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The socio-cultural, institutional and gender aspects of the water transfer-agribusiness model for food and water security. Lessons learned from Peru

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Abstract

This paper critically analyses the potentials and frontiers of an agribusiness model developed along the arid coastal area of Peru. To make this model work, water from Andean rivers and lakes have been dammed and transferred to the coastal area through sophisticated and highly expensive hydraulic infrastructures. Although this ‘water transfer-agribusiness’ (WATA) model has attained its objectives to let the desert bloom and increase agro-exports from Peru, it does so at the cost of local environmental degradation, social unrest and gender disparities. These unintended consequences arose, in part, because the WATA model is anchored in ideologies of domination of nature and colonization of empty territories. The construction of water infrastructure, namely ‘Large Scale Irrigation’ (LSI) left aside the sociocultural, gender and environmental aspects that these kinds of interventions should include. Based on studies of water transfer from the Colca River to the ‘Pampas de Majes’ in the Arequipa region in the south-west of Peru, this paper analyses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the consequences of such interventions on the food/water security and environmental health of the affected population.

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Notes

  1. Aristocratic landlords dominated the Peruvian society after independence from Spain. They were of European (usually Spanish) ancestry, and their identity and ideologies were strongly rooted in the feudal and patriarchal system established across the colonies. Indigenous people were subject to inhuman working conditions and were displaced from their land and territories, provoking a generalised demographic disaster (Wernke and Withmore 2009). After independence (1821), the social and cultural situation of indigenous women and men did not change much until almost the end of the 20th century (Vera 2011).

  2. Boelens (2008:12) points out that such a normalizing power invades, expropriates agency and annihilates local norms and beliefs through an assembly of modern and rational knowledge and official norms. These norms organize subjects in hierarchies, and – in an all-inclusive and participatory way - make subjects self-organize and conform to these lines of command and obedience.

  3. Wester (2008) describes the ‘hydraulic mission’ as the strong conviction of hydraulic engineers, most of them civil engineers, that every drop of water flowing to the ocean is a waste. The flow of water must therefore be captured before it can reach the ocean so that it can be used productively.

  4. Gender dual system refers to the parity of participation of both women and men in socio-political, religious and productive domains of everyday reality.

  5. PETT was created to promote and perfect the granting of titles of ownership and the registration of rural properties expropriated and awarded during the Agrarian Reform, and to grant title to government property. PETT finished in 2007.

  6. This law, among others, fixes the salary of an agricultural worker to more or less U$ 255/month (0.34 currency exchange from Soles to American Dollars, at Jan 2015), which represents less than a minimal salary. A worker who signed a contract with an employer can only claim 15 days of holiday per annum, without rights of compensation for time of service. He or she can be fired at any time without compensation.

  7. PROFODUA justifies its actions by claiming it provides legal security for agricultural users and brings order to the use of water in agriculture. PROFODUA (including PETT) was financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

  8. The Colca River is a sub-catchment of Cola-Majes-Camaná catchment, which is located on the occidental Southern Andes in Arequipa. Colca sub-catchment is considered to be the most important fresh water reserve of this catchment because of the abundance of different sources of water in the upper part with snow-capped mountains, Andean paramos (or tundra), and lakes. These sources of water have allowed the people living in the Colca Valley to develop a highly productive irrigated agriculture (see also Vera 2011).

  9. The use of this explosive was legally forbidden in Peru during those years (1980–2000), as the terrorist group Shining Path was causing much damage using dynamite. However the need for water was so compelling in the community that people even took the risk of being accused of being terroristas, which was drastically punished by prison sentences.

  10. Ecological flow is defined as the quantity and quality of water required for ecosystem conservation and resource protection: this can provide a baseline flow for planning the extraction of water from a river for different purposes (irrigation, hydropower generation, or other productive-economic activity), see also Tharme (2003).

  11. Colca Valley was declared the second natural wonder of Peru by UNESCO. It has already been mentioned that this valley is highly appreciated and visited by hundreds of tourists every day, which in turn drives different emerging economic activities related to tourism. This activity has attracted many migrants, not only from the nearest communities, but also from other regions, such as Puno. Nowadays, almost half of the Chivay population are from other regions.

  12. Dairy farming became a ‘gold mine’ for the trans-national milk company ‘Leche Gloria’. This company is also established in ‘Pampas de Majes’ and has made a profit from this LSI.

  13. This excessive amount of money becomes immediately clear when realizing that the real costs (or factual costs) of irrigation investment in the most highly productive agricultural lands in the coastal area of Peru are around 6,500 US Dollars/ha (Ministry of Economics 2006).

  14. There are many advantages in investing in small-scale irrigation systems: they are less costly, more quickly operational and cause less environmental degradation. Other work has shown that small scale irrigation is an effective means of expanding or improving irrigated areas, increasing food production and raising producer incomes (Coward et al. 1988).

  15. According to a report of the World Bank (Williams 1995) the planned costs of Sub-Saharan irrigation systems was around $ 18,269/ha, but by the end actual costs reached $ 31,238/ha. The average worldwide planned cost in large-scale irrigation has been $ 7740/ha, while the average actual costs have reached $ 12,915/ha.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Gender and Water Alliance (GWA) for their support during the writing of this paper. I also extend my thanks to CIDOB, especially to Eckart Woertz, for inviting me to be part of this process and for his support with editing. I also appreciate very much the feedback of my two anonymous readers and the last editing of Richard Strange. This Research would not have been possible without the support and participation of people from the communities of the Colca Valley; I appreciate their time and friendship. Lastly, I extend my gratitude to my colleague of Wageningen University, Margreet Zwarteveen, who supervised my PhD research.

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  1. Gender and Water Alliance, Dieren, Gelderland, Netherlands

    Juana Vera Delgado

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Vera Delgado, J. The socio-cultural, institutional and gender aspects of the water transfer-agribusiness model for food and water security. Lessons learned from Peru. Food Sec. 7, 1187–1197 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-015-0510-5

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