Orion Grassroots Network

stories from the grassroots

Prescott College: Farms in the Sky

Prescott College students learn about biological diversity, ancient farming techniques, & solidarity—at 15,000 feet.

by Caitlin O’Brien ’06

We are near 15,000 feet, in a Bolivian village called Caraquina Grande, which is not on any map you’re likely to find. A mishap with our bus on a flooded road has made us two hours late. When we arrive wet and embarrassed, emerging from slate-gray clouds and the intermittent threat of rain, we learn that lunch is waiting. The men of the village greet us, dressed in their finest ponchos and embroidered hats. These are real meat-and-potatoes people, in both literal and metaphorical senses; solid, friendly, and simple.

“We” are a joint effort between Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona and the Bolivian Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, in a class called Food Systems of the Bolivian Andes. We are here to explore the ways in which a system of mostly small, independent producers feeds a country of nine million. These farmers engage in some of the highest-altitude agriculture in the world.

Another few hundred feet and cultivation gives way to grazing, then rock. The landscape is alpine, a carpet of low grass with delicate wildflowers and moss, nothing higher than our ankles.

Except the potatoes. The hills are dotted at seemingly random intervals with small plots carved from the soil, mounded into rows, and planted with potatoes—Solanum tuberosum, mostly, though there are various other species. Little else grows at this altitude; quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) and its lesser-known relative cañawa (C. pallidicaule), a ginseng-like root called maca (Lepidium meyenii), oca (Oxalis tuberosa, another tuber), and fava beans. Livestock graze, mainly llama and alpaca, and some sheep.

We are greeted upon arrival with applause and two rounds of handshaking. First, the men stand in at line and we file past. We are clumsy, faltering until we understand the process. Shake hands, clasp shoulders, lean in as if to kiss cheeks, then touch hands again before moving to the next person. We repeat the ritual with the women arrayed along a low stone wall a few feet away. Then we stand in a line and they greet us, the air a-hum with four dozen voices murmuring “Buenas tardes, gracias, bienvenidos.”

After a long formal introduction, the women pull bundles of food from behind their skirts, laying them out on brightly woven blankets. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, oca, and lamb. They say that in the time of the Inca Empire no one went hungry. The stockhouses commonly held a five-year supply of freeze-dried potatoes and dried llama meat called charque, Anglicized to “jerky.”

In the Andes, a land of extreme climate and topography, food security is predicated on diversity. Although there are only a dozen or so major crops, each exists in thousands of varieties. A given family will have five or six potato fields scattered throughout the area, at different elevations and on different slopes and orientations. Some will be cultivated with rows that follow the curve of the hill, some perpendicular, some diagonal. Each plot holds five to twelve varieties of potato, perhaps interplanted with fava, oca, or maize, depending on the elevation, year, and interpretation of bio-indicators.

The other vital element of the Andean food system—and culture—is reciprocity. The Incas’ complex trade system spanned a region from 15,000-foot alpine highlands to tropical lowlands where fruit and other tubers were available year round. In between, dry valleys, mid-altitude cloud forest, and the Lake Titicaca basin provided maize, beans, and coca. Potatoes and llama meat were traded down to the jungle, while fruit moved up to the highlands. Coca was dispersed to all points. In the case of crop failure in one corner of the empire, an elaborate network of roads and a well-coordinated supply of food from various sources could compensate.

It’s easy to imagine the agricultural landscape of modern Bolivia reflecting that of the Inca. From December to March, the rainy season, the fields are a Van Gogh painting; sheep and pigs tethered at odd intervals; mixed herds of llamas, alpacas, sheep, donkeys, and pigs wandering across the roads and fields, potatoes flowering in purple, pink, and white; blue lupines; yellow sunflowers; green maize growing at two or three heights; dark fava beans; yellow oca flowers; sprawling peas; some amber waves of wheat or barley…bright flowers edging the beds.

However, the traditional system of land tenure, based on concepts of communal property and yearly rotations that maximize production, reduce risks, and maintain diversity, is being dismantled at an alarming rate. Land traditionally apportioned yearly, based a system of rotation and family size, is now held individually. As families grow they must carve their land out for their children, or their children must find ways of living that don’t require land.

The idyllic beauty of the Bolivian countryside has largely been spared the homogenizing influence of industrialization, but many Bolivian farmers express some regret. The markets are shifting from a specific potato for soups, one for eating with fava beans and one for eating with peas, a potato for frying and one for freeze-drying into chuño, to a new generation that wants to eat pasta and rice. Burger King imports potatoes from Idaho.

In the lowland Department of Santa Cruz, Monsanto grows GMO soy, while sugar and cotton plantations increasingly replace native forest. The industrial process has taken a firm hold in Santa Cruz, displacing both traditional agroforestry and traditional slash-and-burn agriculture, as well as a vital link in the traditional trade system. The large-scale industrial agriculture model is, however, conspicuously absent in the highlands. Instead, standing between highland Bolivia and the Green Revolution are extreme poverty and the Andes.

On one hand, some 65 percent of the country’s population lives below the poverty line, where many farmers grow their food primarily to feed their families and where middlemen sprout like mushrooms on the muddy roads between farm and market. There is little money to be spared for luxuries like pesticides, fertilizers, and tractors.

On the other hand, cultivation often occurs on slopes too steep to comfortably stand on, on soils too rocky to reasonably dig in, or within elaborate systems of terraces in place since before the Incas. This is no place for a John Deere. The machines Idaho potato farmers use to put a few thousand potatoes per hour in the ground would be patently ridiculous on a 10-acre plot with a 25-degree slope. Western economies of scale simply do not apply. Instead, farmers here use a foot-plow unchanged in design or use for several thousand years, with the exception of salvaged metal replacing the original stone.

The fields are beautiful, and the biodiversity staggering. Five thousand varieties of potato, 600 of fava beans, and 500 of maize grow in Bolivia. However, poverty is not romantic. A lack of clean water contributes to the death of every tenth child under the age of five. And when resources are available, many farmers instead purchase chemical inputs for their land, particularly in the form of nitrogen fertilizer. This is, after all, land that may have been in production for a few thousand years. Soil fertility is not a minor issue.

Also balancing on the rocky slopes we find the proverbial elephant in Bolivia’s agricultural room: coca. By far the most profitable crop per area, coca (Erythroxylum coca) has a history as old as the Andean people. Jorge Hurtado, director of the Coca Museum in La Paz, describes it as the focus of Andean indigenous cultures. It serves as a method of socializing, rather like coffee in the US, and also a symbolic religious function as profound as that of wine in the Eucharist. It also happens to be the raw material from which cocaine is made. One acre of coca will produce the profit in one year equivalent to 16 acres of bananas or four of coffee, the “alternative development” crop most often encouraged. Coca has few diseases and fewer pests, and is a perennial that can be harvested up to four times a year, depending on elevation and irrigation.

There is a robust and legal domestic market for coca leaves, which are used for tea and chewed almost constantly by most campesinos. Exportation of the leaf in any form, however, is illegal by international treaty, with an exception for Coca-Cola, which exports some 105 tons of de-alkalized leaves annually. Although the US-led “War on Drugs” has had its eye on coca production for 50 years or so, newly elected president Evo Morales recently revised the “Zero Coca” party line to “Zero Cocaine,” insisting that coca has a rightful place in Andean culture.

Indeed, Bolivia’s Foreign Minister, David Choquehuanca, recently suggested that coca be served in schools. A much-touted 1975 Harvard study revealed unusually high levels of calcium and other nutrients. In diets often lacking in fresh fruit and vegetables, the vitamins and minerals gained from coca chewing may be vital. Morales proposes decriminalizing coca while continuing the fight against cocaine production, creating an official distinction between the innocuous raw material and the illicit processed product. Also worth mentioning is that the industrial chemicals required to turn 328 kilos of coca leaf into one kilo of cocaine are produced in (you guessed it) the United States. Needless to say, international reaction has nonetheless been virulent, and 50 years of policy are unlikely to change with any appreciable speed.

The battle against coca is now fought largely through the vehicle of so-called “alternative development,” which attempts to replace coca with licit means of making a living. The story of alternative development, however, is fraught with corruption and failed dreams. We hear time and again of outside agencies (USAID being high on the list) that come into an area promoting the newest anti-coca scheme to plant coffee or plant citrus. They begin monumental projects like constructing processing plants. They often require significant input, both financial and material, from the local people. And they often fail.

In a small town in the Yungas, an area of semi-tropical lowland valleys, after two years’ work and $5,000 of community investment building the plant that was supposed to process a local root, hamachpeque, into flour for cookies to be packaged for sale in La Paz, the last $2,000 of investment money never appeared. The processing plant stands still, full of equipment and supplies, but unfinished. The men who show it to us express pride in the building they constructed themselves, and clearly control their anger when speaking of the bureaucracy that robbed them of their opportunity. It is an old story that only gets more bitter in the retelling. This year, they are planting coca again.

Up in the mountains, our welcome party is being hit with rain. The women shrug their wool shawls tighter around them; the men and children don’t seem to notice. We open our packs to rummage for raincoats and elicit a few stares. In a moment the rain has passed. After the food is arranged on its blankets, the women retire back to their stone wall. Men and women eat separately, we learn, but the females in our group are invited to eat in either group. Apparently “American” trumps gender roles. We Americans-who-happen-to-be-women join the women nonetheless, to sit in a hunched circle and tear at meat with our teeth.

Two weeks earlier we had been treated to a similar meal in the valley of Achocalla, outside La Paz. We were visiting a collective of greenhouse growers who want to create a certified municipio ecológico – an ecological county, in effect – to combat the growing trend of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. One benefit of a wide network of small-scale farmers rather than large, centralized, mechanized farms is that the lag time between cause and the perception of effect is dramatically shortened. These growers started using pesticides and noticed that spring was getting quieter. Then they made the connection and began to organize.

Beneath standard, developing-nation chaos, including a lack of government infrastructure, lies one of Bolivia’s great strengths. Everyone is organized. Taxi drivers, hotel operators, shoe shiners, women selling flour and rice in the market, everyone is organized into sindicatos or asociaciones, with presidents and vice-presidents, secretaries, treasurers, and networks of communication. This systematic organization has allowed coca farmers and other disenfranchised groups to effectively blockade La Paz several times over the past few years, successfully ousting two presidents.

This organization has also allowed a group of farmers in a small town to lead the fight forcing passage of a law that bans the introduction of GMO crops. While those already present, like soy, are still allowed, the Association of Ecological Greenhouse and Vegetable Growers intends to change that soon.

Their efforts are joined by a local dairy, Flor de Leche, which buys milk from small producers to make artisan cheese and yogurt. Flor de Leche competes with Pil, a multinational dairy company that holds a near-monopoly on dairy production in the country and sells yogurt with a shelf life of over a month. The nascent health-food movement eagerly consumes Flor de Leche’s merchandise, however, and now the groups are looking for ways to systematically label their products in order to get better prices.

Over the course of a month, we visit a number of variations on this theme, in each of the Andes’ agroecosystems. We cross dry valleys, such as La Paz and Achocalla, and the altiplano, the vast expanse of flat, arid land between the Cordilleras Oriental and Occidental at about 12,500 feet. We visit the Lake Titicaca region, which has a particularly mild climate moderated by the lake, and the Yungas. We explore the puna, the high plateau region, up to 16,000 feet, where Caraquina Grande is located.

As we travel from place to place in our rickety bus, we meet and speak with growers and professors, nonprofits working to preserve biodiversity, conservation biologists, farm workers, technical experts, and children. Each connection builds a sense of community, an emerging image of power. They speak of fighting against corporations and working to preserve their traditions in the face of global influences; we speak of the same. We tell the Asociación de Productores de Tubérculos Andinas de Candelaria, a group working to maintain diversity in potatoes and other traditional tubers, about Native Seeds/SEARCH, a group working to maintain diversity in beans and other traditional Southwestern crops in Arizona.

We mirror each other, through stumbling translations, through cultural barriers, able to see each other and recognize that we are not alone.

Freelance writer Caitlin O’Brien ’06 is an incoming Earth Island Journal intern. She lives in California. Many thanks to Earth Island Journal and to Caitlin for permission to reprint this article.

Prescott College
220 Grove Avenue
Prescott, AZ 86301
United States
Phone: 928/ 778-2090

www.prescott.edu

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