An ancestral solution ensures water for Peruvian alpaca farmers, but is it enough?

In Ayacucho province in Peru’s southern Andes, a three-hour drive from the provincial capital, Huamanga, stands the snowcapped mountain of Rit’ipata, popular among tourists. Every January, high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, groups of young people climb its peak to take photos and play in the snow. But what they don’t know is that the ice they walk on is only temporary.

“The most constant snow we saw was in 2005, and only in the highest part [of the mountain],” says Tulia García, director of the Center for Agricultural Development (CEDAP), a sustainable development NGO that works with rural communities in the area. “What remains here is ice that will melt in a few weeks.”

Rit’ipata is part of the Chonta range of the Andes, one of 18 mountain ranges in Peru that together are home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers. Its name in Quechua means “snow summit,” though this is no longer the case: a study published in 2020 by the National Institute for Research on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems (INAIGEM) showed that the mountain range had lost 95% of its snowcap.

Jesús Gómez López, director of glacier research at INAIGEM, says high temperatures resulting from climate change have caused the disappearance of more than half of Peru’s glacier surface in just 54 years. According to Gómez López, this process is irreversible; his studies estimate that the icy crown atop the Chonta range, including on Rit’ipata, will be gone forever in about 10 years.

“The population living around snow-covered mountains are the first to feel the effects of deglaciation due to the reductions in water. We need to adapt to these changes, which means conserving our basin headwaters,” Gómez López says.

The alpaca farmers who live in the communities here know that the disappearance of snow from the mountain is due to global warming. Older community members attribute it to Rit’ipata’s sadness that people have stopped making offerings to the apu, the mountain deity.

“When we entrusted ourselves to Rit’ipata, our cattle remained safe and sound,” says Gregoria Tacuri, a weaver and alpaca farmer. “The apu performs miracles when people believe in him, as all apu have an agreement with God.”

In Andean culture, the highest mountains are considered apu, and were traditionally worshiped through payments made to the land — an ancestral practice that’s being forgotten as local beliefs lose out to evangelical Christianity.

“We used to have great respect for Pachamama [Mother Earth], and so everything went well for us,” says Máximo Ccorahua, one of the oldest community members in the area. “But no one believes in apu anymore. We had rituals and made offerings, there was rain, a lot of cattle, and Mother Earth was happy.”

A village fighting against water shortage

The community of Santa Fe sits on the slopes of Rit’ipata, in the district of Paras, at an elevation of more than 4,500 meters (14,800 feet), where nighttime temperatures drop below freezing. It’s a village of stone-and-clay houses, without a medical clinic, high school or food market. In this high Andean area, where farming is impossible, the 62 families make a living only through rearing alpacas.

Santa Fe is the source of the rivers and aquifers that provide water to more than 280,000 inhabitants downslope in Huamanga. Yet the community members don’t have a safe water network of their own. Instead, they collect water for consumption from pipelines installed in the hills and from groundwater springs, while their livestock depend on the unique ground vegetation here that acts like a sponge, absorbing water from snowmelt, subsoil and rain, creating a special ecosystem that provides for the alpacas.

Over the last two decades, however, the gradual thawing of Rit’ipata’s snowcap and the increasingly prolonged droughts have caused a reduction in all these water sources.

Félix Tacuri has lived in Santa Fe for 68 years and remembers when the snow reached knee height and springs in the area provided freshwater. He now describes an arid village, with more extreme heat during the daytime and seasons that are out of rhythm.

“Our Rit’ipata mountain would be covered in snow until August and September, but now there has been no snow since April. The water has also been disappearing and our pastures have been drying out. This is because the climate has changed. We’re entering a bad time,” he says.

The community members of Santa Fe have suffered an intensifying water shortage during this time. Since 2004, families have turned to their ancestral Indigenous knowledge of qocha, the Quechua name for an artificially fenced lagoon, to collect rainwater that can be used on their pastures in times of drought. This has the additional benefit of preventing topsoil erosion due to excessive rainwater runoff during rainy months, while also enabling the replenishment of the groundwater aquifers that feed the area’s springs and wetlands. This traditional system is known as water sowing and harvesting.

Ancestral knowledge as a form of resistance

Water sowing and harvesting has five elements, which all aim to replenish subsoil water. These are communal organization, building filtration ditches or terraces to recover arid land, rotating grazing areas, reforesting native plant species, and building dams in existing lagoons or new qocha.

“Sowing is the technique of filtering water into the subsoil, while harvesting is the discharge or use of the water,” says CEDAP’s García, whose organization has promoted the creation of 41 qocha in the community. “When fencing off the qocha, dams are built with a tube or control valve fitted that releases the water into pastures at certain times of the year.”

One of the largest of these qocha is called Qasaccocha, a blue lagoon flanked by two mountains, whose water capacity has increased from 60,000 cubic meters to more than 300,000 (15.9 million to 79.3 million gallons).

The 41 qocha built in Santa Fe can hold a combined 2.9 million m3 (766 million gal) of water, three times more than what was collected naturally. The water captured in 36 of these qocha feed directly into rivers that supply urban and farming populations living around the lower basin.

The first qocha was built in the Guitarrachayocc wetland, tripling its water storage capacity to 90,000 m3 (23.8 million gal). “We started working on this project with CEDAP,” says Gregorio Ccorahua, 40, who is continuing the family tradition of raising alpacas. “We didn’t use iron, cement or bricks; it’s all natural. We have surrounded the lagoon with clay, stone and soil, materials that we call champa. The whole community rallied together with wheelbarrows, shovels and pickaxes, and relearned this technique so that we can take care of our livestock.”

His wife, three of his children and his father, Máximo, live next to this qocha, which not only irrigates their farm, but allows them to farm trout, an activity they started a year ago to provide more options to feed their family.

“It’s very difficult to live here because crops don’t grow. Our animals die from cold and hunger. The qocha help ensure that they have some water and food during the most difficult months. Without them, everything would be dry and there’d be no more plains,” Gregorio says.

The qocha are the result of community work: families identified the water pools and wetlands that needed to be reinforced and organized themselves into groups responsible for the qocha closest to their farms. CEDAP trained those involved, provided tools and snacks and, in some cases, resources to support the labor. Currently, the women in the community are the stewards of the qocha and share their knowledge with younger community members.

Tulia García says the project was called Pachamamanchikta Waqaychasun, or “Let’s conserve our Mother Earth.”

“It’s a way of mitigating climate change and preserving what our ancestors taught us,” she says.

Due to a lack of funds, CEDAP was only able to implement sprinkler irrigation systems in two of the qocha, but the families were able to buy hoses to pipe clean water to their homes after selling some of their alpacas. Several of these hoses can be seen winding up the hills of Santa Fe along the trails connecting the community’s farms.

“Before, we had to walk a lot to get water from pools that had already dried up,” says community member Sonia Quichca Vilca. “Now, I water my pastures and my greenhouses using the hoses.”

The greenhouses are small vegetable patches surrounded with stones and plastic to create a warm microclimate for growing herbs and tubers that would otherwise not be possible because of the frost. This is another Andean practice implemented in Santa Fe so that community members have access to a more balanced diet. However, the growth of these crops depends on the water the community members are able to collect.

A national practice

In 2016, Peru’s Ministry of the Environment recognized CEDAP Ayacucho’s water sowing and harvesting practice with the Antonio Brack Egg National Environmental Award. Other civil society organizations have also carried out water storage and filtration projects in different regions of the country. The Ministry of Agricultural Development and Irrigation studied their practices in 2017 to create the Sierra Azul Fund Implementation Unit, with the aim of financing water security projects for agriculture and high Andean areas.

From 2017 to 2022, the unit funded the construction of 1,482 qocha in 17 regions throughout the country, at a total cost of 184.4 million soles (about $48 million at the December 2022 exchange rate). Of this investment, 62% went into building 670 qocha in the provinces of Apurímac, Huancavelica, Cusco and Ayacucho, enabling the collection of a combined 220.3 million m3 (58.2 billion gal) of rainwater.

In 2019, the government enacted Law No. 30989, which stipulates that water sowing and harvesting in upper and middle parts of hydrological basins is of national interest and a public need, and includes both state and communal projects. However, in a derivative ministerial resolution, 146-2022, which defined investment guidelines for such projects, the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Irrigation indicated that qocha could only be built in areas at elevations of 2,500-4,000 m (8,200-13,100 ft). Communities at higher altitudes, such as Santa Fe, were therefore not prioritized under the guidelines.

Experts we interviewed pointed out that another barrier to accessing the Sierra Azul Fund is that projects may not exceed 45 days to implement, so the communities with the easiest access — those close to roads or highways — are prioritized. The high Andean and alpaca farms often lack this basic infrastructure, meaning it would take longer to bring in equipment and machinery.

“Unfortunately the state is not reaching the most difficult places,” García says. “I know that they went to the Guitarrachayocc qocha to change the dam that we had already put in, but not to build new ones.”

Gualberto Machaca Mendieta, a hydrological engineer with the Sierra Azul Fund, acknowledges that some program guidelines need to be reviewed to align with the reality of communities and basins. However, he says each case is analyzed so as not to neglect critical populations.

“We have difficulties in building qocha in very remote rural communities because we have a short implementation time. But this year, the government started another program called Con Punche Perú Agro, and with them we’ll be able to supplement this type of work,” Machaca Mendieta says.

He adds the aim of water sowing and harvesting carried out under the Sierra Azul Fund is to ensure a steady flow of water into the ground. After a year or more, natural pools will appear in the surrounding wetlands and the water will be channeled to the aquifers for agricultural use.

The qocha aren’t meant for irrigating pastures for alpaca herds, Machaca Mendieta says, but adds that, in practice, community members can and do use them this way in times of drought. “Due to the existing water shortage, we could not limit their use. We have to adapt to communities’ needs,” he says.

A race against the clock and droughts

Santa Fe community members agree that the system of qocha has helped them reduce alpaca deaths, but say the water they’ve manage to store is no longer enough to keep their pastures green. Gregorio Ccorahua says that for three years now they’ve had just two and a half months of rain, which means the qocha aren’t filling up to their usual capacity, and compelling community members to open the dams earlier than expected.

In 2022, for example, the National Hydrology and Meteorology Service reported that Peru’s southern mountains were experiencing their worst drought in 58 years, with the Ayacucho region among the affected areas. Santa Fe community members were forced to open the valves of the area’s qocha that July, three months earlier than usual, but even this couldn’t stop the inevitable: pregnant alpacas started to miscarry, and baby alpacas died due to a lack of water and food.

The community remembers this event as a time of mourning. “Many of my alpacas died, they all became skinny and started to drop from hunger and thirst,” says Gregoria Tacuri, who lost 50 alpacas in just one month. “I’m worried because it’s the only sustenance for our family.”

Migration is also accelerating as a result of this crisis, with more young people rejecting alpaca farming to move to the cities. “My older children went to work in Lima,” says Nancy Tacuri, a weaver in Santa Fe. “They no longer want to live here at altitude because they’ve seen how upset I was when my alpacas died; they don’t want to repeat this suffering.”

Jorge Montes Vara, general manager of SEDA Ayacucho, the company that provides drinking water in the region, says that if the droughts become more prolonged, as is likely under El Niño conditions, there will also be restrictions on the supply of water to the city of Huamanga. “The only option is to ensure that water is stored and captured as much as possible when it rains,” he adds.

Aquilino Mejía, an expert in water sowing and harvesting at the Center for Studies and Promotion of Southern Development, says many more qocha will need to be built to tackle climate change.

“A single qocha is not an immediate solution — it takes one to three years to verify whether filtration has contributed to the generation of new water pools. For a country as large as Peru, the current qocha are insufficient. There must be a more aggressive national investment policy,” he says.

Mejía has promoted the construction of 520 qocha and microdams in Puno and Arequipa, provinces that neighbor Ayacucho. His organization works in partnership with local governments, organizations and rural communities.

“In Puno, the qocha are not reaching their maximum capacity or are drying out while waiting for the rain to replenish them. This shortage is preventing the appearance of new pastures,” he says. “The population is desperate.”

Flavio Valer is another expert championing this traditional practice. His water replenishment projects have been implemented mainly in Cusco and Apurímac provinces, for which he received recognition from the United Nations Environment Programme in 2018. Valer says he believes the state, NGOs and high Andean communities must join forces to expand and improve all aspects of water sowing and harvesting, as the current number of qocha is insufficient if they don’t have collection channels to bring more water.

“In some places, large qocha are built, a dam is installed, and nothing more,” Valer says. “Community members see the qocha drying up and that is why they believe the system no longer works — that they’ve been deceived. The water in the qocha evaporates and is reduced due to its usage, but the collecting channels are built to continue providing them with water from different points, especially in months of high rainfall.”

In Santa Fe, there are few rainy days, but when they come, the rainfall is intense. Hydrological engineers at the Apacheta intake, where water is collected for Ayacucho, note that two weeks’ worth of rain now falls in just two or three days.

This is why García, Mejía and Valer agree that water sowing and harvesting is essential to tackling climate change impacts in the medium term. But more qocha need to be built urgently, they say, with other components strengthened, such as filtration ditches and reforestation of native plants. The latter is particularly crucial given that forested areas capture 16 times more water than grasslands.

“The qocha will always work when it’s raining,” Valer says. “All possible means must be used so that the water stays in the upper part of the basins, and that can only be achieved by promoting the creation of large reservoirs.”

In Peru, the average annual precipitation is 2 million m3 (528 million gal), yet only 1% of this amount is collected for irrigation and human consumption, with the rest running off into rivers and the ocean or evaporating, according to the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Irrigation. If anything, this figure shows there’s massive potential to manage and store even more rainwater.

 
Banner image: It’s estimated that the Chonta mountain range, including Rit’ipata, will lose all its snow and ice in about 10 years. Image courtesy of @mullu.tv.

This story was reported by Mongabay Latam in collaboration with Mullu.tv and was first published here on our Latam site on Feb. 13, 2024, with the Mullu.tv video available here.