A seed for all seasons: can ancient methods future-proof food security in the Andes?
In Peru’s remote villages, farmers have used diverse crops to survive unpredictable weather for millennia. Now they are using this knowledge to adapt to the climate crisis
Dan Collyns in Choquecancha
@yachay_dc
Sat 25 Dec 2021 05.01 EST
In a pastoral scene that has changed little in centuries, farmers wearing red woollen ponchos gather on a December morning in a semicircle to drink chicha, made from fermented maize, and mutter an invocation to Pachamama – Mother Earth – before sprinkling the dregs on the Andean soil.
Singing in Quechua, the language spread along the vast length of the Andes by the Incas, they hill the soil around plants in the numerous small plots terraced into a patchwork up and down the Peruvian mountainside.
The Andes sustains one of the most diverse food systems in the world. Through specially adapted farming techniques, these farmers conserve a great variety of maize, also known as corn, and other biodiverse crops that could be key to food security as global heating causes a more erratic climate. Maize has been grown in Lares, near Cusco, for thousands of years, in one of the highest farming systems in the world. Choquecancha and Ccachin communities specialise in more than 50 varieties of the cereal in a myriad of different sizes and colours.
“In the old days, the Incas grew these ecotypes and now we continue the path set down by our ancestors,” says Juan Huillca, a conservationist in Choquecancha, a tiny mountainside village.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/25/a-seed-for-all-seasons-can-ancient-methods-future-proof-food-security-in-the-andes
Lares Valley, Peru
Images of the Choquecancha community in Peru:
https://tinyurl.com/52evbxsa
Images of the Ccachin community in Peru:
https://tinyurl.com/5n7h9y77
