The Art of Adobe

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Simon

Wherever you go in the rural villages of Peru’s sierra you will see many or most houses made of adobe mud bricks. They are usually small, squat, with a couple of tiny windows and an unattractive roof of corrugated iron (calamina), sometimes held down by small rocks. They are practically a symbol of poverty and what is considered backwardness.

Yet, just preparing the basic materials for such a dwelling is a skilled and subtle task. The other week I had the opportunity to watch and assist with the making of adobe bricks. I was visiting an elderly couple who live in their little plot of land about 30 minutes walk from Cabanaconde.When I arrived I found them in the chacra above their house, with three other men who were helping make the adobes. There were already about 300 bricks laid out in rows. They needed to make a total of 900 to build a basic greenhouse where they would grow vegetables and herbs.

The first step in making adobes is to make the mud. This might sound simple, but apparently the mixture is quite hard to get right. Too much water and the adobe becomes brittle when dry, with cracks forming in the bricks. Too little, and it is “dead”, not sticky enough to mould into bricks. To the mud mixture is added ichu, Andean straw grass, which will help hold together the bricks. The mixture needs to be turned over twice and then left to “mature” for one to two days.

The process I saw to make the bricks involved the following. First, an area of mixed mud had to be loosened a little with a pick. This was then shovelled into a wheelbarrow,which was wheeled over to the row of existing adobes. The mud was dolloped into a double-sided mould, where one of the workers compressed, smoothed, and added more mud until the mould was packed full. After the worker ensured that there was a little space on each side of the divider in the middle of the mould, this was pulled away to reveal two fresh adobe bricks. The bricks would then dry and harden in the sun over a number of days.

What I’ve always found interesting and ironic is that the poorest and most humble people are often masters of a range of arts and crafts. Just for example, saddling and securing a load to a donkey or mule, ploughing and sowing, expanding and maintaining agricultural terraces, are all practices that have many subtleties, often require precision combined with considerable strength, and are best learnt from an early age. The average farmer or agricultural labourer will be master of most or all of these tasks, and will often have a greater range of skills – you could even say greater total skills – than many people with specialized roles in the modern economy. This is why I think it’s misleading to talk about  them as having “unskilled” or “unqualified” occupations.

The difference that leads to “higher productivity” in the modern economy, is the system or machine, that pulls together the disparate tasks of individuals. In an economy based on small-scale household production, there’s not much point in having specialists, say, someone who just builds and repairs agricultural terraces – there wouldn’t be enough work. To make this worthwhile you need some kind of organization to scale things up – I imagine that the Incan Empire, for example, did have workers highly specialised in shaping and fitting stonework.

The other difference is the use of technology. I don’t think it’s correct to say that the traditional peasant economy uses little technology, because all of the practices I’ve described above are technologies, in the sense of being practical applications of human knowledge. Rather, the difference is in the kind of technologies used. “Modern” production practices tend to make more use of systematic measurements and explicitly-defined techniques, instead of or complementary to personal skill and judgement. There’s a lot of potential for such”scientific” approaches to strengthen and improve traditional practices, as long as this is done with understanding and respect for the existing strengths of those practices. Again, I’m pretty sure the Incas and their predecessors did take these approaches.

The other thing which makes modern technologies so much more productive than their traditional counterparts is the intensity which which they, directly or indirectly, make use of the energy provided by fossil fuels.

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Maiz Cabanita: El Solay/La Siembra (Planting Time) 1

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Simon

The highlight of the agricultural calendar in Cabanaconde is El Solay or La Siembra, the planting season. The expression solay is unique to Cabanaconde and I understand it to be some kind of linguistic hybrid (it’s neither Spanish nor Quechua). The classical Quechua expression would be sara tarpuy (literally, maize planting), and this is also used in Cabanaconde, albeit within parentheses.

The solay starts in early August. Each chacra is planted around a week to 10 days after receiving its last round of irrigation water. For planting, the earth must be turned over  and smoothed down (majoneado) twice, before in the third ploughing cycle the seeds are scattered into the furrows, which are then smoothed over for the final time. The traditional practice is to do all this in a single day with teams of bulls. However, nowadays in most cases where the chacra is accessible, people will have the first two rounds of ploughing done by tractor 1-2 days before planting. The tractor isn’t considered precise enough for planting itself, but provides an efficent and less labour-intensive way of preparing the earth.

A related task during planting time is to gramear, to clear the grama or grass away from the edge of the chacra. The wiry local grass that forms the borders of the chacra is tough and invasive, and if left alone will work its roots into the soil and compete with the maize. Depending on how well the borders have been cleaned the previous year, this can be tough work: some work with pick, shovel and bareta to cleanly redefine the borders of the chacra, while others follow behind, gathering up the uprooted grass and tossing it away. In some places it is also necessary to rebuild the walls of the terraces with stones and clods of earth, a task known as to pircar. Gaps that have allowed animals to wander in and out (desirable during the fallow season) must be closed over during cultivation.

Planting is very labour-intensive: for a medium or large chacra or several smaller ones, you generally need two teams of bulls, plus a donkey, mule or horse to majonear. Each team of bulls requires someone to guide the bulls, someone to plough, someone to scatter the seed, and sometimes someone to scatter natural fertiliser (usually guano de ave, made from bird droppings sourced from the Peruvian south coast). You also need someone to lead the donkey/horse/mule and someone to ride the majona. To make best use of time, it’s preferable to start majoneando while the bulls are still ploughing, which means these really need to be different people. Therefore, a regular day’s planting can require at least eight workers.

This is complicated by a fairly strict gender role division in Cabanaconde. The two most skill-intensive tasks – ploughing and scattering the seed – traditionally must be performed by males. To be fair, ploughing requires considerable strength. However, scattering the seed could technically be performed as well or better by women, but according to local custom this would be inappropriate and could bring bad luck. Guiding the bull should also be done by a male, although it’s quite common for a (male) child to do this.

No one really cares who scatters the fertiliser or does the majoneando, although a child or someone of lighter body weight is often the preferred choice for the latter task if a donkey is the only animal available. Meanwhile, the main role of the women is to prepare food and chicha for all the workers and bring it out to the chacra in time for lunch (although the men will usually take a supply of chicha when they head out in the morning). All and sundry will help with clearing the grass.

Traditionally, the large number people required at planting time wasn’t a problem, as this was resolved through ayni, the reciprocal exchange of labour. People would help out their family and neighbours, and then when it was time for them to plant, the favour would be returned. People will tell you that ayni has largely disappeared from Cabanaconde, but it is still practised a bit at planting time. I estimated that at least a third of the people I worked with during the solay last year were doing it as a favour, to their family members or their compadres. Of course, they and others who pitched in were also incentivised by the plentiful food, chicha and liquor on offer.

The balance needs to be made up by paid labour. In some cases, this means hiring a team of bulls and their owner. The bulls cost S/.30, the owner gets S/. 20 himself for a day’s work, and the bulls must also be provided with a large bundle of chala, or maize stalks, which is valued at around S/. 15. When people have small plots of land scattered around the countryside, and similar inputs are required for each one, it’s easy to see how the costs of cultivation can escalate.

Even with a day’s wage being paid, during last season’s solay there were complaints that it was difficult to get people to work in the chacra, given the competing offers of non-farm work in various construction and local government projects, which paid from S/. 45 to S/. 70 per day. No hay gente! was a phrase I heard more than once.  The labour shortage, along with the fairly strict gender roles, were among the reasons why I, despite being an almost complete incompetent, was able to take such an active part in the solay last year.

There’s so much to say about the solay that I’m going to split it across two posts. The next post will describe the actual course of events during a day of planting.

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Cabanaconde: Making Chicha

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Simon

An absolutely vital ingredient in the agricultural cycle is chicha, the maize beer that is drunk before, during and after work in the chacras, especially during large collective efforts such as the solay/planting.

Here’s a description of how it is produced. Note that this refers only to chicha made in Cabanaconde. In other parts of  Peru, it may be done differently and even use different ingredients.

The principal ingredient is yellow maize. First, the grains are taken off the cob and put to soak for two days in a bucket. Then, the water is drained off with a sieve and the kernels are put in plastic bags for seven days until they begin to sprout. During this time they have to be kept in a warm place. Little holes are made in the bags to allow some air out.

After seven days, the sprouted kernels are taken out of the bags and left to dry. This is now wiñapo, which will be used to make the chicha.

The wiñapo is dried for three days. Then it is ground up in a mill or with a mortar and pestle. Water is put on to boil in a big pot, ideally using a wood fire. The wiñapo can be added directly or soaked separately in a bucket before being added. It is boiled for half an hour to an hour.

The liquid is then strained through a white tablecloth held between two people. The sediment is captured by the cloth and the liquid passed to another container. It is left to cool overnight. The next day begins the process of decanting the liquid, usually into ceramic pots called chombas. The upper part of the liquid is clear and yellowy and is called chuyan. The lower, thicker part is called pipo.

The chicha is left to ferment for three to four more days, according to taste, and how drunk you want to make the people who are working with you.

Each litre of water requires about 2 kilos of dry grain*. The more maize is included, the tastier the chicha. During the preparation, some people will add fruit juice or even sugar. This can make the chicha more flavoursome, and it certainly increases the alcohol content. A froth on the surface of the liquid generally indicates a more potent batch of chicha.

I drank large quantities of chicha while working in the fields in Cabanaconde. If you work during planting, you will be given a large 500ml beer glass of chicha every 20 or 30 minutes,starting around 8:00 am with breakfast, and continuing until its all gone (usually around sunset). Some people warn you to be careful with it, and there does seem to be the occasional adverse reaction – I saw several people become extremely drunk or unwell in the chacra, though these were mostly women arriving around midday after spending the morning drinking while sitting around cooking. Drunk as part of a working rthythm, I found it to be pleasant and refreshing. It both quenched my thirst and, as the day wore on, gradually produced a warm, convivial feeling while erasing pain and tiredness (although the coca leaves we chewed might have had something to do with that too).

The only obvious drawback of chicha is that it seems to be an anti-diuretic and can make you bloated. During my first solay, I noticed about mid-afternoon that I had drunken significant quantites of liquid but hadn’t felt a need to pee for more than two hours, and my stomach was gradually becoming more distended. Fortunately, there’s a straightforward solution. Also served in the chacra is jampi, a homemade high-proof liquor. A couple of thimblefuls of this will generally restore one’s natural functions.

*This is from only one source, but referring to discussion in a previous post, you can see that at market rates this equates to about S/.8 ($4 NZD) per litre, just for the principal ingredient.

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El Maíz Cabanita: El Arado (The Art of the Plough)

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Simon

Once the land is irrigated, it is time for the barbecho, which refers to the process of turning over and resting the soil before the next planting begins.  This post describes el arado (ploughing), which is an important part of both this stage and the planting season.

The traditional way to plough is with a yunta (a team of two bulls joined by a wooden yoke). However, over the previous decade, tractors have increasingly been used, particularly for this step of the cycle. Ploughing with bulls is more technically precise, and for this reason they are still used by the majority for planting, but the barbecho just requires the earth to be turned over.  Hiring a tractor costs about S/. 60 per hour, which is enough  time to plough a medium-sized chacra. By contrast, a team of bulls costs S/. 30 per day, they also require feed, and if their owner works at ploughing he needs to be paid as well. So the costs come out about the same, and using a tractor is significantly quicker. Some chacras are too steep or inaccessible to use a tractor, so even the barbecho is done with a yunta; also, for those who have their own bulls the relative costs may be different.

Ploughing with bulls is an activity steeped in tradition and surrounded by a fair amount of machismo. Objects and practices have special names: some of them are neither Spanish nor standard Quechua, and some of them may be unique to Cabanaconde. For example, the long wooden pole which is dragged by the bulls is called la pero (note, not perro) and the stick of dense wood which the person steering the plough uses to poke the bulls and keep them straight is called el allejón.

The bulls used in work in the chacras are mostly serrano cattle, small and lean, curious like all cattle, and easily spooked or distracted by their peers, but mostly tame and obedient. This is fortunate, because the first step involves them standing still while they are tied by the horns to the yunta (and thus to each other).

The plough consists of a long pole of dense wood (la pero) which is placed in a loop of rope hanging from the yunta. At the end of the pole is a roughly v-shaped piece of wood (see photo below). At one end is a sort of tiller which is held by the person ploughing. To the other end a steel furrow is attached with an extremely strong and supple leather tie (what is being done in the photo).

To begin ploughing, one person walks in front of the bulls, who obediently follow. This is known as to guide or guiar. There’s some skill involved, as you need to need to make sure the bulls follow the line the furrow needs to enter. This has been described to me as ‘like driving a car’, but it’s a rather skittish and mechanically unpredictable car. It’s particularly tricky when the chacra is oddly shaped  or the terrain is uneven around the edges. Sometimes in order to ensure that the furrow gets all the way to the end of the chacra you need to jump up on the wall or terrace at the end of the chacra so the bulls will follow you. To make tight turns you may need to tap one of the bulls on the nose with a small stick, or even grab it by the horn and physically drag it around. I acted as guia quite a lot during the planting season, and became reasonably adept at the task.

Doing the ploughing itself requires real skill. It doesn’t look so hard but there is strength and dexterity required to hold the plough straight, ensure the furrow is deep and true, make the turns accurately and encourage the bulls while poking them with the allejón to keep them in line.  I had several attempts but never mastered it.

When the earth has been ploughed, it has to be smoothed over. This process is to majonear, named for the majona, a flat wooden board that is tied to a horse, mule or donkey. Someone leads the animal around the chacra while another person stands on the board, effectively skiing along and closing over the furrows (as in the picture below). Quite often a child will be used to majonear, since a donkey (the easiest animal to get hold of) finds it difficult to drag a full-grown adult, and the weight of a child may be sufficient to smooth over the earth. In other cases, someone will stand on the board with only one foot, more like skating than skiing, and quite quite physically challenging. Where the earth is heavier, an adult standing with both feet on the board towed by horse or mule will be required.

After the barbecho, there is one more irrigation cycle, and then in August the planting season begins. This is the centrepiece of the agricultural cycle in Cabanaconde.

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Cabanaconde: A Day in the Life

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Simon

A typical day during my time in Cabanaconde as an example of the mixture of things I was doing and the routines of village life.  This is from the 2nd of July.

 

After breakfast, at around 8:30, I went to look for Ruth, as we had agreed to go together to see the mayor to show him the brochure for the experiential tourism project. The municipality had funded the brochure and the mayor - a keen amateur photographer – had provided photographs and helped design it. Ruth wasn’t in her store so I went alone to the municipal building. Outside, I ran into Ruth, who had been buying potatoes from a neighbour. She told me cheerily that she’d found out that the mayor wasn’t in town so we were wasting our time.

As we walked back across the plaza, I was hailed by Patricio, and then Edison (‘Chiqui’) also appeared. Both of them have worked as local tourist guides. I showed both of them the brochure and we talked for a while about the tourism project. We went through a list of names of other local guides who could work with the project. I headed back to my side of the village and when I went past Lili’s shop she asked me if I wanted to accompany her to the chacra. She had to take food to the guys who were ploughing in one of the family’s fields, and then to her mother who was down with the sheep that were sleeping on the chacras in the Ccollcca sector.

While Lili was cooking, I used the time to wash my clothes. All washing in Cabanaconde is done by hand: I used a bucket and a concrete laundry fixture with a tap. I normally do one soak-and-wash with detergent and then two rinses. It’s tricky to balance getting the dirt out and being able to rinse away the detergent. I’ve got better, but it’s not ideal, and whenever I’m in Arequipa it’s good to get a machine wash done.

I went with Lili to Lihuay to take lunch to the two men who had already finished ploughing the small chacra. From there, we walked down the main pathway towards CCollcca and while we walked we discussed the new urban development in San Miguel (20 minutes walk uphill on the main road out of Cabanaconde), where the Peasant Community has subdivided the land and is allocating lots to those who register fo a fee. Some see it as a necessary development to give more living space to the community, where many extended families share very restricted space in the small properties within the main village.

Lili hadn’t registered for a lot in San Miguel and wasn’t in agreement with the process. There were two main reasons why. First, she doubted that it would actually go ahead. The National Cultural Institute has registered the San Miguel pampa as a site of archeological interest (although they’ve never investigated anything there) and has indicated it will take legal action against any development. This seems perverse, given that Cabanaconde already built a small football stadium on the same land and now the Province of Caylloma is financing a new museum, supposedly to evenutally house the Mummy Juanita. I can’t see the building in San Miguel being stopped, but Lili was dubious. She and Ruth had supported an “invasion” there last year, but the president of Peasant Community opposed it and ordered the rudimentary structures that people had built to be torn down. The president had then done an about-face and thrown his weight behind the development, which Ruth and Lili thought was suspicious.

The other reason was that Lili didn’t agree with how the land was being divided up. She thought that new land should be reserved for younger people who didn’t necessarily have their own families -  partly because there’s little space to raise a family. And she didn’t think it was fair that multiple people from the same family – many of whom don’t live in Cabanaconde – should each be allocated a lot. Instead, the system was based on differential fees: S/. 500 to register if you didn’t already have land in the ampliaciones (the formerly dry areas that received irrigation water from the Majes project in the 1990s), S/. 1,000 if you already had a lot, and S/. 1,500 if you weren’t originally from Cabanaconde.

We were not far from the chacra and could see Lili’s mother, Señora Prudencia, down with the sheep and goats, but we couldn’t spot the shepherd. Lili called out to a woman who was working on the left side of the path, “Hey, have you seen [name redacted]“. “Oh, I think he’s dead already” was the reply. When we got down to meet Lili’s mother, she explained that the shepherd was not actually dead, but was lying immobile by a bush, two chacras away. He had refused any food and wouldn’t even move the short distance to the shade to be out of the burning sun. He simply groaned occasionally and asked for water.

Apparently the shepherd was meant to look after the animals all night, but had returned to the village around 8:00 am and started drinking aguardiente with some friends. The drinking session had gone on all night, and he had stumbled back towards his post in the early morning, only to fall a couple of fields short. In his absence, the animals he was supposed to be watching had taken the opportunity to go their own way. The docile sheep hadn’t gone far, but the goats had dispersed themselves through the countryside. Señora Prudencia had taken a couple of hours to round them all up.

I helped Lili and her mother muster up the sheep and the goats from where they had been grazing back to their enclosure in the chacra, where their nightly droppings and urine would provide organic fertiliser. An amusing thing in Cabanaconde is that, although gringos are considered to be ignorant about a lot of things, no one considers the possibility that anyone would not know how to herd animals. So it is that on a number of occasions I’ve been the closest person to, say, someone’s escaping bull, and have had to respond to urgent waves and shouts of “arrea, arrea!!”.

Among the sheep were a number of very young lambs, which struggled to cross a couple of canals on the way back to their enclosure. On several occasions I had to grab hold of a nervous lamb and carry it gently across the canal while its mother watched warily from the opposite bank. I found this rather touching, but it’s a normal part of everyday life in the countryside.

Lili had finally convinced the shepherd to have a little soup and he was on his feet, stumbling back to where his blankets and provisions where, just before a hot afternoon turned into a feezing night – which would have been truly dangerous. Lili , Señora Prudencia and I began to 30 minute walk back to Cabanaconde, arriving there just as it got dark.

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El Maiz Cabanita: Riego y Barbecho (Preparing the Land)

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Simon

(Previous posts on maiz cabanita: first, second. )

Once the harvest has been completed, and while the activities of de-leaving, de-graining and using or selling the maize are still occurring, the cultivation moves into its next phase. During June and July, the land will be prepared for the the next planting, which starts in early August.

In Cabanaconde most land does not have a regular fallow period and it is possible to plant maize in the same chacra, year after year. I understand this is due to the natural volcanic richness of the soil as well as the organic fertilisation methods.

The first thing to do after the harvest is over is to clear the crop stubble and fertilise the soil. The most systematic way to do this is by placing a flock of sheep and goats on one’s chacras. The animals eat up the crop stubble, while their droppings and urine nourish the earth. In general, during the post-harvest period, all animals are allowed to roam free through the countryside, where their eating and defecating provides a general public service. However, those who are able will gather together as many as several hundred sheep and make them sleep several nights on their land. Most people own a few sheep: the large numbers are accumulated by renting or borrowing from others. In the day the animals are allowed to wander and eat freely; in the night they are herded together onto the chacra. Those who can afford it will employ a shepherd to sleep there; others may stay there themselves.

Those who don’t have the time or resources to have their plots of land cleared and fertilised by animals will sometimes just burn off the crop stubble.

 

The next step is irrigation. Rain usually only falls in Cabanaconde between December and March, so for the rest of the year farming relies on irrigation water. For more than 1,000 years, this has been provided by the Hualca Hualca river, flowing down from the snows of the eponymous 6,025-metre mountain (see picture above), although since the 1990s this has been supplemented by additional water from the Majes irrigation canal.

For anyone interested in these posts, or in Andean agriculture and livelihoods in general, I highly recommend getting hold of a book by US anthropologist Paul Gelles called Water and Power in Highland Peru. Gelles spent years living in Cabanaconde and today is remembered by almost everybody there as having become ‘just another cabaneño‘ (a high compliment). He wrote in detail about the highly ritualistic traditional irrigation system in which a ‘water mayor’ allotted the water to individual fields in complex patterns based on the Incan division of the village into hanansaya and urinsaya partialities. The role of water mayor was an arduous one, as it involved controlling the flow of water, day and night, during a whole agricultural cycle. It was a customary office which most adult men were expected to hold at some stage in their lifetime.

Nowadays, that system has disappeared and water is distributed in a straightforward geographical pattern which Gelles’ describes in his book as the ‘State system’ and which in the past was only used when emergency irrigation had to be undertaken in dry periods during the rainy season. A water mayor oversees the process, but this is now a paid role and held only for a single irrigation cycle.

The water follows something like a half-moon shape around the village: it starts in the sectors of Seccana and Ishicc, on the canyon side of Cabanaconde; moves up to Cabra above the village cemetery, across to Cutirca and Lihuay; then down the lower-lying southern side of the village through Ayrampo, Ccollcca, Cushqui and all the way to Auki. In each sector it flows down a principal canal, into smaller canals and is then diverted by individual farmers onto their own chacras. This is done by moving large stones and clods of earth in and out of the canals which run around the chacras.

Each farmer has to take their allotted turn to irrigate when the water has reached their chacra. The water flows 24 hours a day; there is no system of holding it in reservoirs during the night. Thus, many people have to irrigate at night time. I have only been to do this once (perhaps will describe in another post) but that was enough to gain an idea of just how cold and taxing this is. It’s not even possible to be sure exactly what time the water will arrive, which means that people might have to wait around in the cold and dark for several hours.

About a week to 10 days after the first irrigation cycle begins the barbecho, which involves turning over the newly softened earth with a plough. Ploughing is a central part of both the post-harvest and planting periods. I’ll talk about that in the next post.

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El Maiz Cabanita: La Cosecha (The Harvest), Part II

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Simon

This is part 2 of my series on maize cultivation in Cabanaconde.

As I explained in the previous post, the main objective of the harvest is to bring the maize back into the ‘corrals’ which are dotted around the village, often between houses. It is transported as entire plants, in bundles of varying size, depending on whether it is carried back by truck or by donkey.

The next step is to deshojar — literally ‘remove the leaves’. Each plant will have one to three choclos or corn cobs. You extract them by peeling off the leaves — often a nail or some other sharpish object will be used to make an initial break in the leaves near the top of the cob — then twisting the cob to remove it. This is might seem like easy work in comparison to some of the other tasks, but it involves long hours of repetitive work, in the hot sun, with lots of bending or squatting. This task is usually done by women: as with the harvest itself, many migrant labourers come from Puno or parts of Cuzco such as Espinar looking for work. At this time of the year in Cabanaconde you will see many of these women, with their distinctive dress of a bowler hat, sweater, knee-length skirt and long woollen pants (NB: not the woman in the picture, who is very much a cabaneña).

The choclos are then laid out on sacks or blankets to dry. How long this takes depends on the level of moisture remaining in the corn, although a week in the sun is usually sufficient. The next step is to desgranar or de-grain. The grains can be worked off the cob with the fingers: once the choclo is properly dried, they come off very easily. You now have grano seco, the primary form in which the maize is stored, used or sold. People in a hurry to sell some of their maize will sometimes remove the grains and leave them to dry loose, although this makes them even more accessible to the mice and birds which are a constant menace to the stored maize.

The maize can be white, yellow, purple or multi-coloured. Although they are all mixed and matched to a certain extent, each type has its principal uses:

  • White maize is the staple type used for cancha (toasted kernels), which is easily the most common way in which maiz cabanita is consumed
  • Yellow maize is the principal ingredient for chicha, although other kinds of maize are also used
  • Purple maize is used for cancha and also in chicha morada, which is a non-alcoholic refreshment common throughout Peru

A certain proportion of the grains are retained for use as seeds. These are usually selected from the largest, most well-formed choclos and are taken from the centre of the cob.

The maize plant minus the choclo is called chala. Although the dry, spiky stalks and leaves look pretty unappealing, they are useful as animal feed during the dry season.For example, during planting season, if someone has to hire a team of  bulls to plough their fields, they’re usually also required to provide a bundle of chala,which can be worth S/. 15 ($7.50 NZD). Little goes to waste.

How the maize is used will depend on the family, and can depend on the total size of their crop, where family members are living, etc. The family of a friend of mine is not untypical: they have a significant amount of land spread across many different plots throughout the campiña around Cabanaconde. She told me that approximately 5 to 10 percent was kept for seed, 10 to 20 percent was consumed, and 70 to 80 percent sold.

Many people told me that cultivating maize wasn’t very profitable. “You get back about what you put in” was a frequent comment. The price for much of 2012 was S/. 4 per kilo, which is relatively good by historical standards. However, there’s only one harvest per year, most people have small plots of land spread through different sectors of the countryside, and there are high fixed costs for activities like harvesting and planting. From what I was told, a one of the smaller chacras would deliver perhaps 200 kilos of dry grain, while a decent-sized one might produce 1,000 kilos. Meanwhile, some estimated that planting alone might cost  S/. 300-400. You can do the sums.

However, it wouldn’t be quite correct to call it a ‘subsistence’ activity. First, the maize is not primarily destined for self-consumption but is largely traded and sold in the market. It is a source of security for families in that, when needed, it can provide not just food but also cash.   Second, although revenue may not exceed expenditure by any great degree, production interacts with and dynamizes other parts of the economy. Certain stages of the cultivation cycle use a considerable amount of wage labour, especially now the practice of ayni (reciprocal labour obligations) has largely disappeared.

There’s lots more to write about the economy of maize in Cabanaconde: the extent to which it’s consumed, traded and sold; where and for how much; and how distribtion or accumulation occur. These topics are for future posts, and perhaps for further investigation.

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El Maiz Cabanita: La Cosecha (The Harvest)

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Simon

I’m going to try to do a series of posts on what I’ve learned about the maize cultivation cycle in Cabanaconde. Hopefully it will be a little more interesting than it sounds. One the one hand, the cultivation of maize is thoroughly linked with local customs and life, and one can’t really be understood without the other. On the other, it provides an insight into the reality of organic production in difficult terrain, something that is worth understanding for anyone who advocates this as a way of life.

I’m going to have to begin at the end of the cycle, since that’s where I came in.

La cosecha (the harvest) occurs in May. It is one of the busiest times of the year in Cabanaconde and, according to some, involves the hardest sustained work of the year. But it’s also exciting and joyous since it’s the culmination of all the effort that’s gone before.

There are several distinct stages to the harvest. The first is to cut the maize, or calchar, which I believe is hispanicized Quechua. This is done by hand with a serrucho (sickle) and is a relatively straightforward task, barring the intense sun which makes everything more difficult. The whole plant is cut; the choclo or corn will be separated later. The trick is to cut the plants to more or less the same length, so they will be easier to pile up and carry. You work in rows, forming small piles of cut plants with all the stalks pointing the same way. There is something of  a technique to cutting, since the maize stalks are weak at some points but very tough at others. If you do it right, you can cut with one swipe of the sickle and don’t have to bend over too much.

The next stage is to amontonar or pile up the maize. An example of this is in the photo above. You have to gather together three or four of the cut piles and then carry the load to the edge of the chacra where the plants are deposited, again with all the stalks pointing the same way. The pile is generally about ten metres wide and several layers high. This is generally done when the maize will be carried back to the village by donkey; when it will be carried by truck it is sometimes left in individual cut piles (see following section for explanation). As a complete novice, I found this somewhat harder work than cutting, since there is a technique to carrying, and you have to negotatiate uneven ground and sometimes climb up a couple of terraces to get to the place where you leave the bundle.

Traditionally, the labour to cut the maize has been provided at least in part by migrants from outside the district, particularly from the upper part of the Colca Valley and the province of Espinar in Cuzco. I worked with a couple of guys from Espinar. The older guy said he had his cattle in Espinar and also worked as a bus driver: typical of many people in rural Peru who must work in multiple occupations to make ends meet. By preference, they were getting paid in maize — 100-120 choclos (corn cobs) per day. This was equivalent to around S/.50, a reasonable day’s wage by Peruvian standards. Rather than selling or trading the maize back in Espinar, they would use it for personal consumption. Five or six days work would provide enough canchita (dried, toasted corn kernels) to last them until December.

The next step is to cargar or carry the maize back to the village. There are two ways of doing this: by truck and by donkey. These days, trucks are preferred for most areas where the vehicle can park within a reasonable distance of the chacra.  The first step is to liar or bundle up the maize plants in the chacra where they have been cut — the idea is to make bundles about as big as a person will be able to carry. You need to lay out a large number of ropes (about 50 per chacra), and the bundles are placed on top of the ropes. These are then tied up tightly, a task which requires two people.

From there, the maize has to be carried to the truck, which may be several hundred metres away, and then carried up a ramp made from a wooden board into the truck. This I found to be the most brutally hard task of any I have experienced so far.  I estimate that the maize bundles weigh an average of 25-30 kg, but the weight is dispersed, which makes it much harder to lift and carry. Sometimes even an experienced worker needs the help of another to lift the bundle onto his back. To then carry this weight the distance to the truck, including across rough ground and terraces, requires considerable strength. In the chacra where I worked, each trip to the truck required stepping up onto a terrace that was above my waist level. With the weight of the maize on my back, it was all I could do to lift my other leg up on to the terrace and continue the journey towards the truck. Note that the 3,300 metres of altitude also has to be factored into the physical effort required.

The day I went to cargar by truck, it was with a group of young local guys, who seem to be more involved in this phase of the harvest. They get paid (in cash) per “trip”, which involves riding in the back of the truck to a particular chacra, bundling up and carrying the maize, and then unloading it in the corrals back in the village. The average trip is worth S/.20, and around three trips will fit in a day, so workers earn a decent wage. When trips are longer they may make S/. 80 or even S/.100. The owner of the chacra will also provide lunch and some beer or licor at day’s end. This was given to me as evidence that, although maize cultivation hardly renders above subsistence level taken as a whole, it pays well at each stage (for example, compared to potato production, where apparently a day’s work may only pay S/.20) and thus gives some dynamism to the local economy.

Nevertheless, the wages are certainly well earned. The young guys are accustomed to the work and take it in their stride, but the recognition that it’s intense work creates a fair amount of machismo. When I went to cargar with the truck, the chacra’s owner Liliana (about my age) tried to insist that I should just watch or should help with some peripheral task. However, when they saw I wanted to work, the young guys egged me on, as did Liliana’s mother Señora Prudencia (who has spent most of her life in the chacra, unlike Liliana who is mostly dedicated to her shop in the village). Sweating profusely and breathing heavily, I managed to carry six loads to the truck, while in the same time the young guys — who had already made two earlier trips — carried ten.  Another factor is that the maize stalks and leaves are rather sharp and thorny and can shred skin. My hands had not yet become accustomed to farm work, and I had neglected to obtain some appropriate gloves, so by the end of the day I was bleeding from several points, and was actually dripping blood over the bundles of maize, inspiring further admonishments from Liliana that I should stop working and take a rest.

The other, traditional, way to carry is by donkey. These days, donkeys are only used for chacras that are very close to the village or that are too far away from the road for the maize to be carried there manually. The advantage of donkeys is that they can be brought right to the chacra and loaded there. This means less human labour is required, although there is still quite a bit of effort required to tie up the maize (in larger bundles) and lift and tie them on to the donkey. The disadvantage is that even with 10 donkeys, it takes several trips to and from the village to clear an entire chacra. The men have to run back and forth to the village with the donkeys, so the process can be just as tiring as with the truck and, importantly, takes significantly longer .

Large groups of donkeys carrying loads back into the village creates the potential for chaos, and for this reason it’s important to have a system of traffic control. The photo below shows the order set down for when animals can be used to carry the harvest into the village from each sector of the countryside. Interestingly, it is imposed by the Municipality (local government) rather than by the Peasant Community, the autonomous organization of community members. In contrast, loads can be brought back by truck from almost anywhere at any time, which is another advantage of using motorised transport.

That covers the harvest itself, up to the point of getting the cut maize back to the village. In the following post I’ll describe what happens next.

 

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Paro en la Panamericana Sur

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Simon

For the third day running, transport and communications in the south of Peru have been paralized owing to a blockade of the Panamerican highway between Lima and Arequipa by approximately 6,000 “informal” miners protesting against government decrees declaring their activities illegal.

My personal stake in this issue is that I was supposed to travel to Lima tonight and had already bought my ticket. This can be postponed and is no big deal, supposing the strike is lifted in the next couple of days. Over time and repeated visits to Peru, I’ve come to understand that holding strikes and blocking roads can be an understandable, even necessary, response to the inability of groups of citizens to have their legitimate issues considered through normal institutional, democratic channels. However, such strikes and the way they are resolved also represent the inability of the State to exert authority (except in disastrously heavy-handed ways; viz, the tragedy at Bagua in 2009) and to act as a just, independent guarantor of the “public good”. Rather, it seems that the State is merely a passive conduit for conflicting private interest, with the most powerful at any one time prevailing. While the government gave the Conga mining project conditional approval in spite of what seems to be the opposition of most of Cajamarca, here the Prime Minister hurriedly offered to modify its edicts to give the miners two more years to “formalize” their activities — still not good enough for the miners to lift their strike.

The arguments behind the current miners’ strike are considerably more dubious than in some other cases where citizen groups have opposed the (perceived) loss of their territory or livelihoods. Informal mining is undertaken by between 500,000 (official sources) and 1 millon (the miners’ estimate) Peruvians, so is a significant source of employment and income. However, the uncontrolled use of mercury is severely damaging to the environment and has resulted in significant pollution of waterways in the areas where it is prevalent, including some leading into Lake Titicaca. It’s likely that the majority of the population in districts affected by informal mining would not support its continuation. In addition, the untaxed income from informal mining is rather high, with a gram of gold (a conservative minimum collected per day) worth S/. 70, more than what is earned by the majority of workers in farming, commerce or services whose livelihoods are currently being put on hold.

The surprise manner in which the highways were seized meant that many vehicles were on the road and have been trapped at the various blockade points. Around 2,500 bus passengers are stuck between Kilometres 590 and 640 on the Panamericana and are suffering hunger, thirst, heat and cold. Already one elderly man has died from a heart attack due to the long distance he had to walk from the blockade in the sun. La Republica reports that the mayor of the district of Ocoña has declared a state of emergency, with agriculture and commerce paralized and a growing shortage of food, medicines, gas and petrol.

With tensions running high on all sides, tomorrow will surely produce some kind of (hopefully peaceful) solution.

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Brief Notes from Peru

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Simon

The weather has again taken a strange turn, perhaps even more extreme than in 2010. Lima should be starting to cloud over by now, but until my last day there it continued hot and sunny. The afternoon we went to the coast, you could see the sea fog trying to come in but burning up before it got on shore. Meanwhile, by April, skies above Arequipa should be cloudless but there’s still a lot of cloud and haze around the mountains, with big cumulonimbus puffing up in the afternoons. The January to March period apparently saw the heaviest rains for many a year, so intense they damaged some of the streets in the city centre. Rain and even snow continues in the sierra and there is apparently likely to make some crop harvests late or significantly reduced.

Both Lima and Arequipa, especially the former, have seen rapid and significant modernisation of their vehicle fleet, which seems to have had a notable impact on pollution levels.

The issues of great debate in the national media continue to relate to exploitation of natural resources. The most prominent controversy at the moment relates to plans for a mine known as Conga in the northern department of Cajamarca, part of the mining project Yanacocha. This project was approved by the previous government but is opposed by the majority of locals in Cajamarca — including the regional government — because of fears of the impact it will have on water sources (four highland lagoons are slated to be used for depositing tailings from the mine). The current government ordered a review by a panel of international experts, which has recently been completed. Barely three days later, President Ollanta Humala announced that the project would go ahead, but with stronger conditions related to direct generation of employment, water storage and protection of the environment, as recommended in the international expert report. Early indications are that many in Cajamarca are not happy with this compromise, so debate and protest are likely to continue.

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