by MILAGROS SALAZAR
PAUCARÁ, Peru, Feb 7, 2010 (IPS) – Although Huancavelica is the poorest region of Peru, it has more than just poverty, malnutrition and unmet needs. There are also women using their creativity, efforts and traditional indigenous knowledge to improve the diets of their families and communities.
“Have you ever had coffee made from chuño (freeze-dried potatoes)?” a young villager asks with a smile before introducing this reporter to the creator of this culinary invention, Marina Huamaní.
She lives in Padre Rumi, a village in the district of Paucará in Huancavelica, a department (province) in south-central Peru, where 86 percent of the total 400,000 inhabitants live in poverty and approximately 45 percent of children are malnourished.
The provincial capital of Huancavelica, in the rugged Andean highlands, is 450 km southeast of Lima, and Padre Rumi is a three hour drive away over a rough road.
Huamaní puts no importance on her talent in the kitchen. But thanks to her culinary skills she has been able to come up with a number of recipes based on a wide range of highly nutritional traditional products that are playing a crucial role in fighting malnutrition in her community.
Her ingenuity even earned her a prize in a cooking contest organised by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to foment the consumption of nutritional foods by peasant families in this poor area.
In late 2009, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced that the number of hungry people had crossed the one-billion mark, and FAO, which warns that global food insecurity is a growing threat to humanity, estimates that the total could rise by a further 100 million this year.
“Women are important in the raising of livestock, the preservation of crop varieties and the preparation of food,” says agronomist Hernán Mormontoy, coordinator of a development project that FAO is carrying out in four villages in Paucará.
“And that is especially true today, with the impacts of climate change, which are accentuating poverty in the Andes,” he tells IPS.
Huamaní, 49, is one of the beneficiaries of the initiative, which is aimed at strengthening community organisations, reviving consumption of traditional foods, and forging links between agricultural production and the market to boost local incomes and guarantee food security.
The people in charge of the project say that one of the challenges they run up against is the deep-rooted culture of machismo. Generally, in these communities, “what the man says goes,” says Edwin Rivera, an agronomist engineer with the Lima-based Centre for the Study and Promotion of Development (DESCO), which is working with FAO.
Inter Press Service for more