Guano
remains a highly prized fertilizer, and Peru is at the top of the field thanks
to the gigantic quantity of oily anchovies that guano birds feast on – which
makes their dung valuable – and the unusual nature of Peru’s desert coast. It
never rains, so the guano just piles up.
By THE WASHINGTON POST |
June 23,
2018 at 8:45 am
By Lucien
Chauvin | Washington Post
LIMA,
Peru — Bird droppings are a nuisance for most people, but in Peru they have
been a closely guarded treasure since pre-Columbian times.
Guano, a
gentler word for dung, is one of the few words in English derived from Quechua,
the language of the Incas. The Incas used guano harvested from islands that dot
Peru’s 1,500-mile coastline as fertilizer. They fiercely guarded the source.
And execution was the ultimate punishment for anyone who disturbed the sea
birds or the islands where they deposited dung.
Execution
is off the table today, but not much else has changed. The Peruvian government
maintains strict control over the islands, which are part of a coastal
protected reserve. Guano remains a highly prized fertilizer, and Peru is at the
top of the field thanks to the gigantic quantity of oily anchovies that guano
birds feast on — which makes their dung valuable — and the unusual nature of
Peru’s desert coast. It never rains, so the guano just piles up.
Guano is
harvested much the same way it was hundreds of years ago, with a squadron of
workers manually scraping, sifting and bagging it. The government, through a
division of the Agriculture and Irrigation Ministry, selects about 400 men each
year to work eight months as harvesters. More than 60 percent of the workers
return from one harvest to the next, and many are relatives. The work is
limited to one or two islands, sometimes three, in each campaign.
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