The true importance of Piura Highlands

Photographs Courtesy Fidel Torres.

 

PIURA CITY, Peru – The highlands of El Carmen de la Frontera District are one of the  most recognized stores of water, food, and even medicine in the world, but one of the less studied discounting its few official protection. With the support of Peru’s Environment Ministry (Minam, as in Spanish), Biologist Fidel Torres continues unveiling the secrets of this place that holds the two key ecosystems of Piura – jalcas or páramos and cloud forests.

 

Precisely, the investigation is focused in this second space where it’s also latent the investment of Rio Blanco mining company, that wants to extract coopper and molybdenum, what have led it to ask for dialogue to local authorities, and those ones to deny it.

 

FACTORTIERRA: Why did you do this trip to the cloud forest nearby Henry’s Hill?

FIDEL TORRES: It’s about executing the investigation plan of Ethnics-Botanics and Bioactive Substances of Main Non-Timber Species with economic Potential of Peruvian Northern Cloud Forests project, Minam’s prize to investigation.

 

F: What did you find?

FT: Vegetal species that farmer families living at the cloud forest surround know – their medicinal, nutritional, analgesic, empowering, inking, healing, antibiotic, insecticide, repellent, diuretic and other  uses.

 

F: How much is it possible to find endemisms in this zone?

FT: The cloud forests are fragile ecosystems of top biodiversity, they represent 2.5% of tropical forests in the world, they constitute one of the water key sources, and because they present like islands at the mountain summits, their distribution is fragmented, what favors the existence of endemic species proper of this ecosystem, registering at them the highest biodiversity of the planet, as well as the most number of species inextinction, so they’re a priority cause of conservation in every country owning them, as Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile (Rzedwosky, 1996; Moniaigne, Fen. 2004;  Toledo, 2009; Ledo, 2009). In the case of Peru, the cloud forests occupy 10% of national territory and they are in 11 regions of the country with 1.8 million people living in those zones  (ITDG, 2009 – as a reference, the Peru’s population is over 33 million people according to INEI). In Peruvian Northern, around the Huancabamba Deflection zone (Piura, Cajamarca, and Amazonas), it’s registered at least 715 endemic species representing around 20% of endemism of the whole country (Sagástegui et al. 2003).

Despite its importance, the economic motivation for its rational conservation stimulation is fragile so reversing its actual degradation status due to extractive activities.

 

F: What’s the influence of this space for the surrounding area and for the region?

FT: It’s the regulator zone of the Chinchipé River Basin hydric system because it forms part of its nascent. To the surrounding zone, it influences by regulating the rains and the temperature of the region.

 

F: what protection policies are followed in this place?

FT: If we define policy as the decisions that have a defined orientation to decide and doing something, those establish rules to regulate these decisions, we can say the existent policy about those ecosystems is that the activities addressed to the extraction of minerals existent underground have priority. About the protection of forest, there are no specific policies.

 

F: How are the surrounding communities relating with their own ecosystem?

FT: The forests form part of the life system of families in their environment. They represent the warehouse of their sanity, nutrition, and the life quality of what they feel to hold spiritual and natural unity.

 

F: What plans are there to visit and know other zones in the region?

FT: The same investigation will be made at the páramos or jalcas of the Yanta Farmer Community (Ayabaca). The investigation is going to be made with the institutional support by Progreso NGO and the sponsorship by the Environment World Foundation.

 

F: What does it remain to make those explorations to be more frequent?

FT: That province governments establish the valuation of their biodiversity as local economic development policy that can be integrated to studies of economic and ecologic zonification for making plans of territorial ordering that is implemented through the concerted regional development plan that is the instrument of fundamental management for regional governments’ government management. Those actions require the perseverant and creative citizen participation and the intensive use of the social coordination that acts purposed to pitch under the governance focus that translates in coherent governments to the common benefit.

 

The investigation, that is in this initial phase, is part of the implementation of the environmental Research National Prize sponsored by Minam with funds of Fonadam supported institutionally by Cipca and with the active participation of Huancabamba Province Government. Also monitored by the Consortium of Economic and Social Investigation (CIES, as in Spanish).

 

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