I haven't been updating my blog the last three months, although (or because) I have been very busy doing fieldwork. Here is the link to a letter from the field that I wrote from Chivay in December:
(Click the link above to see more photos.)
The letter:
“The world is upside-down”: Concerns about climate, food, and money in Chivay
Many
things have changed in Chivay, but at the same time, it feels like it have just
been a couple of days since I left.
After two years’ absence, I
returned to Chivay in the beginning of November with a feeling of anticipation
– to seeing friends again, finding out what had changed in two years, and to be
doing fieldwork again, this time as part of Overheating’s global team. When I
descended the zig-zag road from the high plateau of 4000 meters above sea level
and down towards the small town of Chivay, located at 3600 meters, I recognized
all the surrounding nevados, literally “snow-covered mountains”, which
looked like old friends. However, they were all barren, without their white
ponchos of snow that used to characterize them. A commonly accepted explanation
in Chivay is “global warming”, which causes glaciers to melt and seasons to
destabilize. During November, the farmers were anxiously waiting for the rain,
which would also bring snowfall on the mountaintops.
Many things have changed in
Chivay, but at the same time, it feels like it have just been a couple of days
since I left. I was received by my compadres who had prepared a special welcome
dish of fried guinea pig. The family owns a hostel that used to be a small and
cosy with some rooms around a sunny backyard. It is still cosy, but they have
worked hard and “modernized”, by making a bigger construction with the help of
a bank loan. They are one of a few families in Chivay who have succeeded
because they have invested in tourism early on. The first tourists arrived in
the 1980s, and today, the tourist industry is booming – it is calculated that
270.000 tourists have visited Colca Valley in 2013. However, it mostly benefits
a few big agencies and hotels owned by foreigners and Peruvians living in the
city of Arequipa or Lima. Most of Chivay’s inhabitants benefit indirectly by
getting employment opportunities in hotels and restaurants, by selling
traditional embroidered handicraft and souvenirs, and the owners of local
hostels and shops earn money on the handful of tourist who are adventurous
enough to travel on their own, without a prepaid agency tour. There is
certainly a process of social mobility going on, and at the same time
increasing inequalities between those who have succeeded in establishing
themselves in the tourist market and/or have sons and daughters who have
migrated to Lima or the USA, and those from the higher –and poorer – provinces,
who have moved to Chivay and who work as day labourers in agriculture or as
street sellers.
The money from the tourist ticket
that foreigners have to pay to get into the Valley are mainly used to improve
the roads along the Colca Canyon, where hundreds of tourists go every day to
watch the flight of the condors. Moreover, the municipality of the province –
with its slogan “constructing the best province of Peru” – has rebuilt the
plaza to make it more attractive, with lots of references to the cultural
traditions of Colca. At its inauguration, the mayor emphasized the importance
of not forgetting the cultural roots of the province. While most people seem to
be content with the final result of the plaza, not everyone agrees with the
priorities, and several have mentioned that it would have been better to invest
in the schools and a hospital.
This week, the 4 day long
celebration of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception has attracted thousands
of visitors to Chivay: among them chivayeños living in Arequipa, Lima or
in other countries. The fiesta involves the dancing of wititi, the
traditional “love dance” around the plaza, where women and men, young and old,
put on their finest pollera-skirts colourfully embroidered in the latest
Colca-fashion. In addition, the municipality organized a wititi
competition, where more than 20 groups participated, in order to “rescue and
disseminate the cultural and artistic patrimony of the province, foster the
identity and the local, national and international tourism.”
Although the cultural identity is
being strongly promoted and the tourism is booming, there are other voices that
raise concerns about the very basis for life in the province: water and food
production. The engineer working in the Water Users Organization of Colca
Valley JUVC (Junta de Usuarios Valle del Colca), who sees the farmers’
daily struggle every day, said, ”there is no growth here.” The growth seen in
the mining and construction sector elsewhere in Peru cannot be noticed here in
Chivay, and tourism “is only for a few.” Agriculture is still the main economic
activity in Chivay, but while earlier most families produced food for their own
consumption, today most of the production is for the market. However, it is
getting increasingly harder to earn a living as a small-scale peasant farmer
(average land holding size is 1,2 HA, and many families own just the third of a
hectare); “it is not profitable”. There are several reasons for this: new
climatic uncertainties, like seasonal instability, sudden frosts, and less
water, in addition to low product prices and increased costs of labour. Earlier
people helped each other in a form of reciprocal labour exchange called ayni,
but now they hire day labourers. Hence, less people bother to sow, and many
fields lie abandoned. People find other income strategies replacing or in
addition to farming: shops, artisan handicraft, restaurants, tourist hostels,
mines, or temporary work in the construction sector in the cities. It’s a
common complaint that all that matter nowadays is money.
When I explain what my research project is about, and the Overheating
project in general, people tend to relate it to food production, money and new
illnesses.
“The world is “upside-down”, a
woman told me, because this year it rained in the dry season, and the frost
continued into (the supposed) rainy season. She also said that “the sun
seem to be closer to the earth” because the sun burns during the day, while it
is freezing cold at night. Other farmers complain that they must irrigate more
often because the heat make the earth dry sooner than usual. Climate change and
water issues are still topics that most people are keen to talk about (as it
was during my fieldwork in 2011), but I am struck by a new concern that seems
to be on everybody’s mind these days: food security. When I explain what my
research project is about, and the Overheating project in general, people tend
to relate it to food production, money and new illnesses.
Those farmers, who continue to
produce for the market, rent land from others and use a lot of chemicals,
insecticide, pesticide, and “hormones” or “vitamins”, as it is called, in order
to get bigger crops faster. The chemicals destroy the soil and make it
unproductive for 3 or 4 years, I have been told by people who are critical to
this practice and who refuse to rent their land to commercial farming. The
“hormones” are mostly used on potatoes, to make them bigger and more
attractive. There have also been introduced new varieties of potatoes, more
standardized, based on scientific experiments in the National Institute for
Agrarian Research, which have replaced the local, smaller, varieties. However,
most people are getting worried about this tendency. The new big potatoes are
“not natural”, they take a long time to cook, are hollow inside, and don’t
taste well. The new illnesses that people are getting – like cancer – are
attributed to the food people eat, and to the chemicals and hormones used in
food production.
Another food-issue is about
quinoa: I’ve been told that the grandparent generation didn’t know about
osteoporosis, because they ate nutritious food like quinoa, which later was
replaced by white rice and bread. Today, quinoa is gaining popularity again,
mainly because of the international demand from Europeans and Americans who
have discovered its positive health effects. As a woman said, “the scientists
have found out that it is the best food in the whole world”. Therefore, the
price of quinoa has soared from 3 to 18 soles per kilo. So now the problem is
that most people cannot afford it very often. But what about the farmers
cultivating quinoa? Do they now have the chance to get rich? The president of
JUVC told me that he doesn’t trust the private institutions that are buying
quinoa. They promise you 20 soles per kilo, but in the end might just pay you 5
soles, he said. The NGO Desco try to offer some hope to farmers: they finance
projects of organic farming where they also help farmers to find new markets
for their products, like in the capital Lima, where the boom of organic food is
gaining popularity among the middle classes. But there is still a long way from
Chivay to Lima, and food – which for hundreds of years has been a marker of
sociocultural difference in Peru – is becoming an even stronger indicator of
social inequality.
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