Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 79, December 2018, Pages 475-480
Land Use Policy

The quinoa boom in Peru: Will land competition threaten sustainability in one of the cradles of agriculture?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.08.039Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The changes in land use in Peru during the period from 1995 to 2014 are analyzed.

  • The emergence of the new geography of quinoa production has accompanied a shift away from traditional farming practices.

  • A trend towards competition for land use in Andean crops production is identified.

Abstract

For a long time, the Andean grain crop quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) was just another example of the thousands of little-known and underutilized plants. Today, however, quinoa is considered a superfood due to its exceptional nutritional value and its international demand has soared. One consequence is that in Peru, due to its position as the world’s largest producer of quinoa, questions have arisen regarding the extent to which the expanding global demand for the crop is compatible with appropriate natural resource management. Regarding this issue, the present study uses descriptive statistics for each region of Peru to calculate the mean variation in the percentages of harvested production and harvested area of a range of native Andean crops from 1995 to 2014. The findings show that the boom in demand has led to the emergence of a new geography of quinoa production in Peru, which has been accompanied by the transformation of traditional farming practices and a trend towards increasing competition for land use. For all those involved, this phenomenon warns of the urgent need to create a sustainable interaction between socio-economic and environmental demands. This warning is particularly relevant given Peru’s historical role in agriculture as a center of crop genetic diversity.

Introduction

When, in 1492, Christopher Columbus set foot in the new lands that would later be called the Americas, it provoked a series of events that would forever transform human eating habits. The adventurers that followed him encountered a wide range of agricultural products consumed by the native peoples of the New World, many of which were then introduced to European markets. The new lands of the Americas came to provide a wealth of new food products that had been domesticated by the Neolithic peoples who lived there, of particular note among them are: corn, potatoes, manioc, various beans, tomatoes, pumpkin and sunflower (Mazoyer and Roudart, 2006).

The processes of occupying, colonizing and trading in the new lands allowed foodstuffs that had, until then, beenisolated on disconnected continents to begin to circulate around the world. There followed a profound transformation of traditions, customs, lifestyles and eating habits on a global scale. The documented history of agriculture in the Americas shows the Peruvian Andes ranks to be one of the original centers of Neolithic agriculture, having emerged independently at least 6000 years before present (Dillehay et al., 2005, 2007; Mazoyer and Roudart, 2006).

Distinct cultures in Ancient Peru learned to manipulate plants and in the process of experimentation managed to successfully domesticate them in territories with complex topographical and climatic features (Pearsall, 2008; Piperno, 2011). All this knowledge of plant manipulation was transmitted over millennia and reached a peak during the Inca Empire, between the 15th and 16th centuries (Covey, 2008; Cuellar, 2013). In the 500 years following Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, and with the transfer to the New World of agricultural products originating from the ancient Fertile Crescent (the Middle–East), such as barley and wheat, competition for land use heightened. This led to a dramatic reduction in the production of local crops (Vietmeyer, 1986) and the expansion of today’s commonly-known agricultural commodities (Defries et al., 2015). However, the ancient Andean cultures left a great legacy to the 21st century world in the form of an exceptionally nutritious grain, quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.), which has only recently been recognized by health-conscious consumers around the world (Repo-Carrasco et al., 2003; Abugoch, 2009; Nowak et al., 2015). As a consequence, Peru has emerged as one of the most important players in the world’s health-food market. Hence, a question arises regarding the extent to which the growing global demand for quinoa is compatible with the appropriate natural resource management in Peru. Accordingly, to help answer to this research question, this study adopts three analytical dimensions: (i) the evolution of land use for the cultivation of quinoa; (ii) the transformation of agricultural practices; and (iii) the tendency towards competition for land use.

Analysis of the implications of changes in land use over time provides important insights into the process of designing strategies to strengthen food security (Rockson et al., 2013; Smith, 2013). This is relevant because one of the biggest challenges facing the future of global agriculture is how to reconcile the food production expansion while minimizing the negative impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and society (Hazell and Wood, 2008; Pretty et al., 2010; Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011; Phalan et al., 2011; Tscharntke et al., 2012; West et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2016).

Section snippets

Data sources

To achieve a deeper understanding of the evolution of quinoa production in Peru, data obtained from The Office of Economic and Statistical Studies of the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (OEEE-MINAGRI) regarding production volumes and harvested area (OEEE/MINAGRI, 2015), and from The Integrated Information System on Foreign Trade (SIICEX) regarding trade flows (SIICEX, 2015) were analyzed. As Peru is divided into 25 political regions, data were collected separately for the quinoa

The emergence of the new geography of quinoa production in Peru in the 21st century

Quinoa is one among a long list of Andean agriculture products that became marginalized following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas (Vietmeyer, 1986; FAO, 1994). The factors contributing to its marginalization include the introduction of cereals that replaced quinoa cultivation (such as barley and wheat), as well as technical, economic and social reasons. Thus, the continued cultivation of quinoa over centuries has largely been due to the knowledge held by the indigenous peoples in

Conclusions and the way forward

The analysis of the historical series of quinoa production in Peru, between 1995 and 2014, shows that the configuration of the cultivated area changed dramatically as a consequence of the quinoa boom. The 264% increase in the area under quinoa cultivation in Peru since 1995 is due to expansion from the high plateau of Puno to coastal regions.

Although the quinoa boom is a relatively recent phenomenon, the present research findings suggest traditional farming practices are being transformed. It

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Brazilian National Council for Research and Development – CNPq (Grant Number: CNPq-306375/2012-5) and CAPES PEC-PG for their financial support, and thankful to Professor A. Mujica from Quinoa Genetic Improvement Program at UNA-Puno and A. Humpire from National Institute of Agricultural Innovation (INIA-EEA Santa Rita-Arequipa-Peru) for their helpful information. The authors are also grateful to Professor S.E. Jacobsen, from Faculty of Life Sciences at University

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