IIED bartermarkets 20/6/06 9:35 am Page 1 Sustaining Local Food Systems, Agricultural Biodiversity and Livelihoods Barter Markets: Sustaining people and nature in the Andes IIED bartermarkets 20/6/06 9:35 am Page 2 A wealth of Andean biodiversity urban demand, and others for the export market. Rural households in the Department of The Andes are rich in biodiversity, but the Cusco, in the southern Andes, were groomed to growing conditions are harsh and constrained by supply the national urban market, with altitude, which means that there are a limited predictable results. Farmers already worked hard number of food crops that communities in to produce enough food for their own different locations are able to grow. To overcome communities and some extra to trade. Now they this constraint, Andean people have always had had to increase considerably the volume of food to be strategic to ensure that they have enough production, using the land that had once fed food, and enough of the right kinds of food. their households. Farmers became slaves to the Instead of fighting the restrictions that their market, producing exotic crops such as barley to location and climate impose on food supply beer manufacturers as well as commercial production, they have become specialists and varieties of native crops that required high traders – growing many different types of the inputs of fertiliser and pesticides and that crops that they can grow, and growing enough to displaced more useful and desirable native crops, trade the excess with other Andean communities which survived only in particularly isolated who can grow different crops. areas. At the same time, the cost of these inputs While this system has been in use for increased continually, while the price that their thousands of years, it was recently threatened by new products fetched declined. The new varieties neo-liberal policies that sought to pull the and crops were farmed more intensively, and Andean communities into the cash economy. required much more time from the farmers. Not Since the 1950s the Peruvian government, only were labour-intensive inputs required to international finance institutions such as the produce them in these inappropriate conditions, World Bank, and multinational agricultural but there was also the need to produce tubers, companies have promoted the use of new, foreign grains, fruits and vegetables whose appearance technologies for agricultural production – such as was acceptable to urban consumers (for example genetically engineered crops – and have large tubers with no marks at all from pests or introduced new technologies in storage, transport disease, and with even colour). The widespread and organisation geared towards creating an use of pesticides destroyed local biodiversity, export economy. Since 1995, some areas have and short rotation cycles combined with been pushed into providing for the national artificial fertiliser diminished soil fertility. 2 IIED bartermarkets 20/6/06 9:35 am Page 3 The Lares valley The Lares Valley is about 3,600km2 and is located in the south- bring up their fruit, coffee, yucca and coca, quechua women eastern Andes. The 19,600 people living in the valley are Quechua, contribute corn, pulses and vegetables, and puna women bring and are spread over about 50 communities. The valley has three down Andean tubers, potatoes and meat. Anyone can participate, agro-ecological zones: the yunga, below 2300masl, the quechua, and can trade any amount of any crop. Each week at this one between 2300 and 3500masl, and the puna, above 3500masl. market – there are three others – the yunga zone contributes about Each week a market is held in the village of Lares, in the middle 2400kg of food, while the quechua and puna zones provide about quechua zone, and women travel from the other two zones in 3300kg. Altogether they trade more than five tonnes of food per order to trade the products that they can grow but the other two week – more than 15 times the volume distributed by the National zones cannot. There is some overlap of course, but yunga women Programme of Food Assistance. ANDEAN TUBERS MEDICINAL PLANTS, MEAT, WOOL, OTHERS PUNA MAIZE GRAINS, MEDICINAL PLANTS, OTHERS QUECHUA YUNGA FRUIT COCA, COFFEE, YUCCA, OTHERS A marketing triumph market in the Lares To try to mitigate the damage that these Valley in policies had on the local economy order to President Fujimori introduced social understand assistance programmes, including a this new National Programme of Food phenomenon and learn Assistance that distributed food. But more about how local these programmes only deepened the food systems were being communities’ problems. They were still supported and sustained. It trying to produce for the urban market, generated new evidence on and could no longer grow or buy the the importance of Andean food that they needed for their own barter markets for: consumption. These programmes and • giving some of the the changed production pattern had poorest social groups in another even more devastating result: the Andes better food between 1996 and 1998 malnutrition security and nutrition; rates for children under five in rural • conserving agricultural areas went up from 37.8 per cent to biodiversity (genetic, 47.7 per cent. The high-altitude regions species, ecosystem) suffered most, including the through the growing and departments of Huancavelica, Pasco, exchange of native food Apurimac, Ayacucho and Cusco. crops in barter markets; Out of this social crisis emerged a • maintaining ecosystem services and local solution: the appearance of landscape features in different agro- red stars: chalayplasa, a network of Andean ecological zones; and barter markets locations markets based mainly on bartering. • enabling local, autonomous control blue arrows: Indigenous social and management of production and consumption – people’s trips to barter systems combined to enable and more specifically control by market places communities to grow, trade, and women over key decisions that affect consume the foods that they wanted. An both local livelihoods and ecological 3 action research programme studied the processes. IIED bartermarkets 20/6/06 9:35 am Page 4 A participatory research methodology The research highlighted here was an integral part of ANDES (b) description and interpretation of the emergence, and IIED’s joint programme on Sustaining Local Food functioning and flow of food through the barter Systems, Agricultural Biodiversity and Livelihoods. markets; Participatory Action Research (PAR) was key to creating an (c) assessment of the status of agro-ecosystem intercultural dialogue. The active participation of the people of functions; and the Lares Valley in describing and translating their reality into (d) interpretation of the role of the barter market. quantifiable data was particularly valuable. The selected households were followed through all their The research assumes that the Andean agro-ecosystem daily agricultural activities for three months. An open- is a complex social and ecological system. The aim was to ended questionnaire was complemented by the reflections consider the agro-system as a whole, starting from the of women from the quechua and puna zones using a point of view that in a subsistence context, a household’s deliberative focus group technique during three capacity to produce food is related to how well they can: workshops. A land inventory was made during fieldtrips to (a) conserve agricultural biodiversity; the Choquecancha and Qachin communities, and (b) maintain soil fertility for agriculture; and experienced local peasants developed an inventory of wild (c) maintain pest control and pollination processes. and domesticated species and explained how they The research analysed not only households but also the accessed and used them. The results were further agro-ecosystem, which comprises the Lares River basin and complemented with a spatial analysis of the food Lares District. It includes several agro-ecological zones and production and access zones produced during a focus constitutes an integrated economic and social system of group workshop with women who use the barter markets culturally divergent communities. Three communities were and who identified the borders of the zones on a selected in the puna and quechua agro-ecological zones, topographic map (1:85,000). based on their distance to the main road and whether they To analyse the emergence of the chalayplasa – a new had links with the city of Calca in the Incas’ Sacred Valley and institution but based on traditions of reciprocity – a focus the city of Quillabamba in the Amazon forest. In the quechua group drew up a chronology of the appearance and expansion zone the communities of Qachin, Choquecancha, and Lares of the Lares Valley barter markets. Focus group members Ayllu were chosen. In the puna zone the chosen communities included bartering yunga women and quechua and puna were Pampacorral, Wakawasi and Qochayoq. In each women who attend the markets. They described in depth the community, three families were selected to study local factors that had caused the barter markets’ proliferation and livelihoods. The households were randomly selected through how the markets currently work, including the products, a community assembly based on their willingness to varieties and exchange equivalencies for different food items. participate (after a survey showed that all households The Lares barter market was analysed in detail because it participated in the barter markets). convenes more regularly than the other three in Qachin, The research took place in four phases: Choquecancha and Wakawasi. An in situ survey was carried (a) local food system analysis and agro-ecosystem out with 49 bartering yunga women based on produce characterisation; composition, volume, origin, and seasonal variability. To 4 IIED bartermarkets 20/6/06 9:35 am Page 5 complement these results 196 in situ semi-structured different types and varieties of produce they grow and interviews were conducted with quechua and puna peasants consume. By comparing the produce that is traded in the who frequently visit the four markets.