Reflections on Quinoa and Farmstay in Santuario de Quillacas

Views of the village from the church bell tower

Church built in the 1800s by the Argentineans per the Spanish

Chicken in a tree, lolz

Transforming llama wool into fiber - an international development project

Like an army of quinoa

Quinoa fields for miles

Black quinoa

Fidencia and I harvested some potatoes

Evo's tractor project

Disco plough at work

Meeting fellow community members

Cholita scare crow

Winnowing by hand

My own room with quinoa adorning the walls :)

Sunrise over the Altiplano

Harvesting with a sickle (curved knife)

Purifying the quinoa by selecting out different varieties for next year

Sunset

Feeling very Altiplano Bolivian in my hostess' bucket hat and wool shawl

My host Max

Harvesting at sunrise

After a hard morning's work

Native corn

Fidencia sent me home with more choclo (boiled corn) than I knew what to do with!

Life on the Altiplano is difficult, if I haven’t mentioned it before (which I am sure I have, ha).  I think the first time I’ve gagged on food the entire year was today while eating llama intestines (tripe), served to me as a mid-morning snack alongside the ubiquitous chuno or freeze dried potatoes and a hunk of chewy llama meat.  Willy’s sister assured me that if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to eat it.  What was I going to do, spit it out and hand it back?  So I tried my hardest to not think about what I was actually eating; though the chewy tube-like food reminded me of calamari, albeit much stronger in flavor.  It’s hard to imagine anything that makes chunos seem deliciously appetizing, but this intestine did it.  Bolivian food makes food in Tanzania seem like a culinary treat, which I think says a lot.  However, the one thing I will miss about the gastronomic culture here is the “almuerzos.”  These are fixed lunches, at least 3 courses but sometimes 4 or 5 for the miniscule price of only $2-4.  Yesterday in Oruro, for instance, I enjoyed a five course lunch for 22 Bs or just over $3, which included a delicious soup, a small salad, a piece of bread with aji (spicy salsa-like tomato sauce), a main dish of chicken, pasta, potatoes, onions, and chuno in a sauce (“picante de pollo”), and a dessert of whipped custard.  Almuerzos make you feel fat and full, especially if you finish everything, but they sure are good deals!  It also makes you understand why many Bolivians don’t eat dinner in the evenings.       

Back to quinoa for a second, I really get the feeling that farmers would prefer to sell to an association or to a private business with technical support and assured markets.  I don’t think they like selling to middlemen per se, except for the advantages such as cash in hand and the convenience of someone knocking on your door with free transportation.  Some farmers, in contrast, have indicated how they do believe that middlemen are just there to make money.  However, there also seems to be a large amount of suspicion or doubts in establishing a new relationship with a private business.  Twice now, when I asked if the farmer was excited about working with Jacha Inti/Andean Naturals, in two different communities more than 8 hours apart, they responded with almost identical answers.  They seem indifferent and feel like they have been screwed over in the past.  Thus, because they don’t know how the relationship with Jacha Inti is going to be in terms of prices, payment, and benefits, they aren’t overly excited at the beginning.  I do hope, however, that if the farmers do choose to engage with them, that they realize the benefits that the company can bring (at least from what I’ve seen).

I know that for a while, like maybe two weeks, I was convinced that I wasn’t going to achieve what I wanted to in Bolivia.  That I would never make it to the southern Altiplano to regions where royal quinoa is grown for export.  I was flailing around without contacts and was considering settling for working with PROINPA in Pacajes, a marginal expansion area for quinoa where farmers are not exporting but merely using for household consumption and some local sales.  I was disheartened by the words of some colleagues who suggested that perhaps my work was redundant, overly ambitious, and unfeasible given my lofty goals and relatively short time period in Bolivia.  Discouraged, I told myself, “for once in your life, don’t Lauren Howe the hell out of this” – i.e. take what you can get, do what you can with the resources at your disposal, and don’t kill yourself.  Well that mentality was short-lived in retrospect, since now I am trying my hardest to accomplish everything I possibly can in the next nine days.  Things were certainly slow going here.  People don’t answer emails or phone calls; they say they will do something (e.g. send a report, call you back in twenty minutes) and they never do; it’s been impossible to track down the right people; and my Spanish has made everything much less efficient.  It took me more than a month to really get on my feet and get my bearings (especially working up the courage just to run around the city of La Paz knocking on doors with my poor Spanish).  But the second half of my time here has been so incredibly fruitful that it definitely makes up for the stagnation and frustration at the beginning.  I also feel that so much has changed in the Bolivian quinoa industry, especially as a result of 2013 and United Nation’s International Year of the Quinoa, so writing off my research as “repetitive” also didn’t make sense.  Some of the academic papers and studies I’ve read from 2007, 2010, even 2012 might be slightly outmoded at this point, which fueled my inner fire even more.  I can’t believe that I considered skipping Bolivia in favor of Peru because I thought it would be too difficult.  Here I am, I feel like I am part of something big, really big.  In the wake of the International Year of the Quinoa, I am getting both a literal and figurative taste of what’s happening in the wake of 2013 and in the midst of the global quinoa craze.  I may have said it before, but quinoa is a manifestation of EVERYTHING I’ve been exploring over the past 9 months, namely the tension between tradition and innovation.  There is a supposed myth of quinoa that explains why royal quinoa exists in the Southern Altiplano but nowhere else:

“The legend of Mama Thunupa is one of the foundational tales of differentiation of Lipeña quinoa.  The legend tells of a time when a terrible drought  affected the Southern Altiplano, causing famine and widespread disease. The people of the area prayed to their god, Mama Thunupa, to send rains and food; Mama Thunupa sent another god, Nusta Juira, to end the suffering.5 Nusta Juira walked through all of the Southern Altiplano, saying that she was sent by Mama Thunupa to end the drought and the famine, but was received differently throughout the area. In the north, people doubted her provenance and she was received coldly; farther south, people received her warmly but still with doubt. In the far south, in Los Lipez, she was received as a god and treated as such. People followed her and praised her. At the end of her journey, she said, “For all the places I’ve walked, a plant very resistant to cold and frosts will have a very long height and its fruit will have an extraordinary ability to combat hunger, cure sicknesses, and will be resistant to droughts. You are all a strong and intelligent people.” She then ascended to be with Mama Thunupa again.The plant that she left was quinua real; where she had been coldly received, she left a short plant that would be sufficient to feed the people, but in Los Lipez, where she was received warmly by believers, she left the largest and most nutritious grain to honor them.”

-From “Nusta Juira’s Gift of Quinoa: Peasants,Trademarks, and Intermediaries in the Transformation of a Bolivian Commodity Economy” by Andrew Ofstehage, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as published in the Anthropology of Work Review

After going on a week-long quinoa tour with the largest importer of organic quinoa in the U.S., two of their major American clients, and one of the only two quinoa farmers in all of Australia, I couldn’t think of a more exciting and dynamic time or place to be studying the changes in quinoa production.  Like Paola Mejia from CABOLQUI said, these next few months are going to be a game changer for Bolivia, though whether positively or negatively has yet to be determined.  But I can feel it.  It’s like the buzz around quinoa and this so-called tipping point is tangible.  From my discussions with farmers to NGOs to private businesses to government officials, I can really tell that the dynamism is alive and well.

More notes from Quillacas from my conversations with Willy and Fidencia:

·         "Exporting companies and middlemen are robbing us" -my farmer hosts

·         Quinoa will be about 1,250 Bs/quintal in May/June during the new harvest

·         700-800 Bs/quintal in October/November/December

·         $12.50 Bs/lb or $7/lb

·         $3,000/quintal in the U.S. – it’s a stable price but our price rises and falls – "farmers are only getting 30% of the retail price" - this is true, but extremely high as compared to most products (they are still getting more than 80% of the export price too)

·         Middlemen are impersonating producers and using fake names to take advantage of government and NGO resources, so now some are getting testing to see if they are actually producers (questions such as: how many HA do you have, how long is the fallow period, when is the time of sowing etc.)

·         Middlemen are going to other countries and using association names

·         PROQUIOR is the chain of oruro department and the president is not even a producer now; he’s a middleman and for this reason, some produces reqfuse to participate, while others don’t care

·         Middlemen are taking resources away from the farmers

·         With labor, it used to be 100 Bs/day ($14.50) per worker per day (8 AM – 6 PM with meals) – now it’s 120-150 Bs/day ($17-$22) and in a few weeks it will become a bidding system

·         Pachamama law with the government in 2012 – but they don’t have a list of data because the law gives money out to farmers but middlemen are posing as farmers; the law includes a payment system that is supposed to ensure farmers against crop failure, pests, climate disasters etc. (an assured payment system against natural disasters)

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My perspectives on a lot of things have changed this year.  For instance, time doesn’t seem to matter as much.  I think about a thirty hour train ride in India or ten hours on a bus in Tanzania or Bolivia.  These are distances and hours that would seem ridiculous at home, where everything is much more convenient.  But you deal with it because you have to.  For half a year, bucket showers and squat toilets were nothing.  We are an incredibly adaptable and resilient race, I’ve decided.  I remember writing the letter to myself after Adirondack Adventure, the wilderness pre-orientation program for my college, self-explaining how it was one of the most challenging experiences of my life.  Looking back on it, at the time, it was.  My family and friends doubted that I could go into the “wilderness” for several days, hike ten miles a day, and canoe through Adirondack lakes.  But I survived and I loved it.  Two years ago, studying abroad for a semester in Australia also seemed challenging and very much out of my comfort zone.  I was nervous to be away from home for four months straight, on a continent about as far away from New England as you can get.  But I loved it.  Now here I am, traveling around Bolivia and everything that has come before this seems so incredibly effortless.  I really feel like I can take on the world now, with a new sense of confidence and self-assuredness.