Thread for interpretation, and Owlingua and Myriam Helou for translation. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is responsible for the content of this report and any errors or omissions.
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