Household Herds
Given the predominance of grasslands in the park, and the relatively large number of non-native livestock owned and managed by the household, household herders (often women and children) are the ultimate decision-makers affecting conservation in the HBR. Households generally own a variety of livestock including cattle, horses, mules, llamas, alpacas, sheep, goats and pigs.29 Over 4,014 livestock were recorded in the 2001
29 Differences in herd size, composition, and management are pronounced among households. Discussion of these differences is provided below, and is an important factor in the analysis presented in Chapter 3.
census.30 Mean herd size for the household was 13 (min = 0, max = 190, stdev = 17), with 75% of the average household herd composed of sheep (75%).31
An annual activity profile of household herding labor (shown in Figure 2.6) reveals the importance of this activity. Most households with draft animals utilize them during the labor intensive tasks of field preparation and harvest. The household herd is kept near the community during these times to minimize spatial disjunctions in
agriculture and herding (McCorkle 1987). The increased labor demand of herding animals in the community, while keeping them off of cultivated fields is evident in the activity profile of February and March. Herding labor is reduced when crop stubble from the campaña grande harvest is grazed in April and May. Once these resources are
exhausted, women’s’ herding labor increases in a trend consistent with dry season transhumance; a herding strategy involving the movement of animals to higher pastures as the dry season progresses. On the other hand, men’s’ herding labor trends downward over the same period. Overall, the labor invested in herding livestock by both men and women is pronounced. Females spend an average of approximately 25% of their time herding throughout the year, significantly more than any other subsistence task, while men spend nearly 10%. Compared to the statistics of time allocation to agriculture, men and women collectively spend more time herding.
30 The possibility for under-reporting household livestock exists in most pastoralist communities. I was able to cross-check and update these totals during my visits to the household for time allocation observations and monthly surveys.
31 Pigs were not counted in the livestock census as they are kept at the household or staked near the house and do not rely as much on natural forage or use of the Ishinca valley. Most households had a number of pigs, guinea pigs and chickens which are not represented in this count.
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Figure 2.6: Time allocation to herding by gender. Graph characteristics are identical to those of Figure 2.5. Rainfall data illustrate the subtle effects of the dry season on female herding labor, which increases gradually over the months of May through August as many (but not all) herders range farther from the community and higher into the Ishinca valley to seek out suitable forage for their livestock.
Tourism: A fair-weather industry
“Yo era el arriero primero para trabajar con turistas. Acá ellos vienen todavía; algunas veces más y otros menos.
Trabajo cuando llegan, pero necesito mis chacras y mi ganado el mismo. Ellos me apoyan, siempre están. No es así con las turistas.”
“I was the first arriero to work with tourists. They come here still, sometimes more and others less.
I work when they arrive, but I need my fields and livestock the same. They support me, they are always here. It is not so with the tourists.”
(a comunero of Tupac Yupanqui, reportedly the first arriero, Sector Collón, 2002). Collectively, mountain tourism makes up approximately one-fifth of the world’s tourism revenues (Lynch and Maggio 2000). Travel to the Andes, in particular, has grown substantially in recent years (Mitchell and Eagles 2001). According to statistics published by the region’s tourism authority (summarized by van Es 2002), the number of visitors making overnight stays in Huaraz had steadily increased to over 157,000
individuals by 2001. The majority of these overnight stays are Peruvian nationals for which the region serves as a holiday retreat. The economic impact of these tourists is pronounced in Huaraz where money is spent in local cafés, hotels and touring agencies that make day trips into the park’s most popular valleys such as Llanganuco and
Pastoruri. Yet, a very small proportion of the revenues they generate, if any at all, reach the park’s surrounding indigenous communities. It is the lesser but still significant foreign tourists, a group of approximately 23,000 individuals, that are more likely to spend extended periods of time in the region for climbing and trekking, venturing to outlying communities such as TY.
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Figure 2.7: Foreign and national tourists making overnight stays in Huaraz from 1988 to 2001. Notice the pronounced decline in tourism during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time period that corresponds with Shining Path activity in the region. This trend illustrates the fickleness of the industry and its sensitivity to the political climate, discussed in greater detail below.
0 30 60 90 120 150 180 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 Year T our is ts ( tho us an ds ) Foreign National
Many adventure tourists to the HNP utilize the services of arrieros from its surrounding indigenous communities.32 Arrieros carry the gear of visiting mountaineers to base camp with the assistance of pack animals, primarily mules and horses. This
32 The national park registry documents a total of 109,063 entrants to the park in 2000; 95,446 national and 13,617 foreign tourists. Of these, they recorded 4,424 adventure tourists (INRENA 2001). This is likely an underestimate because tourism checkpoints are located at only a few valleys in the entire park, including those of Llanganuco and Carpa (Pastoruri). During fieldwork in 2002, a tourism checkpoint was formally established at Wiliac, a barrio of Collón that most tourists pass through before beginning their trek through the Ishinca Valley. This manned registry will assist in getting better estimates of the traffic through this particular valley, although one can assume that it gets a good proportion of the foreign tourist population due to its popularity as an acclimatization valley.
service brings a lucrative wage to those certified to do the work, with rates of 10
USD/day for the driver, plus an additional 5 USD/day for every animal carrying weight. By comparison to the average daily wage of 2–3 USD/day for the work of a jornal or peon (day laborer), this income is quite significant. In 2002, there were 46 arrieros in the sectors of Collón and Pashpa registered to work with tourists, reflecting the Ishinca valley’s popularity for climbing and trekking. Other occupations in the tourism industry for which individuals were actively pursuing certification include cook, porter and guide. These occupations require additional certifications and command higher wages of 25 USD/day for porters and cooks, up to 50–150 USD/day for guides.33 The majority of households had 1 arriero, usually the oldest male and economic head, while the
maximum number of arrieros within a single household was 4 (a father and his 3 eldest sons). In total, 40 different households (14% of the community) had the ability to earn wages through tourism, allowing for their departure from the other 76% of the primarily subsistence-oriented households in the community.34
33 Rates were provided by the Casa de Guias of Huaraz (pers. comm. 2007). The large range in guiding salary reflects the level of difficulty associated with different climbing pursuits in the region. The base rate of 50 USD/day is for trekking, whereas 120 USD/day is typically charged to guide Alpamayo, a 5947 meter technical climb in the HNP.
34 Community members living in the sector of Pasha often commented that that they did not get equal access to tourists entering the Ishinca valley because many usually begin their hike in Williac and bypass them altogether. Many certified to do arriero and portering work from Pashpa circumvented this problem by establishing working relationships with trekking agencies in Huaraz. A few individuals rented apartments in Huaraz during the peak climbing season where the odds of contracting with tourists or guiding agencies were greater. During the fieldwork year there was some attempt among the community’s
arriero association to create equal access to tourism opportunities. A rotation schedule was created so that
tourists entering the plaza would register at the park’s newly created post in Williac, then would contract the next arriero in line if their services were required. This plan provides evidence of an attempt by the community to adapt rules for governing access to wage-earning opportunities and creating a sense of fairness. Yet, this plan was only moderately successful, as many times I observed that the arriero next in line would not be around in the plaza at the time that tourists arrived, and tourists would go with whomever was available.
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While a stark contrast to other wage-earning opportunities, tourism offers little reprieve from the uncertainty inherent in the highland economy. Even the 14% of community’s households that are involved in tourism identify themselves, first and foremost, as farmers and herders. As the quote from Collón’s eldest arriero suggests, community members recognize the sporadic opportunity of tourism and the necessity to make a living from the land. Adventure tourism, while a significant source of income for some households, is insufficient to discourage their dependence on resources within the national park. First, tourism is subject to boom-and-bust cycles reflecting the influence of economic and political processes acting on tourist decision-making. For example, Shining Path activity in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s discouraged tourists from visiting the region, a trend that can be seen as a dip in registered overnight visitors to the region in Figure 2.7. Although this activity was effectively squelched with the 1992 capture of Abimael Guzman, the political climate of Peru is frequently a deterrent for international travelers whose numbers have recovered slowly since (see Figure 2.7). More recently, protests following on the heels of political events (i.e., a country-wide teachers’ strike and subsequent declaration of a “state of emergency” in the department of Ancash) resulted in a noticeable decline in tourism in 2003. According to a local café owner in Huaraz, many believed that the larger political and economic realities affecting the price of oil in 2006 had a bearing on that year’s tourism travel as well (pers. comm. 2006).
In addition to the larger trends in tourism, the industry also is seasonal at best. Climbing and trekking are exclusive to the dry season. During the dry season months of June through August, arrieros from Collón and Pashpa linger in the plaza of Williac (a
barrio of Collón situated near the entrance into the Ishinca valley) to encounter climbing parties that require their services. Others travel to Huaraz to seek out work by asking tourists walking on the streets, or by contracting directly with one of the many trekking and climbing agencies based there. The success of these efforts is obvious in the average activity profile of wage earning shown in Figure 2.8. This profile illustrates the
seasonality of wage earning activities such as tourism, which occupies a significantly greater proportion of males’ time during the dry season months when arriero work is at its peak.
Although this work is seasonally pronounced, the lesson here is that tourism fluctuates due to a multitude of forces external to the communities that depend on it. Because of the prerequisite of favorable weather for climbing and trekking, it is quite literally a fair-weather industry for residents of TY. Although visitors to the Ishinca valley are many, and the time spent in arriero work pronounced, there is only a brief seasonal window over which such opportunities exist. Collectively these conditions result in an industry that does not supplant the traditional agro-pastoral economy, perhaps one that even enforces it; evidence of this at the household-level will be provided below.
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Figure 2.8: Time allocation to wage-earning by gender. Graph characteristics are identical to those of Figure 2.5. Rainfall data illustrate the correlation between peak wage-earning activity for men, and prime climbing and trekking weather, which occurs primarily in the dry season months of June through August.
Changes in Household Farming Practices
While households are relatively similar with regard to their crop selection and reliance on rain-fed agriculture, they are more varied in their use of chemical inputs and in the length of time they cultivate a particular plot (Mayer 2002, Zimmerer 2002). Several local informants reported that an increasing number of households are cropping their holdings continuously, a condition for communally coordinated sectoral fallow systems described as a “zero-fallow problem” (Campbell and Godoy 1992). Until recently, it was reported that households would cultivate fields for an average of 3 years before removing them from agricultural production for several more. Figure 2.9
illustrates a typical crop rotation sequence elicited from community informants. The first year of planting is represented in the outer circle, with successive years moving inward. The possibility of fallow is indicated in the innermost circle. If fallow does not occur, the cropping sequence simply starts over. The results of monthly surveys of household purchases support informants’ claims of agricultural intensification. Of the 80 households sampled, 51 (64%) made fertilizer and pesticide purchases at least once during the year of observation. Of those 51, 45% made multiple purchases, as many as three times throughout the year (see Photo 2.7).
Photo 2.7: Field assistant, Juan Sanchez Duran, stopping to observe a recently sprayed field of