MARCH 2009: Hot potato? Climate change hits home for Andean potato farmers

By Eliza Barclay

Huarez, Peru - For the first half of his life, Gregorio Huanuco farmed to the same rhythm that dictated the survival of his grandparents and ancestors for thousands of years. He waited for the rains to fall on his small parcel of land in the village of Coyllur in the Cordillera Blanca, or White Range, of the Andes mountains in central Peru, and planted native varieties of potatoes, tubers, and cereal crops like quinoa. When the crops ripened, Huanuco, who is 45, harvested what he needed and sold what he didn’t in the city of Huaraz several hundred feet below in the valley.

Climatologists say local impacts of global warming were first documented in the Peruvian Andes in 1970, but 1990 is the year Huanuco says he began to notice disruptions, first in small, bizarre, anomalous forms: a battering hailstorm, two months without rain, a warm winter. Then the quirky weather became more consistent and other threats began to appear: rats nibbling away at his cereal crops and a fungus, known as late blight, blanketing his potatoes.

“Before, we planted all year long, any month we wanted to,” Huanuco said, peering at his tiny plot, recently sown with potato seed. “Now we only get water a few times a year and so we cannot plant as much, and the pests and diseases keep coming. It’s very difficult and we are hungry.”

As part of an international strategy to boost the profile, production and trade of the potato, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization designated 2008 the International Year of the Potato. The Peruvian government has also committed to promote the potato as a poverty alleviation strategy by increasing production for internal and external markets.

But increasingly, farmers like Huanuco, who depend heavily on a predictable climate, are finding themselves vulnerable and ill prepared to handle new pests and diseases that have materialized as the average temperature has risen and rainfall patterns have shifted. Climate change is creating new obstacles that may jeopardize the success of the potato a key export product unless sufficient adaptation measures are implemented.

According to a September 2007 study on climate change, agriculture and poverty by the Overseas Development Institute, or ODI, if governments can shift technical support from crops vulnerable to climate change to more climate change-proof ones, countries like Peru could avoid declines in export agriculture. That transformation is emerging as a critical issue that could affect the millions of potato farmers vulnerable to climate change with dreams escaping poverty

Though Peru is the birthplace of the potato and Peruvians have been cultivating and consuming them for more than 7,000 years, today the potato holds a lowly status among the country’s key crops.

Worldwide, less than 5 percent of potatoes are traded internationally, and prices are mainly driven by local tastes, rather than international demand. One reason why the global potato trade has floundered is the difficulty of transporting them: raw potatoes are heavy, susceptible to disease and can rot in transit.

But while the majority of the world consumes white potatoes, the Peruvian government has recently begun developing schemes to export native Peruvian potatoes, like yellow potatoes and ollucos, which are more nutritious, colorful and flavorful and appeal to international gourmet tastes. It has also pledged to provide technical assistance to the 1.8 million potato growers in Peru.

The Lima-based International Potato Centre, or CIP, also recently launched an initiative to market the native potato, and is assisting poor farmers in improving yields, which have been too low to meet the external market’s demand, according to the centre.

Peruvian farmers like Huanuco have long farmed native potato varieties at 2,500 meters or higher, far above the level where most insects, viruses and diseases could survive.

“Climate change is bringing new diseases and more frequent diseases during the harvest,” said Cesar Portocarrero, a civil engineer who has been studying the effects of climate change on the Peruvian Andes for decades. “As the plagues and the temperatures increase, the farmers are forced to go higher and higher up the mountains to avoid them. Eventually they’ll have nowhere to go.”

Sabina Valverde, another Coyllur farmer, says the new pests and diseases have forced her to buy fertilizers and pesticides.

“The fertilizers are costly and even when I use them I produce much less than I used to,” Valverde said, adding that she only gets one half a sack of potatoes per year from her plot, and has nothing extra to sell at the market.

CIP experts say because late blight is dependent in part on temperature and rainfall, it is becoming a threat at altitudes where previously it couldn’t survive.

According to global circulation models, temperature in the Andes will increase at a rate more than two times the global average. This extreme change is expected to irreversibly affect the alpine ecosystem. Studies by the National Institute of Natural Resources and the National Meteorology and Hydrology Institute found that Peru has lost 22 percent of its glaciers in the last 35 years, and with it 12 billion cubic meters of water.

Biodiversity International, an international non-profit that promotes the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, says potato breeders are looking to the gene pool of wild potatoes in search of traits that will allow the domesticated variety to endure climate-related threats like drought and disease. But a simultaneous challenge is that 16 to 22 percent of all wild potato species are threatened with extinction by the year 2055 as a result of climate change.

The private sector is also endeavoring to address the late blight scourge, which causes about 20 percent of potato harvest losses in the world in scores of countries, through controversial genetic modification. The German chemical giant BASF is currently developing a GM potato resistant to late blight that it says will boost yields by 30 percent and be cleared for export.

Peru’s Agriculture Ministry has also begun to take a simpler approach: working with farmers in the Sierra on determining which traditional crops already in sue are most appropriate to the new climate variables that are expected to multiply.

“What we’re seeing is that the future is in the traditional crops the farmers already know,” said Donato Sandoval Cuisano, an agronomist with the Ministry of Agriculture. “Those are the crops that will be able to persist.”

But the export potential of those crops remains questionable until farmers are able to boost yields, and many farmers, like Huanuco, lack the technical know-how or the capital to invest in inputs and seeds that will boost yields.

Tito Guillen Rosales is the 27-year-old mayor of Coyllur, and a small producer of artichokes, which he hopes to sell to a middleman for export.

“Our potatoes and corn have been affected by climate change, and we know we need to try new things, but we don’t know how,” Rosales said.

Rosales, Huanuco and some of their neighbors recently began working with a Lima-based organization called Practical Solutions – Technologies Defying Poverty, or ITDG in its Spanish acronym, to adapt to climate change and improve their economic situation.

The World Bank, funded by the Global Environment Facility, also has a adaptation pilot project underway, financing seeds and inputs for alternative crops for export.

“What we have learned is that adaptation must be a local strategy and process,” said Ricardo Giesecke, director of the climate change unit at Environment Ministry, who is working with the World Bank. “It requires strong communication with the people who are affected.”

As the ODI report points out, Peru’s farming sector will also need support from the government to weather new challenges like climate change.

“Public expenditure on agricultural research and advisory services, market development, and rural infrastructure can be shifted in favour of small farm export promotion,” the report reads. “Help in diversifying out of agriculture, and more social protection, will be necessary in those areas, or for those farms, without successful farming futures.”

Other experts are concerned about the impact of climate change on the country’s coastal plains already dedicated to large-scale agro-export production.

“As the water resources from rivers like the Rio Santa in the Cordillera Blanca diminish, we will have to think about what type of crops we should be planting and whether water-intensive crops like rice and sugar cane make sense,” said Laureano del Castillo, an agrarian law specialist at the Peruvian Center for Social Studies. “It’s the responsibility of the private sector and government to figure out what to plant.”

Meanwhile, as farmers in the highlands face increasingly greater odds in battling the new challenges of climate change, many are giving up and migrating.

“The highland regions and potato farmers of Peru are largely ignored by the government,” said Miluska Ordoñez of ITDG. “If we don’t push the agrarian problems to the forefront these areas are going to disappear. People are already leaving because the local climactic conditions aren’t allowing them to survive and stay on their land.”

Huanuco, for his part, plans to stay on his land and hopes to learn to adapt his farming practices to climate change, access climate-resistant breeds and eventually produce enough potatoes sell on the market.

“We are suffering now, but we are learning that we have to change and adapt,” he said.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A version of this article has appeared in the Miami Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle