Community Gardens Help Anchor Indigenous Villages in Peru

Posted: 23 January 2007

by Thea Gelbspan

Changing times demand new approach to agriculture, land use in Urubamba rain forest.

The muddy path to the Miaria village community garden takes visitors past wooden shacks and overgrown fields. Drops of water not yet evaporated by the morning sun hang from the trees. As the sun climbs, its rays illuminate the vapors from the wet ground. Despite the early hour it grows hot, and the group shuffles under the shade of trees as community leader Jacobo Díaz stands between fallen logs near the edge of the garden, squinting in the light.

He describes the agricultural practices of the ancient Machiguenga and Yine people in Peru’s Urubamba river valley. “Our parents and our grandparents lived far apart,” he began. “They searched for land where they could grow yucca and plantain for two years, and then they’d move on.” When the fields stopped producing crops, they would seek other fields to clear and plant. “Our ancestors before us made gardens, then they abandoned them. They made another, then they abandoned it again.”

With the coming of modern times, the indigenous people in this part of Peru had to settle in communities. They could no longer use their old “slash and burn” tactics, clearing and planting fields until the thin lowland soils became depleted before moving on. They had to adapt to changing times.

Their first step was to gain control of their ancestral lands, so they could still plant their crops, hunt, and fish. The indigenous people, however are not the only ones interested in the area’s natural resources. Illegal logging of mahogany and other valuable trees by non-indigenous Peruvians is rampant in the forest. The Camisea gas pipeline, a major natural gas project, is drilling tons of gas from within indigenous lands deep in the remote jungle and piping it across the Andes and to the coast, where it is exported. The gas company transports heavy machinery using huge ships that travel down the Urubamba river. The area rivers are also seeing an increase in industrial fishing. Boats now drag their nets across the river bottom, severely decreasing fish stocks, and endangering an essential resource on which the indigenous people have relied for centuries.

Without clear legal title to their ancestral lands, the indigenous people would be powerless to protect their forest and water resources, and have a hand in determining their preferred means of economic development to help them overcome poverty. So the Machiguenga Council of the Urubamba River (COMARU) and its ally, the Center for the Development of Indigenous Amazonians (CEDIA), approached Oxfam America for help in 1985. Over the next 15 years, Oxfam provided some of the funding these two organizations needed to demarcate their lands, and create state of the art maps using geo-referenced, satellite technology. They then filed the legal claims with the national government to get property titles. In total, theses efforts helped 4,197 families in 71 communities gain title to 933,863 hectares of forest land (nearly 2.3 million acres).

Having established ownership of the land, the Machiguenga and Yine then turned to developing management plans to create ways for people to make a decent living without degrading their national resources. The first step: documenting the biologically diverse plants, animals, and fish, and create some projects that would help people provide food for their families and reduce the pressure on fish and game. Four communities with a total of 475 families (roughly 2,600 people) created ponds to raise fish using mostly locally available materials, replanted mahogany and other valuable trees, developed a pilot community garden to experiment with diversifying plants and reviving cultivation of some species that communities had stopped using over-time. Families are now cultivating a wider variety of yucca, a staple food in this area, and medicinal plants like the sangre de grado, a birch-like tree with blood-red sap used for first-aid to stop the bleeding of minor cuts and scrapes.

Jacobo Díaz told the visitors that the gardens were helping the people of Miaria to live in their community, now that the Yine no longer move around in the forest. “We claimed and won the title for our lands, now we have our own lands and are tied to them. This project is helping us to extend the life of our gardens. Now we don’t need to worry as much about what we are going to eat. We are now able to produce food for our children.”

Thea Gelbspan is the regional program manager for Latin America in Oxfam America’s headquarters in Boston.