By Matthew Mather
Matthew is a student on our MA International Development programme.
High-up in the hills above Cusco in south-eastern Peru, indigenous locals are tackling the escalating climate emergency and ensuing food insecurity in a unique and culturally significant way.
Channelling ancestral knowledges, Parque de la Papa, or ‘Potato Park’, a 15,000-hectare reserve, has been created in order to conserve the under 1,365 known varieties of the native vegetable, vulnerable to climatic shifts. By preserving the potatoes’ genetic diversity, local villagers are crucially able to strengthen their own resilience faced with increasingly extreme weather events.
Asociación Andes, who developed the project, worked alongside locals to establish a communal space based around the concept of Buen Vivir, from the Quechuan ‘Sumak Kawsay’, roughly translated into English as ‘good living’. Rooted in the traditional ayllu system, it describes a way of living which prioritises the good of the community, inclusive of animals, nature and Pachamama (Mother Earth), above that of the individual.
Buen Vivir has also come to articulate a rejection of traditional development and its ties to western, capitalist ideas of modernity. For decades, foreign-backed initiatives have sought to ‘modernise’ Peru and its neighbours through neo-liberal inspired extractivism. However, cases such as the swiss-led Tintaya copper mine, which covered up dangerous levels of water contamination flowing into nearby villages, demonstrate the damaging social and environmental effects which western-led development interventions have frequently engendered.
Several varieties of ‘papas’ being sold at a local Peruvian market.
Source: Crop Wild Relatives. Creative commons licence. Creator: Mike Major/Crop Trust Copyright: (c)Michael Major/Global Crop Diversity Trust
The park represents a reclamation of the rights of the local Quechua population to govern, nurture and conserve the land which feeds them, free from interference from state or global economic actors. However, it also exemplifies a largely unexplored feature of Buen Vivir: the value of local knowledge transmission not only as a means to tackle food insecurity, but also to subvert the flow of euro-centric epistemologies. Nelly Stromquist considers the role of Buen Vivir as a means of “decolonising knowledge”, referring to contrasting understandings of development by local populations and those of the Global North, whose interventions have historically shown little interest in dialogue with indigenous thought.
Although Buen Vivir has recently gained positive global attention, chiefly thanks to the left-wing governments of Ecuador and Bolivia writing the concept into their constitutions, inherent problems emerge when viewed on the ground. In Ecuador, despite appointing indigenous leaders to his government, ex-president Rafael Correa used the institutionalisation of Buen Vivir to silence native activists’ more progressive demands for land reform. In weakening traditionally strong peasant movements, the state has been allowed to impose an increasingly extractivist model, leading to cases of land dispossession in areas where mining projects have been earmarked, such as that of the indigenous Shuar population - see also the research of Merino (2016) and Tilzey (2019).
In both countries, the elevation of the concept into hegemonic discourse has altered the fundamental spirit which initially engendered political interest. This is what Ramon Grosfoguel determines ‘epistemic extractivism’, or the pillaging of indigenous knowledges to be transformed into economic capital, while a politics of exclusion cements itself. In Peru conversely, where the principles of Sumak Kawsay have not been co-opted by the country’s right-wing government, the concept is more strongly embedded in indigenous socio-political movements, battling against a state which continues to adopt policies of resource extraction.
A 2011 meeting of all Andean nations centred around the principles which Buen vivir was based on: ‘Sumak Kawsay’.
Source: Flickr, Cancillería del Ecuador (2011). Creative commons licence. Description: “Primer Encuentro de los Pueblos y Nacionalidades Andinas por el Sumak Kawsay”
While these voices are beginning to be heard on a national political scale, the impact of the ‘Buen Vivir’ project emerging from Peruvian grassroots indigenous movements is best understood within projects like Parque de la Papa. In inspiring locally developed solutions to food insecurity, it offers an organic vision of Buen Vivir, outside the political realm of the state, which prioritises the voices, needs and knowledges of the indigenous communities it serves.
References
- Merino, R. (2016). An alternative to ‘alternative development’?: Buen vivir and human development in Andean countries. Oxford Development Studies [online], 44(3), pp.271–286. [Viewed 11 November 2020]. Available from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600818.2016.1144733
- Tilzey, M. (2020). Capitalism, imperialism, nationalism: agrarian dynamics and resistance as radical food sovereignty. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 41(3), pp.381–398. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02255189.2020.1767543
