FACTORTIERRA

The science already has an answer about why Piura Andes' medicinal plants heal.  All photographs provided by Fidel Torres .  PIURA, Peru - The potential of medicinal plants in Peru is enormous in terms of biodiversity, but restricted in terms of usefulness. The  investigations are focused on their power for treatment or healing diseases, but they are not enlarging their own perspective to other activities requiring them too, as cosmetology or nutrition.  This narrow vision also limits the economic potential for the communities where these species grow. In the other side, many of these investigations only arrive to gather the knowledge of the communities where that  biodiversity is located, treating them as a source but blocking them to participate into the scientific process. Add to  this the risk that biopiracy follows to represent, that gets data and results but it does not patent them as owned by this  country but it compromises them as ...

How did it start up and break the first plant to process solid residues across Piura?   By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo . Photos by Simon Garragate .   SULLANA, Peru – A cistern truck gets again to a sewer hole at the skirts of Bellavista City toward El Cucho Village. It contains residual water from Humboldt squid process that is made at the Industrial Zone. The Sullana Province’s Municipality (MPS as its initials in Spanish) admits that the equivalent to 70 vehicles of that kind (about 30 tons each one) eliminate residual water to Chira River through that hole. This means 2.1 million liters every 24 hours.   “It’s rich in ammonia and nitrogen,” the manager of one processing plants explains to me. The liquid smells bad, but it is not polluting technically neither legally, first, because it’s about an enriched fluid, second, because the Peruvian Criminal Code does not specify the stench as a cause of contamination crime.   But, the things change when the whole spill...

By Fidel Torres G.  

Two studs believe the tara can improve the life quality of a whole school, a town… or even a macro-region.   By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo . Photographs by Mako Fernandez and Ronald Zevallos. TUMÁN, Lambayequé – What do you do if you have a school about 660 feet away a factory expulsing smoke almost all the day, and the soil is mostly sandy, also being in a depression prone to floods? The answer may be waiting for anything, or worst, until once upon a day, an institution decides to move a whole town to break a world record… and it gets it.   Tumán is the capital city of the also-named district created in 1998 by the today convicted former Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori, inside Chiclayo Province , Lambayequé Department . The territory Surface is 50.2 sq mi, where about 27,000 people live. Tumán Town concentrates more than 23,000 inhabitants.   The most district’s territory is covered by sugarcane, about 27,182 acres entirely managed by empresa Agroind...

The contamination tarnishes the Pearl of Chira.   By Mako Fernández Guerrero , Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo , & Ronald Zevallos Muro . Photographs by Franco Alburqueque .   SULLANA, Peru – The rumor –because no one confirmed the source—ran like spread powder: the second most dangerous city of Peru after Callao. The inexistent tourism vanished, the Sullana-natives  abroad were seen bad, coming to this city from other places equaled to enter a war zone.   Until 2013, the second most important city of Piura, one of the 20 most important ones in Peru (after the 15 th place), concentrated about 150,000 people of 1.7 million who lived across Piura Department , according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (2007). It’s the capital city of Sullana Province and it hosted the half of its population, according to the same source.   Where have the ddiscouraging merit come out from? It was repeated, it was repeated, and even it provocated an emerge...