Here’s a timely article from Eliza Barclay on a topic close to many Peruvians’ hearts: potatoes.
- Cover photo from The Potato, Treasure of the Andes
Extreme weather shifts caused by global warming are interrupting millenia-old agricultural cyles in the high Andes, reports Barclay for the Miami Herald. That turmoil is having a devastating effect on crops of native Peruvian potatoes, which grow at altitudes of 3,000+ meters above sea level.
Barclay notes in “Peru’s Potato Farmers Adapt to Climate Change” (Sept. 11, 2008):
For the first half of his life, Gregorio Huanuco farmed to a rhythm that dictated the survival of his grandparents and ancestors for thousands of years. He waited for the rains to fall on his small parcel of land in this village at 11,000 feet in the Cordillera Blanca, or White Range, of the Andes in central Peru, and planted native varieties of potatoes as well as cereal crops like quinoa. When the crops ripened, Huanuco, 45, harvested what he needed and sold what he didn’t in the city of Huaraz several hundred feet below in the valley.
Climatologists say global warming’s impact was first documented in the Peruvian Andes in 1970, but 1990 is the year Huanuco says he began to notice disruptions, first in small, bizarre, anomalous forms: a battering hailstorm, two months without rain, a warm winter. Then the quirky weather became more consistent and other oddities began to appear: rats nibbling away at his cereal crops and a fungus, known as late blight, blanketing his potatoes.
LAND ONCE FERTILE
”Before, we planted all year long, any month we wanted to,” Huanuco said, dubiously eyeing his tiny plot, recently sown with potato seed. “Now we only get water a few times a year and so we cannot plant as much, and the pests and diseases keep coming.”
Click here to read the entire article.
This news is devastating for Peru because 95 percent of its potato crop is consumed nationally — only 5 percent is exported. People who live in the high sierra especially depend on these native potatoes (which differ from the white potatoes sold in US stores) because they are among the few crops that can grow at very high altitudes.
Without a good supply of potatoes, the people in the puno will starve — and they are growing more and more hungry each year.
The title of Barclay’s article suggests that Peruvian farmers have figured out how to adapt to climate change, but her story reveals that they don’t yet understand how to solve the problem.
NGOs and government organizations are beginning to search for solutions, and some excellent pilot programs are underway. Time is critical, though — farmers have been battling drought and pests since 1990. It will be too late for some.
I think of the farmer/herders I met in Ausangate this September and how vulnerable their crops are to shifts in the weather. “Our lands are producing less and less,” they told me. “We are very sad.”
“We are hungry,” they added. They said it in the simple, matter-of-fact way that people do when they have grown accustomed to no one caring about them.
This year, 2008, has been dubbed the International Year of the Potato. Well-orchestrated publicity campaigns educated people worldwide on the benefits of potatoes, in general, and on the remarkable attributes of Peru’s 3,000 varieties of native potatoes. I don’t think the world has ever had such potato consciousness. I hope that this awareness translates into useful, well-funded programs to save the native potato before it and the people of the high Andes become casualties of climate change.
–Barbara R. Drake
For more information on native Peruvian potatoes and efforts to rescue this ancient crop, visit the International Potato Center, In Lima. Peru.
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