Ovejas is a rural municipality located in the Sucre Department, where four peasant communities participate in the project: La Coquera, El Palmar, Miramar, and Pedregal, as well as two local associations, AEDECOS and ASOMUEMPA. They engage through training, biodiversity monitoring workshops, and by contributing their individual plots or community reserves to forest conservation efforts.
Challenges after the armed conflict
This region was long a fruit and agricultural production area for Colombia. After the area was abandoned due to the internal conflict, the Montes de María naturally regenerated. Today, in a post-conflict context, there is a gradual process of people returning and reclaiming their lands.
Residents are returning to their lands and often engaging in unsustainable agriculture. As a result, the phenomenon of returning “home” has become a significant cause of deforestation in areas that were freshly recovered during the period of abandonment. The new agricultural practices are commercially linked to tobacco cultivation, which requires petrochemical inputs, and livestock farming, which requires large areas for grazing.
Alternatives to unsustainable agriculture
The project seeks to conserve the remaining forests together with local populations and develop economic alternatives to deforestation, generating income from non-timber forest products such as hibiscus (jamaica flower), guáimaro and orejero. Envol Vert has contributed to the construction of a processing unit in Ovejas to produce flours and jams in collaboration with the local association AEDECOS.
