Parque de la Papa

As we prepare to embark on quite an epic trek to the renowned Machu Picchu (with its culturally constructed identity--as discussed in the previous post), we spent one of our last days in Cusco visiting Potato Park, or Parque de la Papa. This park is a sustainably based farming initiative, where six villages of indigenous people collaborate on how the park is organized and ran. The farm works to maintain Andean biodiversity, cultural heritage, and food security for greater Peru.

The park itself has over 2,000 different types of potatoes (of the 4,000 different types in the world, Peru hosts 3,000 of those). In addition to potatoes, farmers here also grow quinoa (also native to the Andes), hundreds of types of maize (once holy to the Incas), peppers, and other vegetables. I have been looking forward to this visit for the duration of our trip.

We left Cusco early in the morning and headed to Parque de la Papa with a man who was a friend of some of the villagers there. On our way he stopped and showed us holistic or medicinal plants that were native to the Andes, we ate at a local small restaurant which specialized in quinoa soup, and finally arrived at the park sometime in the afternoon. Upon our arrival we visited people who were working on building a house. They build the house out of Eucalyptus wood (brought here by the Spanish), to keep insects at bay. We stopped and talked with them for a few minutes and learned how they built their houses.

When we arrived at the park center we performed a ritual to the earth to show our respect. Our guide provided each of us with three coca leaves--each leaf symbolizing a different aspect of the offering, and we gave the earth or respects, prayers, and hopes, and then cast the leaves off to the wind. We walked around a central museum to speak with some young girls who were working on their family farm nearby. The girls only spoke Quechua, so they communicated only with our guide. However, we did help them thrash grain by walking two burros around in a small circle on top of it. The young girl who was doing this said she did this all day long (early morning to dark) for a week or so before the work was complete.

Afterwards, we met with a man who had been working farther up in the mountains. He came down on a small motorbike and opened the museum for us, where he explained (in very fast Spanish) about the structure of the community, the layout of the land, the types of foods grown, and the other organizations that the park works with. As it turns out, the park is part of the International Potato Center, and works with this organization to help create food security initiatives for all of Peru by providing sustainably, locally grown fresh foods to rural and urban poor.

This organization is a type of direct resistance to imperialism, colonialism, poverty, Westernized development, and the many other problems that plague Peru and other similar nations. The park bring together the collective work of people--they assist each other in housebuilding, cooking, farming, etc---and creates a locally based, sustainable alternative to the modern international food system. Peru, at this time, relies largely on food imports because it is cheaper to purchase imported food than food locally produced. This creates risks of food shortages, price controls outside of the government's ability to manage, and a quality and quantity of food that is in the hands of the international market and transnational corporations. Many of Peru's food insecurity problems stem from this dependency upon international imports. However, Parque de la Papa resists this and creates a viable, successful alternative.


This type of resistance reminds me of Manisha Desai's article “Transnational Solidarity: Women’s Agency, Structural Adjustment, and Globalization” (from the book Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics). In this article she discusses the concept of contextualized activism, or activism that is specific to the needs of local peoples, rather than activism that is based on abstract morals, principles, or global needs. Furthermore, Desai argues that resistance can also be multidirectional, or that it can take on many fronts at once in many different ways. Desai terms this contextualized and multidirectional type of resistance as "scattered resistance," meaning that it can take on new forms as it needs--similar to Krogel's assertion about identity construction (discussed in the previous post). Parque de la Papa is addressing multiple fronts simultaneously: food security, poverty alleviation, imperialism, etc. while working in culturally relative and localized, contextualized ways to provide solutions to these problems. It involves many people, who otherwise may have found themselves as rural migrants to urban cities without adequate employment, and it focuses on culturally grounded sources of food, thus reclaiming cultural food heritage, all while working to create a more stable food security system across Peru through its networking with other organizations. This is an impressive and successful alternative solution that could be learned from around the world.