Quinoa

This ethnography examines efforts to expand quinoa production for export in Huanoquite, one dynamic agrarian district in the Cusco region of the Andean highlands of Peru. Consumed by millions of people because of its healthful properties, quinoa has been cultivated by Indigenous Quechua farmers of the Andes for millennia. Based on the author’s long-term fieldwork over forty years, part 1 offers a backdrop to understanding the quinoa boom, showing how Huanoquite’s agrarian history and infrastructural and development projects, initiated by state and parastatal agencies, have been experienced by villagers. It takes account of the effects of neoliberalism, enduring racism, gender dynamics and discrimination, generational dynamics, and meanings of development. Part 2 turns to the quinoa project, discussing quinoa’s properties, its cultivation and processing, food politics surrounding its promotion and consumption; obstacles to its expansion, and why quinoa cultivators, consumers of quinoa, and government agencies entertain divergent assumptions regarding food security, sustainability, and food sovereignty. The final chapter addresses villagers’ resistance to mining activities that will pollute the entire region’s water supply on which its agriculture depends. Through a close analysis of the quinoa boom, the book shows the tensions between an ontology of pragmatic spirituality that grounds Quechua Indigenous villagers’ efforts to keep their world in balance and affective and economic modes of extraction that threatens the sustainability of their lives.