Peru's Potato Farmers Struggle to Deal with Changing Climate. By Eliza Barclay, Miami Herald, September 15, 2008. "For the first half of his life, Gregorio Huanuco farmed... [as his] grandparents and ancestors [had]... He waited for the rains to fall on his small parcel of land in this village at 11,000 feet in the Cordillera Blanca... of the Andes in central Peru, and planted native varieties of potatoes as well as cereal crops like quinoa. When the crops ripened, [he] harvested what he needed and sold what he didn't... But 1990 [was] the year Huanuco says he began to notice disruptions, first in small, bizarre, anomalous forms: a battering hailstorm, two months without rain, a warm winter. Then the quirky weather became more consistent and other oddities began to appear: rats nibbling away at his cereal crops and a fungus, known as late blight, blanketing his potatoes... 'Before, we planted all year long, any month we wanted to,' Huanuco said, dubiously eyeing his tiny plot, recently sown with potato seed. 'Now we only get water a few times a year and so we cannot plant as much, and the pests and diseases keep coming'... The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization designated 2008 the International Year of the Potato [and] the Peruvian government is also promoting the potato as a poverty alleviation strategy... But increasingly... climate change is creating new challenges that may threaten the potato's chance to become a key export product unless farmers learn to adapt."
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