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PERU: Women Combine Invention,
Tradition to Improve Rural Diets
By Milagros Salazar
PAUCARÁ, Peru(IPS) - Although Huancavelica is the
poorest region of Peru, it has more than just poverty,
malnutrition and unmet needs. There are also women using
their creativity, efforts and traditional indigenous
knowledge to improve the diets of their families and
communities.
"Have you ever had coffee made from chuño (freeze-dried
potatoes)?" a young villager asks with a smile before
introducing this reporter to the creator of this
culinary invention, Marina Huamaní.
She lives in Padre Rumi, a village in the district of
Paucará in Huancavelica, a department (province) in
south-central Peru, where 86 percent of the total
400,000 inhabitants live in poverty and approximately 45
percent of children are malnourished.
The provincial capital of Huancavelica, in the rugged
Andean highlands, is 450 km southeast of Lima, and Padre
Rumi is a three hour drive away over a rough road.
Huamaní puts no importance on her talent in the kitchen.
But thanks to her culinary skills she has been able to
come up with a number of recipes based on a wide range
of highly nutritional traditional products that are
playing a crucial role in fighting malnutrition in her
community.
Her ingenuity even earned her a prize in a cooking
contest organised by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to foment the consumption
of nutritional foods by peasant families in this poor
area.
In late 2009, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced
that the number of hungry people had crossed the
one-billion mark, and FAO, which warns that global food
insecurity is a growing threat to humanity, estimates
that the total could rise by a further 100 million this
year.
"Women are important in the raising of livestock, the
preservation of crop varieties and the preparation of
food," says agronomist Hernán Mormontoy, coordinator of
a development project that FAO is carrying out in four
villages in Paucará.
"And that is especially true today, with the impacts of
climate change, which are accentuating poverty in the
Andes," he tells IPS.
Huamaní, 49, is one of the beneficiaries of the
initiative, which is aimed at strengthening community
organisations, reviving consumption of traditional
foods, and forging links between agricultural production
and the market to boost local incomes and guarantee food
security.
The people in charge of the project say that one of the
challenges they run up against is the deep-rooted
culture of machismo. Generally, in these communities,
"what the man says goes," says Edwin Rivera, an
agronomist engineer with the Lima-based Centre for the
Study and Promotion of Development (DESCO), which is
working with FAO.
Of the 82 peasant facilitators of the project in the
four participating villages in late 2009, only 18 were
women.
Although women's participation in the project is still
weak overall, there is one exception: the village of
Anchonga, where 12 of the 25 facilitators are women.
"We are trying to turn this situation around, so women
and men will play an equal role," says Rivera.
"I entered the contest with a complete meal based on
chuño: I made a chuño dish with onions and meat, along
with soup and coffee," says a smiling Huamaní during a
break in a community project, where IPS found her
digging a ditch with a pick and hoe.
She said the chuño coffee is easy to make: "First you
grind it up, then you toast it in the pan until it turns
black, and afterwards you pour in hot water with
cinnamon, cloves and a bit of fennel."
And how did she come up with the recipe? "It came from
inside me, from my thinking, from my heart," she says in
Quechua, her native language.
Chuño is prepared with a traditional method that
involves freezing the potatoes overnight in the intense
cold of the altiplano before dehydrating them by
squashing them flat and laying them out on the roofs to
dry in the sun.
The food preservation technique has been used for
centuries in highlands areas like Huancavelica, where
there are 800 kinds of native potatoes, of the 2,500
varieties in Peru, according to FAO.
Besides chuño, there are other nutritional native foods
like quinoa, also known as Inca wheat; oca, a root
vegetable; amaranth, a traditional grain; the root
vegetable olluco; and tarwi or Andean lupin, whose seeds
are used in different recipes.
Women have begun to revive the use of these traditional
crops in this corner of Huancavelica, not only for
family consumption, but for sale as well.
Thus, besides improving the local diet, crop
biodiversity is being preserved in this highlands area,
where indigenous peasants make up more than 90 percent
of the population, the FAO project says.
The cooking fairs also promote other traditional
foodstuffs like cochayuyo, a kind of kelp that is high
in iodine, and the wide-growing airampo, which women use
to flavour porridge and beverages.
But there are foods that have fallen into disuse because
the preparation techniques have been lost. That's the
case of tarwi, which locals say "tastes like poison"
because it is bitter due to a high alkaloid content.
But Huamaní, who has cooked for seven children and four
grandchildren, says she learned from her mother to soak
the seeds in abundant water for a month, remove the
pods, and cook the tarwi with tuna and onion.
FAO has begun to give workshops on tarwi preparation and
how to improve its production on the plots of the 1,000
people involved in the project.
As part of the effort, they have arranged visits to the
villages in Paucará by "yachachis" (traditional Andean
teachers) from Cuzco.
Juvencia Oregón, one of the participants, now prepares
meals with tarwi for her family. "Before cooking it, you
have to 'de-bitter' it, hanging it in the river for up
to eight days, until the yucky taste goes away," she
explains.
Florencio Layme, one of the leaders of the facilitators,
has improved production of tarwi with the help of his
wife and six children. From an initial yield of 150 kg
on one hectare of land, the family's production of the
crop has gone up to 650 kg.
"My family helps till the earth, spread the fertiliser
and plant," says 53-year-old Layme.
It is the women who usually select the seeds. "My
grandparents taught me that," says Dionicia Carbajal,
who has an organic garden where she grows beets, lettuce
and tomatoes to diversify and improve the family diet.
"I no longer have to buy vegetables in the market," she
says.
Women also help prepare the clay for the adobe bricks
used to make the local houses. And they are especially
skilled saleswomen, like Máxima Silvestre, who runs a
dairy products business with her family that she calls
Semillas de Vida (Seeds of Life).
But water shortages and the loss of crops as a result of
climate change have a heavy impact on women, who are in
charge of feeding their families. "Sometimes we have to
walk really far to get water," says Marina Quispe in
Padre Rumi, where piped water is available just one hour
a day and there is no sanitation.
Some women are forced to migrate to cities in search of
jobs. "Mothers and daughters leave during the vacation
months, from January to March, to work as domestics and
cleaning women," says Rivera.
"Some come back, but others never do," he says, adding
that the biggest challenge is getting the entire family
involved in development projects of this kind, to
improve their prospects in the poorest region of the
country.
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