Quinoa, a grain crop, native to the Andes, is adapted to high - altitude, arid, cold, hypersaline environments. Its traditional cultivation, on Bolivia’s altiplano, faces significant threats including climate change, water stress, mining impacts, and the emergence of large-scale quinoa farming enterprises elsewhere, producing cheaper but lower-quality crops often reliant on heavy use of agrochemicals. These threaten the livelihoods of Andean growers who rely on traditional methods tied to biodiversity-friendly land use to produce quinoa organically using diverse local varieties.
Quinoa’s popularity as a superfood in Europe and North America, with a boom between 2011 and 2014, catalysed additional adverse changes in the economics of production, leaving many traditional farmers very vulnerable and endangering the specific extreme habitats where the crop is grown, and their unique biodiversity.
This project highlights that diversity, promoting its conservation, identifying potentially beneficial strains of soil bacteria and fungi, and seeking to develop novel bioproducts for greater crop and ecosystem resilience. Its aim is thereby to mitigate climate change and other threats, and provide the altiplano farming communities with sustainable alternatives to intrusive agro-industry.
The scant information about quinoa symbionts reflects a general lack of information about Bolivia’s fungi and bacteria. Fungi are essential for sustainable life: to conserve producers (plants) and consumers (animals), fungi, the recyclers, also need protection (and they do much more than recycle). Our project’s work in quinoa-growing areas will start to address Bolivia’s fungal and bacterial biodiversity conservation black hole and use the knowledge to promote design of intelligent systems which meet human needs while enhancing biodiversity, reducing human impact on the planet, and creating a fairer world.
The Permaculture Association is represented in this project by Gihan Soliman. Ms Soliman has extensive experience working in food security, and particularly with day-to-day delivery of monitoring and evaluation.
More details of this project are available on the Darwin Initiative Website