Help Mercy Corps Turn Crisis Into Opportunity

Mayerly is a farmer in a small village nestled high on rugged, verdant slopes of the Andes mountains of southwestern Colombia. She was born and raised in the El Tambo municipality, in the Cauca department, where her family and the community rely on agriculture to grow their livelihoods.

“I really like to raise animals, like our chickens and rabbits,” says Mayerly.

She tends her animals alongside her main crop of coffee. Mayerly’s family—her husband and their two school-age children—live and work on a farm.

Although coffee crops provide financial stability for the family, it hasn’t always been this way.

Cultivating legal livelihoods, from coca to coffee

Mayerly’s farm, like thousands of smallholder farms in Colombia, was once used to primarily produce coca leaves—the key ingredient in cocaine.

Coca is a significant crop because it fetches prices that enable growers to have economic stability. Until recently, coca leaves generated much more income for farmers compared with legal crops such as coffee, palm oil, and cacao.

Growing coca, however, is a source of stress. “With coca, we were unsafe,” Mayerly says. “And we always ran the risk of being taken to jail and having our kids taken away.”

Mayerly’s journey into coffee began when Mercy Corps invited her to attend a meeting about the benefits of substituting coca with legal crops.

Mercy Corps held community meetings and one-on-one conversations with participants to discuss risks of moving away from growing illicit crops. The aim was to inform growers who might be thinking about the complicated and expensive undertaking of exiting coca and beginning an entirely different crop, such as coffee.

By removing illicit crops, Mayerly received technical expertise and other support as part of ALGO Nuevo, or “something new”, a Mercy Corps program that aims to build a vibrant rural economy by advancing legal livelihoods, expanding land property rights, and strengthening more sustainable access to markets in Cauca.

That tough decision put Mayerly on a path to where she is today—cultivating roughly 12,000 coffee trees on 2.5 hectares of land.

“We can say [the transition] has been a total success,” Mayerly says. “It’s a reality that we sustain our families with coffee instead of illicit crops.”

Mercy Corps partners with the local cooperative, Caficauca, to support farmers in getting their coffee to market.

Land titling is core to peacemaking

In addition to supporting farmers to move into growing legal crops, ALGO Nuevo’s approach to promoting more peaceful futures has assisted hundreds of farmers in Cauca, including Mayerly, to receive the title for their properties.

Land titling provides rural farmers with something that has been missing for generations—security over their properties. 

In Cauca, Norte de Santander, and elsewhere within the country, the lack of official land titling has allowed armed groups and drug traffickers to force small farmers to grow coca plants or face violence. It’s one of the reasons an estimated 6.8 million people have been displaced within Colombia.

Having official proof of land ownership is helping legitimize Mayerly’s business and provides her ability to access resources previously unavailable, such as bank loans.

“We decided as a community to have more peace and no more armed groups in our area,” Mayerly says.