Ica, Peru.

ICA VALLEY

After a month and a half in the Peruvian highlands, I was viscerally reminded of how bad agribusiness is—the smells, the poverty, that it entails.  We were riding along the coast, headed to Ica—I had been warned that it wasn’t a beautiful or marvelous place, but we went to see the dunes.

As we drove, I remembered Ceará: the real estate speculation that is threatening to displace traditional and indigenous communities.  Where it seemed to be a hanging threat along the Northeast, which prompted such groups to band together and for TCUM (a communitarian tourism association), I didn’t see any signs of this occurring here. 

 

One side of the freeway was reserved for the concrete boxes and luxury apartments that would be seasonal homes for the wealthy from Lima—the other, were shanties and improvised squatter communities.  Dilapidating from time, or already wrecked/being rebuilt in the earthquake cycle…

Every half hour or so, there was a horrendous odor—from the chicken farms that fill the plates of the eager folks who line up to the places that sell massive polla ala brasa: the seeming secret to any Peruvians happiness (they eat so much chicken). 

But as we rocked into Chincha, then Pisco, and finally Ica, I really thought about agribusiness, and its grim, depressing truth.  It is heinous, aesthetically.  As you drive down the Pan-American Freeway, you can just see what happened.  The details are fuzzy, but the general gist is somewhat clear.  The emphasis on agroexport investment has created a small group of transnationally connected winners, and the rejects and displaced casualties, squeezed out of the game. 

The asparagus fields were truly bizarre.  The place is literally a massive sand dune, one of the driest places on earth.  Just desert and sand, lifeless… beautiful, empty, psychedelic, expansive…

And then, there are these asparagus oases, bright green artificial atrocities, headed for (mostly) British tables.  Once and awhile, you see the shacks, that don’t seem fit for the habitation of animals—plastic, improvised things.  They are probably only lived in occasionally, on a seasonal basis by workers.  Unlike the encampments organized by the MST, however, while they look similar, I don’t see hope at the end of this.  These are just hovels for the seasonal worker, who toils under the caustic sunshine.  There were groups of people lined up at corners, heads covered in t-shirts, waiting, presumably for work.  I saw women planting asparagus, with sticks, supervised by men who didn’t work, just followed them along the rows. 

The point being: sure, one can grow just about anything, just about anywhere, with the right chemical perscriptions (of fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and spring water).  But it can’t be good to be one of the seasonal laborers there, under the sun, on what was once a sand dune.  Again, visually speaking, the contrasts are bizarre.    

I sort of remembered the sertão—which was once a multi-use, communal-ish agropastoral community, low-intensive sort of agriculture/fishing.  In the 1990s, such patterns were fixed by land settlements, and they became agronegocinhos—producing monocultures for export for the most part.  Chemicals, irrigation, and there you have it—mangos and goiaba, and grapes for wine and export. But, the work is miserable.  It is too hot. But there, families there have decent, or concrete homes.  They own their lands.  They are rich people, or so they tell me.

Bizarre.

For more, see:

http://www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/foodsovereignty/pprs/30_Lynch_2013.pdf

How Peru's wells are being sucked dry by British love of asparagus

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/sep/15/peru-asparagus-british-wells