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Friday, April 17th: A Conversation about Trojan-Horse Aid
5:30 – 7:30 PM
Cafe Nostalgica
Ottawa
This Friday, join Susan Walsh, USC Canada Executive Director and author of Trojan-Horse Aid, for a reading and conversation about her new book.
This event is free. Click here for event details
Trojan-Horse Aid is a frank account about Andean aid that asks development workers to leave their hubris and Western recipes at home.
In a compelling first-hand account of development assistance gone awry, Susan Walsh illustrates how national, international, and multilateral organizations failed the Jalq’a people in the Bolivian Andes during the early millennium. Intent on assisting potato farmers, development organizations pushed for changes that ultimately served their own interests, paradoxically undermining local resilience and pushing farmers off their lands.
The following excerpt situates Susan’s research among the Jalq’a farmers in Ravelo, a municipality located in Bolivia’s southern department.
The highlands of western South America are an imposing, at times merciless, landscape of arched-backed ridges, yawning gullies, sculpted rock faces, quilted patches of green, purple, red, and gold at harvest, and ribbon- thin roads connecting scattered villages of adobe. When the early morning sun creeps over and down sleepy mountain ridges, their beauty takes your breath away. But their splendor reaches beyond a commanding appearance. Their Indigenous residents can also lay claim to one of the world’s greatest shares of cultivated plants and more particularly to the centre of origin and diversity for potatoes, the world’s fourth most important food crop and the crop that provides 40–50 per cent of the total calories consumed by rural highland households. The farms where my research was located, in Bolivia’s most southern department, Potosí, are considered to be one of the centres of biodiversity for the potato species in a country that is one of the world’s ten most megadiverse.
In Ravelo, the regional municipality that is home to the two Quechua-speaking Jalq’a communities that welcomed my research, agronomist Regis Cepeda analyzed and catalogued as many as 53 genetically distinct potato varieties and dozens more varieties of morphologically different types. Ravelo’s Jalq’a farmers, however, were not generally recognized for this primordial diversity but rather for their production of commercial potatoes that help to feed the roughly 200,000 residents of the country’s constitutional capital, Sucre, a three-hour potato truck ride from the village of Ravelo. On Sucre streets, Ravelo’s rural folk were often referred to as los paperos – the potato producers. Ironically, although perhaps not surprisingly, Ravelo’s commercial potatoes were of greater benefit to their urban consumers than to their producers. A study of Ravelo producers in the mid-1990s on behalf of the country’s national potato research centre, Proyecto de Investigación de Papas (proinpa), argued, in fact, that the surpluses from Ravelo farms serve to maintain the non-productive classes of the city. Like that of their displaced compañeros from the silver and tin mines that once drew the wealthy to Potosí, the story of the peoples of this region is an inverted “rags to riches” tale in which the rich of the metropolis feed off a hinterland of producers “in rags.”
Nor was this exploitation unique to the twenty-first-century Indigenous farmers of Ravelo’s home province of Chayanta. Research on the ethnic Llameros from a sister municipality has established that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a greater Chayanta – consisting of the five provinces that now form Northern Potosí – was the principal supplier of wheat for three of the nation’s departments: Potosí, Oruro, and La Paz. Chayanta’s Indigenous farmers were in fact among the richest in Bolivia until the termination of protectionist policies at the end of the nineteenth century. Lower priced Chilean and Peruvian wheat imports grabbed important shares of the market. This liberalization of trade, together with the sacrifice of this region’s agricultural wealth to the highly extractive mining industry, contributed to the area’s rapid return to subsistence. The open veins of Potosí, it is said, capitalized Europe. Yet, in 2000 and still today the department is among the hemisphere’s poorest.
In the year 2000, the family farm economy in Ravelo’s 104 villages was thus one of subsistence and semi-subsistence agriculture. There were a number of comparatively successful petty commodity producers on primary transportation routes. But for most of Ravelo’s Indigenous farm families cash earned from market sales was rarely enough to cover costly agricultural inputs, let alone household supplies, such as the kerosene to fuel makeshift lamps when darkness fell. It was not, therefore, their direct link to the market economy that sustained Ravelo’s Jalq’a. Rather, generations of resilience strategies kept these subsistence communities and their people alive. But the conditions of their semi-subsistence were such that migration to cities for cash remuneration, however temporary and integrated into their resilience strategies, was growing more and more important and frequent.
To learn more about Trojan-Horse Aid, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
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