A group of 369 Colombian women artisans in Boyacá, Cundinamarca, and Santander now use coca leaf flour as a natural textile dye through Tinta Dulce, a circular economy project that Bogotá designers Daniela Rubio and Mónica Suárez founded in 2021 in El Tambo, Cauca, converting the country’s most stigmatized crop into a legal industrial input that more than doubles the commercial value of handcrafted pieces sold on both domestic and international markets.
Colombia cultivates more than 253,000 hectares of coca annually, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, making it the world’s largest producer and giving the plant a presence in regions where artisan communities have worked with natural fibers for generations. Tinta Dulce takes that proximity and turns it into a circular economy argument, treating coca leaf as a raw material available in abundance rather than as a problem to be eradicated.
From stigmatized crop to industrial pigment
The technical process that Tinta Dulce uses does not involve any of the chemical extraction steps associated with cocaine production; artisans dry coca leaves and grind them into a fine green flour that serves as a pigment for dyeing fique (a plant fiber native to Colombia’s Andean region) and wool, replacing synthetic dyes that carry documented health risks for workers exposed to them daily and that release persistent chemical compounds into wastewater.
In Guacamayas, Boyacá, the commercial result of this substitution is direct and measurable: a woven table centerpiece that previously sold for US$21 now reaches US$42 after the shift to natural coca dye, with the doubling in price reflecting both the product differentiation that natural pigments allow in craft markets and a pricing methodology that Tinta Dulce introduced to capture the full production cost rather than undervaluing artisan labor.
El proyecto Tinta Dulce ha integrado la hoja de coca como un modelo de economía circular que ha permitido a mujeres de Boyacá, Cundinamarca y Santander aumentar sus ingresos de manera significativa y resignificar sus labores https://t.co/FIfaehbYoo
— Agronegocios (@agronegocios_co) April 10, 2026
A business record built from scratch in Cauca
Tinta Dulce began at the Agroarte cooperative in El Tambo, Cauca, in 2021, recording US$125.6 in total sales during its first quarter; by March 2023, the same cooperative generated more than US$1,172 in monthly sales, a 410% increase that the project attributes to a rigorous cost-accounting system Rubio and Suárez introduced alongside the dyeing technique, a system that raised labor payments to artisans for scarves and shawls by 248% in the same period.
From El Tambo, the project expanded to Boyacá, Cundinamarca, and Santander, where the artisan communities already worked with fique and wool but faced the same structural problem of underpriced output and health exposure from synthetic dyes; Tinta Dulce’s model scales because its core input, coca leaf, already exists in or near the communities it trains, and the knowledge transfer involves craft skills those communities already hold.
The legal and policy horizon Colombia must navigate
Colombia now faces a structural tension between two models for managing coca: eradication through substitution, which the Petro government reaffirmed in March 2025 with a pledge to eliminate 25,000 hectares in the Catatumbo region, and legal productive use, which projects like Tinta Dulce demonstrate at the community level.
Dejusticia, a Bogotá-based legal and social research center, argued in October 2025 that the ongoing UN review of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs creates an opening for Colombia to formally reclassify coca leaf in food, textile, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical applications, a reclassification that would give Tinta Dulce and similar projects an internationally recognized legal supply chain for the first time.
To this day, the artisans working with coca flour operate in a legal grey area that national policy tolerates but does not formally protect, and the distance between toleration and institutional backing is precisely the gap that determines whether coca revalued at the community level can ever reach the formal economy at scale.