Most of the Northern Hemisphere has been swaddled in the oppressive heat of summer for nearly two months, but south of the equator, high up in the remote Andes Mountain, the weather is frigid — and its having devastating consequences.
In southern Peru, thousands of meters up in the Andes, sheep and alpaca herds have been decimated by bitter cold that often sinks below 0 degrees Fahrenheit.
The temperatures not only freeze the life out of llamas, alpacas, sheep, and other livestock; the prolonged cold affects the health of children and the elderly.
Despite Peru's $150 million in export earnings from alpaca wool, the roughly 120,000 families, many of whom are indigenous people, that raise that animals and sell their fur usually only get $1,200 a year — less than half of Peru's minimum wage, according to the Associated Press.
Below, see what life is like when frigid winter settles over the harsh landscape of the Peruvian Andes.
Peru's Puno region has been particularly hard hit, with some 55,000 deaths among the alpaca herds that range across mountains topping 13,000 feet.
Source: Vice News
Animals that graze in the region's mountains are hearty, but this winter has been particularly tough. What one forecaster called "atypically dry" weather in the Amazon had prevented humid air from moderating the mountain temperatures, which allowed snow to continue to pile up on grasslands and freeze creeks.
Source: Vice News
William Morales Cáceres, the head of Puno's agricultural ministry, told Vice News that 279,000 alpacas, 30,000 llamas, and 370,000 sheep had been affected by sickness or death because of the low temperatures. According to the AP, 50,000 alpacas had died by mid-July.
Source: Vice News, Associated Press
Alpacas can only be shorn once a year, and females only give birth to one offspring every 11 months. The cold often ruins grasslands, and the soil is poorly suited for crops. "Without water and without food, the weak ones die," Mateo Mullisaca, a 62-year-old shepherd, told the AP, as one of his alpacas took its final breaths.
Source: Associated Press
There were early signs of a harsh winter, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency in the region in May. Morales Cáceres said that the herds' diet has become so poor that the animals are increasingly susceptible to infections and diarrhea.
"They get weaker and get ill," Morales Cáceres told Vice News in late July. "A lot are dying."
The hardship is not limited to the animals. The state-of-emergency declaration activated programs to distribute blankets and other aid to people in the area, as well as vitamins and fodder for livestock. But one shepherd told the AP that aid hadn't been enough.
Mullisaca, who runs farm almost 16,400 feet high in Peru's Andes, last year lost about one-fifth of his herd of 150 animals. He told the AP that not enough food and corrals had arrived to protect the animals from the cold.
"Sheep, the only other animal that can survive on the grassland plateaus, are also dying in large numbers as evidenced by Mullisaca's loss the night before of five lambs a few hours after entering the world," the AP reported in July.
When alpacas die, families butcher them for meat, but as winter weather wears on, food often dwindles and the prolonged cold affects the health of children and other vulnerable people.
According to government figures, two months into the cold season 14,000 children had developed respiratory illnesses and 105 had died. Most of the cases were in the Puno region.
As the winter drags on, children can become sick, recover, and then relapse, often multiple times, a doctor stationed high in the remote Andes told the AP.
The state of emergency declared in May ran out in mid-July, but a second one was activated on August 8. Residents in 14 districts of Puno region received 203 tons of food and 45,510 blankets.
Through August 6, the cold season in Puno had necessitated 1,036,740 tons of humanitarian aid, delivered throughout the region. According to the regional government, this aid has gone to more than 100,000 families in Puno.
Authorities have distributed 313,670 tons of outerwear, including hats, pants, polar blankets, slippers, stockings, rolls of polypropylene, blankets, polar sweatshirts, and jackets, according to Peruvian news site Diario Correo.
More than 700,000 tons of food had also been distributed through the first week of August, consisting of rice, sugar, oatmeal, noodles, oil, beans, and cans of mackerel fillets, among other things.
"The situation will probably not get better until September," Martí Bonshoms, a forecaster for Peru's national meteorology service, told Vice News in July.
Bonshoms said the weather was not related to climate change, which others disputed.
"You can feel that the climate is changing," Morales Cáceres told Vice News. "It is getting more extreme."
Most farmers in the region sell their alpaca fleece for about $5 a kilogram. In all, Peru exports $150 million in alpaca fleece every year. Despite efforts to spread that income around, many people in the region remain impoverished, with some taking up work in the cocaine or illegal-mining trades.
Source: Associated Press
Peru's newly elected president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, visited Puno during his first tour of the country this month. He promised more investment in infrastructure to improve lives in the area.
"We want to support Puno, we want Puno to be prosperous," Kuczynski said, according to El Economista. He lamented that the region had high rates of infant anemia and said his administration would promote the construction of 10 water-treatment plants around Lake Titicaca, which borders the southern edge of the Puno region.
"We have to combat anemia, malnutrition. ... The true solution is clean potable water for everyone," Kuczynski went on. "We are going to eliminate the trash in the lake, we are going to clean it, we are going to have public health in Puno."
Kuczynski's promises notwithstanding, the harsh, prolonged cold and dissatisfaction with the aid provided seems to have set tensions on edge. Morales Cáceres told Vice News that anger could break out if more isn't done to help indigenous populations that rely heavily on alpaca herds and other livestock.
Source: Vice News
While Kuczynski has made promises to improve public services in rural and isolated parts of Puno, he has only been in office for a few weeks, and it's not clear how his government will bring his plans to fruition or whether his stated plans would do much to mitigate the biting cold. A failure to do so would not surprise some observers.
"Every year with the winter freezes and cold temperatures the plants and animals die," Miguel Hadzich, the head of a group affiliated with Peru's Catholic University that has built 600 homes with heating for alpaca farmers, told the AP. "A scandal breaks out and then the state looks the other way."
Source: Associated Press
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