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Month: July 2019

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Last Thursday and Friday there was an event in Junin to show off their pilot program. I went to see what the system really looks like - and to get some sun.

Somewhere between Jauja and La Oroya.

Junin's capital, Huancayo is in the Andes east of Lima, at a high enough elevation that it catches your breath.

The event was attended by representatives of the FAO, Peruvian universities and development organizations, farmers who contribute to the program, municipalities from Junin that participate in the pilot or who are contemplating participation, and the municipalities of Piura, Arequipa, and Lima. Lima had a large delegation and its own photographer; the man leading the delegation was feted everywhere we went, giving me the impression that the event was in part a sales pitch to Lima - this makes sense, as metropolitan Lima houses about a third of the Peruvian population.

The first day was a series of presentations, followed by an excursion on Friday to a preschool, several farms, and the processing plant that the producers use.

The preschool rolled out the red carpet for us: they cheered as we entered the school, and after we saw the kitchen and went into a couple of the classrooms, we were shepherded into their auditorium, where a group of the cutest children danced for us in traditional costumes.

On the breakfast menu that day: sangrecita with potatoes, a drink with quinoa, and flash photography.

It was very obvious that this part of the day had a few purposes: 1. for the municipality of Huancayo to show what it does for its citizens; 2. to impress the attendants of the event. These events make a lot of sense when you think about how 'invisible' this pilot program is - when a mayor builds a park, there's lasting physical evidence, but when you provide good nutrition to a child, the effects of that good nutrition are not immediately apparent. Having an event like this (with pictures to splash all over the newspaper) makes the invisible much more visible.

After the brouhaha at the school, we visited three farms in the town of Pucara:

One Agrepina's tomato houses.
A cuy (guinea pig) farm. I'm told they're delicious.
Cuy is not sold into Wali Warma because all meat provided by the program must be packaged and because cuy is extremely expensive. (We went to this farm because it is part of a strong cooperative in this town.)
A farm run by a cooperative.

The farms are certified under the SGP certification (Sistema de Garantia Participativo, System of Participatory Guarantees), which requires farmers to use certain practices and to process their yield to a certain standard. It takes three years to be fully certified, and not all farmers who sign up make it to full certification. The vegetable farmers of Pucara have their own processing facility in the center aisle of a previously disused market:

Rigorous sanitation procedures are maintained; produce passes from one station to the next in an eight step process.

From here, the food is transported to schools either in the Qali Warma delivery truck or a truck they hire (and clean) for the purpose.

In all, the event was an important look into how the Junin pilot is received in the area and how it functions in the context of Pucara; I can see how the model could be flexible enough to adapt itself to other regions, though it would need to establish itself in areas with a strong agriculture sector capable of consistently providing sufficient quantities for the demand of the local schools. In areas where this is not the case, a different approach would be necessary.

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Measuring the diversity of a food supply gets tricky fast.

Do we measure the diversity of the farms products come from? How is that done? There are ways of measuring land cover with satellites, but that doesn't say a huge amount about the species or varieties on a farm. So that means doing surveys of farms. Then you have to wonder if the farmers call the same varieties by the same names, and if what's in the field is what they grow year-round - some fields have crop rotations within the same year, and cover crops in the off season. Is the farming style of the region changing? Are there notable extension efforts in the area that are promoting polyculture or monoculture?

If you want to know about the diversity in a diet, that can get thornier still. A lot of measures of dietary diversity rely on 24-hour recalls, in which a person lists everything they ate the day before. There are a few problems with this: they may forget something they ate (having done this myself, it is very easy to 'blank' on a food), there's no easy way to show the amounts of what they ate, and the day that they describe may not be a typical day. These foods are often clumped into different 'functional groups,' which can change depending on who the survey is of and who it's for; but there are often groups of vitamin A-rich food, protein, carbohydrates, leafy vegetables, et cetera. If you want to talk about varieties in a diet, you have to rely on the consumer knowing what the varieties are called, which will often restrict you to farming families or to hunting down labels on packets.

On top of all of this, are they telling you what you want to hear, or what actually happens? Are they fudging the truth to maintain their dignity? (Imagine that a foreigner comes to your home and asks if you eat insects: if you live in a culture where eating bugs is a low-caste thing to do, you may not want to tell an outsider the truth.)

Agro biodiversity Fest, Huanuco - Peru
Corn varieties in Peru. Source of image: iucn.org

There is an astonishing amount of variation of measurements that are taken; one of the main gripes of meta-analyses is that studies are incredibly difficult to compare, making it really hard to make overall statements about agrobiodiversity and diet diversity.

Considering that this is what the next phase of my thesis is about, I'm in deep water. However, there are a number of examples that have been done successfully which look at agrobiodiversity, diet diversity, and system sustainability. For example, there's the Agrobiodiversity Index, which measures 'commitment,' 'action,' and 'status:' the political will, what is being done, and the current level of agrobiodiversity. These three categories are examined through the lenses of policy, species and varietal diversity, pollinator and soil biodiversity, landscape matrices, seed access, and others. Nutrition is included in the Index through functional diversity, both when it is mentioned in policy documents and in terms of "functional group richness of consumed foods," the number of functional groups the study participants are eating. It's not clear from the Methodology Report exactly how many functional groups there are, or if this varies between countries.

The Agrobiodiversity Index has been a massive undertaking which has spanned years of work; if you would like to see the results of the Index, it has analyzed ten countries worldwide for their levels of agrobiodiversity: Australia, China, Ethiopia, India, Italy, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa, and the USA. Feel free to pick a couple of countries or to skim the whole thing; it's a fascinating read.

Link to the Agrobiodiversity Index.

Of course, if you also want to measure other kinds of sustainability (water, greenhouse gas emissions,...), that can involve a whole other set of measures, picking and choosing what you need to know in order to be able to draw the type of conclusions you need. It's easy to see how different measures of similar things can become so different so fast, and it's easy to see why people would complain about how difficult it is to compare these approaches. I'm starting to see this kind of diversity as a necessary evil in order to adequately measure agrobiodiversity in each context.

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Last Friday, I was able to meet with the Chief of Performance of Qali Warma; this was my first opportunity to speak to someone in the program. Our conversation covered a lot of ground and helped me to feel out the position of Qali Warma. When I asked about the possibilities of including more diversity in the menus, I was told that Qali Warma has a couple of initiatives to include traditional potato varieties in Junin and tarwi in Ancash. This was news to me, so after a Google search I was able to discover the scale of the programs.

Foto: Tarwi en floración, Comunidad de Camicachi, Ilave/A. Canahua
Field of Tarwi.

Tarwi is a traditional Andean food most commonly found in Peru and Bolivia; those familiar with flowers will recognize that tarwi is part of the lupine family. Here, the beans are eaten as an accompaniment to a meal, in ceviche (marinated in lemon juice and hot pepper), or served in a dish such as tarwi with potatoes and rice.

Qali Warma is bringing tarwi in the form of bread to six provinces of the department of Ancash, reaching 76,500 students. The tarwi is ground into flour or boiled and mashed before getting mixed into the dough.

Tarwi flowers, tarwi beans, a dish of tarwi with potato and rice, and tarwi ceviche.
papas-andinas
An array of different types of traditional potato varieties.

The second initiative is taking place in department of Junin; SENASA (the Peruvian agency that monitors agriculture and provides technical support) and the regional agriculture board of Ica have provided trainings and technical support to farmers. Farmers have formed cooperatives so that they can produce potatoes not just of sufficient quality but also sufficient quantity for the demand.

This collaboration and hard work has resulted in 336 schools in four provinces with a total of 17,352 students receiving traditional varieties of potatoes in their school meals. The estimated amount bought for 2019 is 31 tons.

CIP
Many potato varieties have marbling of color in their flesh.

Qali Warma faces a number of troubling challenges, and as with any large bureaucracy, moves slowly. However, these initiatives and their pilot programs show that there are some in the institution who wish to make positive changes; the success of these initiatives can be scaled out to more regions in Peru. While neither of these initiatives will completely change how Qali Warma functions, they do show how the model can be flexible enough to include some kinds of non-perishable foods without endangering food safety, or bogging down the administration to a prohibitive degree.

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The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) held a conference in Lima this past week. The title was: 'In Defense of the Commons: Challenges, Innovation, And Action.' They had a program with sessions Monday-Wednesday, field trips on Thursday, and a final day of sessions on Friday. The conference was held in the Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru, which has one of the nicest campuses I've seen:

The main sessions I attended were on Friday and were organized by Bioversity International, and focused on PACS, Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services.

Some of the audience at the conference; the men in the foreground of the picture are from Cusco, Peru. Every region of Peru - and particularly the Andes - has a different mode of dress; on top of this, in many places locals can tell which town people are from by their hats. (So don't assume everyone's traditional dress looks the same - there is as much cultural diversity as biodiversity in Peru. Also, these aren't their normal street clothes.)

PACS work with local communities to conserve threatened varieties, first by determining what the local varieties are, how much land is planted with these varieties (and by whom), and which varieties should be conserved. Locals have a say in each step of the process and there is competition to find out which communities will participate, building excitement and emotional investment in the scheme. Next, seed is collected; from what I have heard, this can be one of the hardest steps in the process, because there may only be a tiny amount of seed available in any one place. When enough seed is collected, farmers grow the crops; at harvest, a portion of the seed goes to a genebank and the rest the farmers can keep for themselves. In addition, the farmers receive payment of goods; the payment can be shared by the whole community or be parsed out to individual families, and it can be anything from mattresses to processing equipment to building materials: the participants of the program choose what they would like to receive.

In the morning on Friday we heard presentations from a number of speakers, showing how PACS had worked for them. There were examples from a number of places: quinoa in Puno in southern Peru, amaranth in Cusco, Peru, corn in Ecuador, corn in Guatemala, and potatoes in Apurimac in the southern Andes of Peru. In all these cases but one, representatives of the farming communities involved spoke about their experiences, either about the new passion they felt for conservation or the affirmation of their prior convictions. The farmer from Puno came with four samples of quinoa and spoke about how radically her life had changed for the better by conserving these varieties.

I have less blurry pictures, but this guy reminded me of Indiana Jones (it's not just the hat). He's a potato farmer and keen conservationist, key to the program in Apurimac.

After lunch, we broke into working groups of different categories, looking to build upon the experiences of PACS and to make them better. These groups focused on an array of topics: monitoring, conservation (including with traditional knowledge), development of value chains, access to seeds and seed banks, financing and regulation, and finally, public procurement programs.

I ended up leading that last group, considering that I was the one with the most current knowledge base of the four of us who were participating. However, one of the members was part of the administration of Qali Warma in Cusco, so no one in the group was green to the issue.

Public procurement may not at first blush seem like a logical transition from biodiversity conservation, but considering that bringing native varieties securely out of danger requires having enough land devoted to its cultivation and a market for its sale, public procurement makes sense. If a government prioritizes biodiversity, it provides a ready-made market for these varieties and products made with these varieties.

Our group spoke a lot about the twin routes for change in the system: producers need to be empowered and organized, linked with financing but also with small businesses that can make products of high quality that could be sold to the government for its programs. In return, the government must make sure that the door is open to these producers and these businesses.

Nasturtiums.

Of course, this is much easier said than done. Given the sheer number of receipts that the program has to manage, sourcing from places that would provide smaller quantities would bog down the bureaucracy, and sanitation requirements would incur costs of money and time for farmers. However, it was the consensus of the group that these changes are valuable and worth the trouble.

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Bettering school nutrition has obvious benefits that no one can deny; however, if someone were to play devil's advocate, they might just ask whether diversifying the food and local sourcing for school meals really does that much good.

Image result for devil's advocate
xkcd, "The Sake of Argument"

I can answer that in a couple of ways: one, feeding children a diverse diet teaches them in a way that whiteboards and lectures never could, and two, that enhancing local markets does a better job of improving dietary diversity than having a lot of species grown on any one farm.

Shibhatu & Qaim (2018) and Jones (2017) both came to similar conclusions. Jones conducted a review of 21 studies and found that in 19 of them there was only a slight positive association between on-farm diversity and dietary diversity. Shibhatu & Qaim examined dietary diversity and on-farm species diversity of 1,482 households in Indonesia, Kenya, and Uganda and found that market access was a better determinant of dietary diversity than diversity on the farm.

This is because what is grown on the farm isn't necessarily what is eaten, which makes sense, even though it's not the first conclusion we might jump to. But when you think about it, you can think up any number of plausible scenarios where this happens: think of cocoa farmers in west Africa who have never had chocolate. They grow chocolate not for their own consumption but to make money for their families, and the amount of money they make depends on their access to markets.

The challenge for agrobiodiverse ecosystems is that having an incredibly diverse farm can be economically disadvantageous, as it can foster subsistence livelihoods, lower income, and lower diet quality, running against one of the main goals of agrobiodiversity: food security (Shibhatu & Qaim 2018). The key, then, is to support diverse farms by giving them a market for their production that enables them to buy food that helps them eat well.

If someone's still playing devil's advocate they could say - the point of school meals is to feed children nutritious meals, not to save whole communities of vulnerable farmers, so why not just fortify food?

Devil's advocate
Andrew Grossman.

I'll return to my first point. If you feed children fortified foods (like the biscuits that are given to Afghan children), you're not teaching them what they will need to know later in life when they no longer are participating in a school meal program. If you show a child that the school approves white rice, cookies, and sugary drinks, they aren't learning habits that will benefit them for their rest of their lives, and you can't guarantee that they will buy fortified foods in the future. (For that matter, one of the things I learned when I was in Capilla was that the children don't like the texture of fortified rice.)

On top of this, if you buy local food for school meals - if it has the full and proud support of the school and the planners of the program - you are also sending a powerful message to the children that the food produced by the community has real value, and that there could be possibilities for them if they stay in that community.