Peru has recently become the world’s number one exporter of asparagus to places including Europe and the US. The boom there has pumped a lot of money into the economy, but it’s also pumped out a lot of water.

Ica is a small, modest city near the Peruvian coast. But on a recent night, the city’s downtown plaza is hopping, including a small religious parade.

Click to enlarge (Illustration: Manya Gupta)

The bustle is largely due to asparagus. Ica is Peru’s asparagus capital. And the overseas demand for the long green spears has turned the place into a boomtown.

Locals say unemployment is near zero. Poverty has been cut in half. And there are unheard of amenities.

“There are now movie theaters as of only four or five years ago,” says Cecilia Blume. “And another thing that’s super important to me is the social revolution. There isn’t childhood malnutrition. Because in Ica, there’s work now for women – in agricultural packing.”

Blume grew up here and now runs a consulting company that works with asparagus exporters. And she and others in the business chalk almost all of this progress up to asparagus. But the picture here in Ica isn’t totally rosy.

Manuel Checa drives me straight up to the top of a sand dune high above the Ica Valley. Checa is part-owner of an agro-export group called Athos. They grow asparagus and pomegranates on about 1,200 acres of land.

He stops the car and points to some of the blocks of green that stretch out below us.

“This asparagus is 17 years old,” Checa says, “and it has produced very well. But now, we’ve killed 20 percent of our asparagus, and this year we’re killing 20 percent more.”

Checa’s company is pulling back from asparagus, after two decades of growing more and more of it.

“It’s causing a water problem,” he says. “We have to change crops.”

That’s because asparagus is a thirsty crop. And this part of Peru, along the coast, is basically a desert. The climate is great for farming, but the only water here comes when rains high up in the Andes wash through on their way to the sea.

That feeds local rivers and replenishes underground aquifers. There’s always been agriculture along these rivers. But never like today.

“The agro-exporters starting from 1995 intensively were overdrafting the aquifer, pumping water up and out,” said David Bayer, a local water activist who first came to Peru in 1964.

He says the Peruvian government, with the support of the US and the World Bank, pushed asparagus cultivation for export, irrigated with water pumped up from the aquifer, for only the cost of building and operating wells. Basically free water.

“And they also took over the equivalent, in the case of the Ica Valley, the equivalent of virtually 40 percent, 45 percent of the land,” Bayer says.

Over time, all that irrigation has caused the aquifer to drop lower and lower. That’s made it tough going for some bigger growers like Athos. And it’s become even tougher for small-scale farmers.

Dominga Rosario owns a patch of land in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ica. She’s one of thousands of local residents here who farm mostly to feed their families.

She points out her corn, mango, avocado – they’re a little yellow right now. She’ll get a decent crop, Rosario says, but “you have to irrigate more. You have to invest more.”

That’s because as the aquifer has dropped, the soil above it has become drier. But irrigation can be expensive, especially when farmers have to keep digging deeper and deeper wells. Some can’t afford it. And they’ve abandoned their crops. The city of Ica’s municipal drinking water supply could even be at risk.

“I think there needs to be a solution as soon as possible,” Rosario says. “Because these companies, they’re preying on the aquifer. And when the aquifer dries up, our future will be uncertain!”

The situation has gotten so dire that it’s set off a scramble for solutions. For some, the answer to the water shortage is simple: just get more water.

Alfredo Sotil manages a commission that represents big agro-exporters here. He says that in the rainy season, as much as half the water running off the mountains flows into the sea. He and his colleagues want to capture that runoff behind new dams. “We’re interested in taking water and transferring it here, to continue generating this development,” Sotil says.

The dams could have the added benefit of generating electricity. But huge dams and water diversions are expensive, and they can cause their own environmental problems. That’s why others here are focusing not on getting more water but on using less.

Miguel Betín grows asparagus and pomegranates on a farm close to the Ica Valley. He recently installed a new, super-high-tech drip irrigation system designed by an Israeli expat who lives nearby.

“It works better than what we thought,” Betín says.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We were thinking we were going to save 40 percent water in the first year, and we saved 70,” he says.

Betín says his asparagus is just as good as the crop grown with conventional drip irrigation. And he says if the other growers in the region copy him, it could make a huge difference.

“If only the asparagus growers change, you’d save like 70 million cubic meters a year. So you have a big part of the problem solved there,” he says.

As for activist David Bayer, he thinks more farmers should follow the example of Manuel Checa: just stop growing water-hungry crops like asparagus. Or at least cut back on them. And he thinks some land should be taken out of production altogether for a while, to let the aquifer recharge.

Of course most growers aren’t interested in killing their golden cash crop. And the Peruvian government? It’s taken halting steps toward addressing the water crisis here. But some Peruvians say big changes may only come through pressure from a more formidable force: international consumers.

Stefan Bederski runs an organic farm about two hours from Ica. He says all the positive changes in agriculture in Peru recently – from better pay and working conditions to stronger environmental controls – all of them have come largely through pressure from overseas markets, especially in Europe.

“They have been really the ones who have forced the Peruvian agriculture and the companies to do the things right,” Bederski says. “We do have our own local laws and national laws, but there is no force to make them happen.”

Bederski thinks it might well be the same with the overuse of Peru’s water, that it’s the consumers overseas who will make the difference.

An international coalition of nonprofits is already trying to make that possible. They’re developing water use standards for Peru and around the world that will be like fair trade standards.

They say the effort will help consumers in Europe and the US learn more about the water impact of the asparagus and other imported produce at their local store, so they can choose products that don’t take a big gulp from someone else’s nearly depleted cup.

Quick – what’s the first crop that comes to mind when you think about food from Peru? If you’re like most people, you might say the potato. Potatoes originated in Peru, and there are thousands of varieties in the country. But there’s a lot more to Peruvian food than potatoes. Even at the International Center for the Potato, or ICP.

In an ICP research field near the Andean mountain town of Huancayo, a group of local men and women rip into a patch of dark soil and yank up tubers in a shocking array of colors. The edible roots range from fuchsia to dark orange to a light yellow that fades all the way to dark purple, and they’re among the 700 hundred or so varieties of indigenous Peruvian crops known as oca, olluco and mashua.

Peru has one of the most varied food cultures in the world, with highly diverse growing regions from here in the Andes to the Amazon rainforest in the east and the Pacific coast in the west. And if you’re a foodie, you might have noticed that Peruvian cuisine is suddenly all the rage in the United States.

Not long ago, many of the country’s indigenous crops were falling out of favor. But that trend is being reversed by the hand-in-glove work of Peruvian chefs and ICP researchers like Ivan Manrique.

Manrique and his colleagues grow once widely-distributed Andean crops in research plots here in Huancayo, and then analyze them in the lab.

“We’ve done DNA studies,” Manrique says, “and we’ve found that each one is different.”

Some crop varieties are high in proteins or antioxidants, Manrique says, others in vitamins or medicinal properties. Some, he says, even contain chemical compounds that haven’t been found in any other species in the world.

That’s important because as in much of the rest of the world, agriculture in Peru is facing big challenges from temperature and rain swings as a result of climate change. Many of the ancient crops being studied here are hardy ones that grow in tough conditions.

Manrique points to a bulbous root called maca as an example of a hearty and highly valuable crop. For hundreds of years, he says, it was valued as a high-energy food. Incan warriors even carried it with them on trips to expand their empire.

Manrique says it’s also exceptional because it grows at altitudes at about 4500 meters above sea level, where no other crop can prosper. It’s also very nutritious, Manrique says, and has recently been shown to improve libido and fertility in men.

It’s that last quality that’s helped save it, Manrique says. Twenty years ago, maca was on the verge of extinction, but today, it’s grown on more than 5,000 acres in Peru.

The ICP’s goal is to save as much more of Peru’s rich crop biodiversity as possible.

Meanwhile, down from the mountains in Lima, the effort is getting help from the man who just might be the most popular Peruvian alive today—Gaston Acurio.

Acurio is a chef and entrepreneur, with dozens of restaurants here in Peru and around the world and a cooking show on TV.

His flagship restaurant in Lima, called Astrid y Gaston, was recently named one of the top 50 in the world. Until a few years ago, Acurio says, it leaned French, because Peruvians felt they were a third world country that had to import culture from Europe.

But one day, he says, “we discovered we have a very rich cultural diversity.”

For Acurio, it was an epiphany.

“We understood that as cooks we have a big glorious responsibility of representing our biodiversity and our culture with what we are doing, which is cooking.”

So Acurio basically invented what’s known as Novo-Andina cuisine—traditional Peruvian flavors, presented in new and exciting ways.

Within only a few years, Novo-Andina took Peru – and the world – by storm. And the demand for Peruvian crops took off. Consumption of native potatoes, for instance, increased 50-fold here between 2005 and 2010.

“That’s cooks, that’s my generation,” Acurio says. “We did that.”

And the appetite for native Peruvian foods didn’t stop with potatoes. Acurio points to a native fruit called the camu camu as another example.

“This fruit camu camu was all the time in the Amazon,” he says, “but nobody knew of it in Lima. So as cooks we started to tell the customers about this product. And now you can see camu camu in the supermarkets, in yoghurts, in every bar there are sours with camu camu.”

Of course there are some native foods that Peruvians haven’t yet embraced.

The grain quinoa, for instance—it’s all the rage in places in the US, but it can be hard to find in restaurants in Lima, because many here consider it a poor man’s food.

Like Ivan Manrique at the International Center for the Potato, Gaston Acurio believes changing that mindset will help preserve Peru’s food biodiversity for the future. And he relishes the challenge.

“The great thing is we’re just starting this story,” Acurio says. “It’s just the beginning.

To get to some of Peru’s most remote Andean communities, you head out over pockmarked dirt roads from a small town already 10,000 feet up. Up – up – up — past llamas and alpacas and sheep and cows. The vegetation thins out and the air becomes even thinner. Your lungs clamor for oxygen and you’re offered coca leaves to help adjust to the altitude.

And then, after four hypnotic hours, you’ve arrived – at a patch of sparse farmland near the town of Pomacocha, at 13,000 feet an outpost at pretty much the upper limits of agriculture.

For centuries, Pomacocha’s thousand or so residents have grown corn in the fertile valleys below the town and potatoes on slopes that push against the sky above, fed by seasonal rains and glacial streams.

But climate change is hitting the high Andes hard. Temperature and precipitation swings are becoming more extreme, the glaciers are shrinking fast, and a tough place to farm is becoming even tougher.

So to help them deal with an uncertain future, residents are looking back in time—to before the arrival of Europeans.

From a field of brown soil, Pomacocha resident Mariano Ccaccya unearths a small, pink potato—a huaña, one of the first to be grown here in decades. The huaña is the native potato in this part of Peru, but Ccaccya says it had fallen out of favor in recent decades and was about to disappear.

Huaña are bitter, Ccaccya says, and it takes a lot of work to make them palatable. But he says there are good reasons to grow them in times of increasing uncertainty.

Ccaccya, who’s the local head of a nonprofit group that’s leading an effort to revive ancient Andean crops, says huañas can be stored for two or three years, more than four times as long as most other potatoes. Ccaccya’s colleague Adripino Jayo says huañas also resist frost, hail, extreme rain and drought.

“It’s very, very strong,” Jayo says. “Now that we’re in the crisis of climate change, it’s worth recovering these potatoes.”

Others think so too. Jayo and Ccaccya’s organization, Cusichaca Andina, recently won a grant from the World Bank to further its efforts to promote a variety of resilient ancient Andean crops, including quinoa, amaranth, and different types of potatoes and squashes.

But changing what’s grown here is only part of the plan. Cusichaca Andina is also looking to the past to try to change how crops are grown.

On a steep slope in a valley about two hours from the potato fields, Jayo pulls away a stand of brush to reveal an overgrown rock wall. He says the stones are part of a long-abandoned system of agricultural terraces, built into Peru’s mountains by the Incas more than 500 years ago.

Terraces like these once blanketed thousands of square miles of the Andes, and were described in the 17th century book The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, by Garcilaso de la Vega.

“They built level terraces on the mountains and hillsides, wherever the soil was good,” De la Vega wrote. “And these are to be seen today in Cusco and in the whole of Peru.”

Just a small fraction of the terraces are still used today. After the European conquest, Spanish crops and agricultural systems largely displaced traditional ones.

But here in Pomacocha, old terraces are being restored, and new ones are being built.

Ccaccya says they have a lot of benefits. The terraces help channel water for irrigation while avoiding erosion. They can hold water for months, which is crucial in a place with only intermittent access to water. And plants grown on them are more productive, he says.

Cusichaca Andina is also working on reviving another ancient technology for holding and transporting scarce water—Incan irrigation systems that Garcilaso de la Vega called “extraordinary.”

“The Cisterns, or Conservatories, were about twelve foot deep, in channels made of hewn stone,” de la Vega wrote, “and rammed in with earth so hard, that no water could pass between… But the Spaniards little regarded the convenience of these works, but rather out of a scornful and disdaining humor, have suffered them unto ruin, beyond all recovery.”

Centuries later, the digging and hammering of a handful of men near Pomacocha suggests that the ruin of the Incan irrigation channels was perhaps not quite beyond all recovery. The workers are chiseling and lining up stones along a long-abandoned canal once used to divert water from a nearby spring.

“It’s always been here,” Jayo says, pointing at the stone canal. “It’s probably from pre-Incan times, but it’s still useful for irrigation, with a little help.”

Cusichaca Andina and other groups in the Andes have recovered these and other ancient agricultural treasures through a combination of archaeology and exploring local traditions. And they’re teaching communities throughout the Peruvian high Andes how to rebuild and use them, along with other ancient agricultural techniques.

It’s all part of an effort to increase the resilience and food security.

But the leaders of Cusichaca Andina realize they can only make a small dent in a vast need. Jayo says the Peruvian government has a big role to play as well.

“We see the difficulties in the national context,” Jayo says. He says the group wants politicians in Lima to apply what it’s doing across all of the Andes.

So far national politicians haven’t picked up that slack.

But the work here may have relevance to mountainous regions beyond Peru. For instance Cusichaca Andina’s founder, British archaeologist Ann Kendall, recently traveled to China. The world’s largest country faces huge challenges from climate change and water shortages. And it also happens to have its own system of ancient mountain terraces that Kendall thinks may just be waiting to be revived.