1. Abstract
I’ve been in
Chiclayo for just over a week now on the first of two fieldwork trips to compare post-harvest soil conditions in organic and conventional cotton farms. I’m working with an organization called
Organic Exchange which is based in a small town in Texas and works in the US, South America, western Africa, India, and Europe to promote organic cotton. The South America office is in Lima (Peru being the most important organic cotton producer on the continent, woot) and I’m working with its director, Alfonso, to carry out this project. It isn’t quite an internship because I’m doing a lot of it on my own, and it certainly isn’t a job because I’m not getting paid. It’s voluntary research and an important part of my education as a sustainable fashionista wannabe.
2. Introduction
Chiclayo is a small city on the north coast of Peru. I would call it a small version of Lima – modern, a fair bit of cultural and economic diversity, not quite beautiful but certainly pleasant. I’ve mostly only seen the city during the night. The past week I’ve left early in the morning every day for an agricultural suburb called Mórrope, a town named after the “murrup, murrup” sound the lizards here make.
On the corner of the pretty plaza (crowned in its center with a sculpture with four large lizards) is the office of APAEM, Asociacion de Productores de Algodón Ecologico Murrup or the association of organic cotton producers of Murrup. This is where I meet Aldo, technically my assistant even though he is older than I am and has a lot more experience in post-grad research than I do, not to mention knowing every cotton farmer in the area and a heck of a lot more about cotton. He also has a shiny red motorcycle.
We studied five cotton farms, each with a hectare to five hectares of del cerro cotton (a shorter staple variety), and each with a friendly farmer and his lovely family. First was Lino, an 84-year-old man who helped me install insect traps along with his 10 year old great granddaughter. Then we went to Felipe’s farm, a conventional farm that grows pima cotton (long staple and lovely). Then we went to visit Rodolfo’s farm. Rodolfo grew up on the outskirts of Mórrope, just like most of his farming neighbors, but unlike his neighbors he is inspiringly progressive. He and his wife, Natividad, have three sons – an unusually small number of children (most farmer families here have upwards of six kids) – because they wanted them to have a good education. Rodolfo is the president of APAEM and has traveled to Brazil and Portugal while most of his neighbors haven’t been to Lima. Arnaldo’s farm is the fourth we studied. Arnaldo is the next-door neighbor and brother of Rodolfo. Last we went to Rogelio’s farm where Rogelio’s wife, Digna, grows her own crop of native colored cottons and wove them into my new favorite coin purse.
3. Methods
Alfonso and I flew up to Chiclayo together last Monday. When I got to the airport gate I looked for him but didn’t see him. I boarded the plane and sat down and then realized that he had called me on my cell phone. I called him back and he picked up. Alfonso: “Hi, are you at the airport?”, me “yes, I’m on the plane”, Alfonso:“what, is it leaving at 6?”, me: “No it’s leaving at 4:55”. He was the last one on the plane. Being a hopelessly tardy person from a family of unpunctual people (except you, Dad), I couldn’t help but like his lateness. Once we arrived to Chiclayo were equipment-shopping, breakfast, and dinner buddies. Here’s what we talked about during the hours we spent together: COTTON. The farmers, the economics, the fashion trends, the everything everything everything about COTTON. In other words, it was perfect. I admit that Alfonso can talk quite a bit and when keeping up with translating required too much energy at the end of a long day romping around in farms under the sun, there was a lot of smiling and nodding and knowingly sounding “ahs”, “uhs”, and “mmmms”. I wonder how much wisdom I missed out on while I zoned out.
We met every morning for breakfast to eat breakfast and took a crowded
combi to Mórrope. We would inevitably get to the APAEM office late and a punctual Aldo and the lovely Onelia, the secretary, would greet us. I would load up my arms with buckets and bags of plastic cups, medicinal alcohol, and raw fish, and hop on to the back of the bike looking an
ekeko. We’d get to the farm and get to work setting up our insect traps, taking a survey of weeds, and sifting through dirt for worms. Then I’d do an interview with the farmers and map out the farm. Alfonso told me that no one from out of town ever comes to the farms here so they were thrilled to have me doing a study there. I could tell. The farmers and their children would drop their work at home or in the fields to do hard and tedious work with me, digging and counting weeds. They were so wonderfully welcoming.
The farms were beautiful. From a hot ride under the equatorial sun and a dusty red-brown road that reminded me of arid Kenya I’d enter a green farm with
carob and guavo trees and green fields of cotton and corn. There were little red-and-black birds, egrets, bright-blue-cheeked lizards, piglets, donkeys, cows, horses, and turkeys. There was never a cloud in the sky and the sun was very hot.
4. Results
Aldo didn’t enjoy the work as much as I did. He would hurry through the set-up and collection of the traps. I was always running after him and he was always doing something not-quite-right. He got annoyed with me when I stopped to take notes, draw maps, make sure that we had collected every last speck of a bug. After Alfonso left for Lima, Aldo became extremely mumbly (Aldo: “Mumble, mumble”, me: “what?”, Aldo: “mumble”, me: “what?”, Aldo “aha, let’s go”). It got really stressful and I resented that he was raining on my limited time in the cotton fields of Mórrope. Near the end I was about ready to ask him to leave me alone, but I needed that shiny red bike to get around. At last he got rid of himself for me by saying he had some emergency situation and couldn’t help me. What a relief. I finished the collections with a mototaxi and the lovely Onelia who was much more pleasant and peered into every collection jar to see what we had caught. TONS OF FABULOUS, BEAUTFUL INSECTS! And three rats and a lizard! I’m shipping them back to Lima for identification.
5. Discussion
I spent my last day in Mórrope yesterday. I said goodbye to Lino, Felipe, Rodolfo, Arnaldo, Rogelio and waved goodbye to Onelia at the APAEM office. I am anxious to leave my hotel room filled with multi-colored tupperwares of alcohol-soaked arthropods and go see the pyramids of
Túcume and get back to Lima to be in the lab with my bugs! Before I get to start identification I have to go to
Chincha and do the whole thing over again. Ooph.
