October 2002

Trickle-Down Theory, Andean Style

Traditional irrigation practices provide a lesson in sharing.

By Paul Trawick

Scarce but carefully apportioned irrigation water from two alpine springs enables the villagers of Huaynacotas to stretch the maize-growing season to nine months, just enough for their staple crop.

As we looked out over a vast basin in the southern Peruvian Andes, I asked my host the reason for the terracing I saw all around me. “The field always has to be flat so that the soil will absorb all the water,” Eusebio Quispe told me. This was just the sort of straightforward lesson that an anthropologist hopes to learn through ethnographic fieldwork. What about conserving the soil, minimizing erosion? That was another benefit of terracing, Quispe acknowledged, but evidently he considered it secondary, and also obvious. The important point was that in this rugged environment, you cannot irrigate efficiently unless you radically alter the landscape.

I had come to the remote village of Huaynacotas to study its system of irrigation and water management, planning to compare it with others in the same province. Quispe spoke to me in Quechua, the language of the Incas, and although I did not yet realize it, the tradition I would learn about in his village dated back centuries, to the Inca empire and even earlier. But I could already see that the sculpted landscape was very old. The village sits at an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet, in the middle of a mountain bowl that tilts southward, facing out over cliffs that plunge down to the banks of a river far below. The stairways and zigzag footpaths I hiked up on my way to the community were cut into the stone cliffs and mountainsides, clearly in ancient times, and the terracing represented countless generations of hard work.

Huaynacotas has a reputation for being a remarkable place. Although Spanish colonists founded settlements along the river in the lower part of the valley, establishing their haciendas, or agricultural estates, on land taken from nearby indigenous villages, this community was largely able to resist the takeover of its lands. A visitor in 1704 marveled at how the villagers operated their own gold mine so that they could pay the tribute owed to the Spanish Crown directly, without having to acquire money by selling crops and other goods to outsiders, as most Andean people did. Present-day residents of the lower valley—Spanish-speakers who trace their descent from the original colonists—regard Huaynacotas’s inhabitants as purely “Indian,” exceptionally tough and proud, and they say that the villagers have maintained many of their Inca traditions up to the present day.

The reputation is well deserved, but the history turns out to be more complicated than this. Huaynacotas is a place where people have struggled to hold on to their indigenous identity and their peasant way of life while maintaining some control over the direction and pace of change, but it is not a backwater relic of the distant past. The villagers are part of the modern world and are comfortable migrating to and dealing with its urban centers. The Quispe family, for example, like nearly all the other households in this village of 1,080, has one foot in Huaynacotas and one in Arequipa, the third largest city in Peru, and the Quispes depend on both ways of life for survival. Two family members live and work in Arequipa; they receive food crops from the village to help lower their cost of living and, in turn, send cash remittances back home.

Nevertheless, the people of Huaynacotas have preserved their traditional means of conserving and sharing water for several hundred years, and I was fortunate to start my research in such a community. I set out to learn primarily by doing, helping the Quispes and other families irrigate their parcels of land and, most of all, accompanying the village’s water distributors on their rounds as they measured out the water and saw to it that the resource was used properly by each household. These experiences showed me that physically controlling water is one thing, conserving it and maximizing its availability is another, and sharing it effectively among people without generating conflict is still another. I was very interested in all three, but especially in irrigation as a social and moral challenge.

The local tradition of water distribution is based on the concept of equity, or fairness. As I ultimately came to understand it, this amounts to the notions that everyone has a right to a proportional share of this vital communal resource, provided they fulfill the corresponding duties to the community, and that everyone should be affected by the prevailing scarcity in the same basic way. Interestingly enough, the sixteenth-century chroniclers Garcilaso de la Vega and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala emphasized the principles of proportionality and fairness in their brief descriptions of what they said was the Inca system of water management. I had not looked very closely at their accounts before I began my fieldwork, but when I set about writing up my research a few years later, I immediately noticed this and other striking parallels. Modern scholars had doubted the accuracy of these early descriptions—in part because after five centuries of change, there appeared to be little consistency in Andean irrigation practices in different locales.

A reservoir in Huaynacotas stores springwater that accumulates overnight. During the day, enough water is released from it into the village canal network to irrigate as many as eight fields.

Huaynacotas has two main water sources (large alpine springs), two reservoirs for accumulating their output at night, and two separate networks of canals to carry the water down to the fields. Each network serves roughly 500 acres, and archaeological studies indicate that much of this land has been under continuous cultivation for at least a thousand years, dating back to an early Andean empire known as the Huari. The fields—each of which, as a rule, comprises several levels of terracing—range in elevation from 10,000 to 13,000 feet. Some of the highest fields are primarily rain-fed rather than irrigated and are devoted to tuber production; the others are intensively cultivated with maize (the villagers’ primary staple food) and various other subsistence crops.

The village is made up of three extended kinship units known as ayllus, whose members generally have small plots of land scattered throughout the irrigated territory. This pattern is probably the result of a long history of intermarriage between the three groups, along with the gradual fragmentation of landholdings through inheritance and population growth. Like all Andean peasant villages, Huaynacotas includes both large and small landowners, but social and economic stratification is much less evident than it is in the large number of provincial villages that were once closely connected with the Spanish hacienda tradition. No family in Huaynacotas today has more than a dozen acres of cultivated land, of which at most seven or eight are irrigated.

Each of the two irrigation networks is overseen by a water official called a kampu. The position rotates each year to two different men from the village and is considered a form of obligatory service to the community (the men usually volunteer, although sometimes under pressure). In September, men prepare the fields with plows pulled by oxen while women do the sowing. The kampu then routes the water to the various sectors of irrigated land, following a fixed sequence that reflects the planting order and crop maturation times. The individual villagers on the receiving end then direct the flow onto their parcels, one by one.

In a normal year, rain falls almost every afternoon and evening throughout the rainy season, which lasts from January through April. Nevertheless, irrigation is essential, because at this high altitude, maize requires nine months to mature. The irrigation sequence is determined by the fact that some sectors are significantly colder than others, owing in part to altitude but also to daily exposure to sun and wind. Maize plants sprout and develop more slowly in such locations and have to be given a head start to protect them from the frosts that come at the end of the growing season. All sectors under production at a given time are irrigated, however, and water reaches every parcel, before the process begins again at the top of the sequence. Each complete cycle takes two to three months, depending on seasonal and long-term fluctuations in the supply. Even at best, a field is irrigated no more than three or four times a year.

Each reservoir refills overnight. The next morning, the kampu opens a wooden gate, releasing a flow of water that provides about nine hours of daytime irrigation. A dam made of large rocks and sod splits the stream from the reservoir and main canal in half. The two separate flows, called rakis, are diverted in this way through branch canals to reach the fields. Each raki is considered sufficient to water about four-fifths of an acre (a standard-size field known as a topo) in roughly two hours. When the water flow is high, therefore, each raki irrigates about four fields per day.

Within each sector, the kampu allocates water shares to individual parcels of land in a fixed contiguous order, starting at the bottom of the sector and proceeding upward, parcel by parcel. This contrasts with the practice in other villages nearby, especially those where irrigation is overseen by the state. There the bigger landowners and those growing crops that state officials consider more valuable to the economy (alfalfa, for example, which is fed to cattle being fattened for sale in urban markets) are able to get water more often than anyone else, through both licit and illicit means.

The springs that supply Huaynacotas are the most vulnerable ones in the valley to droughts, which have happened with alarming frequency in the southern Peruvian Andes during the past thirty years. Water for irrigation is extremely scarce, even under normal conditions. Nevertheless, conflict over the resource is far less prevalent here than in other villages in the province. The tradition followed in Huaynacotas ensures that people absorb the impact of shortages fairly equally and that the uniform frequency of irrigation is preserved. If the flows dwindle, the kampus get the consent of the community to take some of the higher sectors of land in each half of the system out of production. Because all the families have land in these upper sectors, everyone makes a sacrifice (not a small one) for the common good.

The way each parcel is irrigated also contributes to maintaining a basic proportionality or equity among people’s water rights. Earthen ridges or dikes of a standard height—about fifteen inches—divide the field into sections called atus, each covering perhaps 200 square feet. The water is pooled in these to the same depth over the entire surface of the field, starting with the bottom terrace and working upward. Once all the atus have been filled, irrigation is considered complete, and the flow must then move on to the next parcel and the next household, with no duplication allowed. The kampu allows no departures from this arrangement—such as the destruction of terracing and the irrigation of slopes, wasteful practices that are common elsewhere in the highlands, especially in areas formerly dominated by haciendas.

The contiguous sequence of distribution helps minimize waste. My research assistant and best village informant, Jesús Chirinos, who had already done his stint as water distributor, filled me in on the reason. As in most highland communities, the canals are lined only with gravel, and a lot of water is lost because it soaks into the ground. Once the soil beneath has become saturated, however, the rate of loss decreases dramatically. Consequently, it is best to concentrate irrigation in one small area at a time, rather than jump around. In other Andean communities, most of whose traditions are quite different, the waste is much greater.

Just as important, the contiguous pattern makes irrigation a thoroughly public affair. Everyone knows the order of distribution, and since adjoining parcels are likely to be irrigated on the same day, their owners are normally waiting and watching, preparing their fields for irrigation, while their neighbors finish their turns. This routine monitoring provides restraints on theft, favoritism by water officials, and other forms of corruption.

Canal cleaning in Huaynacotas is an annual communal affair.

The system’s transparency enables people to see that under local rules and procedures, there is a direct link between their own self-interest and the common good. This essential compatibility has enabled them to avoid the well-known “tragedy of the commons”—the tendency of people to overexploit and abuse any resources that they hold in common. Indeed, everyone in the village knows not only the rules but even how to operate the entire canal and reservoir system, because the male heads-of-household do this in rotation, serving as water distributors and sponsoring the yearly cleaning of the canals.

Conducted on the 16th and 18th of August to prepare the two halves of the system, the Yarqa Aspiy (Canal Cleaning) is an intensive communal work project. The men carry it out in an atmosphere of celebration and always under the influence of a lot of drink, softened somewhat by a special meal prepared by the women. The distinction between work and play is completely blurred (it’s literally a work party). On the day designated for the cleaning of his half of the system, the kampu begins by making burnt offerings to the alpine spring and saying special prayers to the mountain deities that bring the rain, after which cane alcohol and corn beer are consumed by everyone present. The men then work and drink their way back down to the village, shoveling silt out of the reservoir and removing rocks, weeds, and other debris from the main canal. Along the way, they say other prayers at the junctions with the secondary canals. The work is done so enthusiastically that half the irrigation system is cleaned, sanctified, and thanked from top to bottom in a single day.

This kind of cooperation is made possible by a basic proportionality in the maintenance duties that people must fulfill in order to preserve their water rights. Because large landowners derive a greater benefit, their contributions to the canal cleaning are required to be greater—in terms of labor, food, and especially drink—than are those of the smallholder majority. This contrasts with the situation in the villages lower down in the valley, and in many other places throughout the highlands today, where the large landowners contribute the same amount as any smallholder, usually by hiring someone else to work in their place—a practice generally not allowed in Huaynacotas. During the past several decades, the breakdown of communal work traditions elsewhere in the Andes and in many other parts of the world has been widely noted, but in my opinion, the main reason for it—a lack of proportionality and the resentment and conflict that this lack engenders—has never been fully appreciated.

I believe that the water management system practiced today in Huaynacotas is the Inca system, just as the local people say it is. Studies done recently in other parts of the Andes show that this tradition has survived elsewhere as well. In fact, I think this type of system had emerged in various localities and become widely established in the Andes before the time of the Inca empire. Because the practices had proved to be effective and sustainable, the Incas may have adopted them and even endorsed them as official policy.

The national government in Lima would be wise to follow the Incas’ precedent today. The Peruvian state has long been heavily involved in resource management in many places, since it is technically the legal owner and steward of all of the country’s irrigation water. But like other governments in the so-called developing world, Peru’s now faces downsizing because of heavy foreign debt. Organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are urging Peru’s leaders to get out of the business of managing water, because the state’s methods are seen as wasteful, costly, and rife with conflict.

Peru’s government would now like to turn over responsibility for the operation and maintenance of local irrigation systems—and even ownership of the resource itself—to local water-user groups, and it is searching for a management model that will accomplish this shift without leading to a tragic outcome. Fortunately, Peruvian officials don’t have to look very far. The best policy alternative does not come from a Washington think tank or from some land-grant agricultural research institution in the United States, consultants that Peru has always turned to in the past for such models. It comes from the Andes—from the Incas and their predecessors—and is similar to the solutions worked out by indigenous peoples facing the same challenge in other parts of the world. Because it works, the tradition has been handed down for hundreds of years, reaffirmed and ratified by people who knew their very livelihood was at stake.

Paul Trawick first got involved in water management issues as an undergraduate in the 1970s, when, as a representative of the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group, he fought a plan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a dam on the Rogue River. He later earned a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University for his research on the contrasting irrigation practices followed by diverse communities in the Peruvian Andes. As someone who has worked periodically for both the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, Trawick is familiar with the call for reform in the handling of water resources. He suggests that policy makers in Peru and elsewhere have much to gain from an examination of the irrigation procedures and related customs that some of the Andean communities have maintained since ancient times. An assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky, Trawick is the author of The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons (Stanford University Press, October 2002).

Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2002

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