Thieves recently broke into a storehouse in this farming town high in the Andes, knocked the manager over the head and made off with 1,179kg of contraband. Trucks have been surreptitiously crossing the border, laden with an illicit substance bound for China. With the price of their signature crop soaring, once-poor farmers bounce along the unpaved roads in shiny new vehicles.
The precious stuff that has provoked sudden larceny and luxury here is not drugs, gems or precious metals. It is a pungent, turnip-like vegetable called maca, heralded as a cancer-fighting superfood and sold on the shelves of US supermarkets like Whole Foods.
It is so popular in China for its perceived aphrodisiac effects that this year Chinese buyers showed up with suitcases full of cash to buy up the harvest, inciting a gold rush and setting off alarms from Lima to Los Angeles and beyond.
As maca booms, some Peruvians fear that they are losing control of a valuable crop with a history that goes back long before the time of the Inca empire.
SMUGGLING
Officials say that many Chinese buyers smuggled the root out of the country in violation of a law that requires maca to be processed in Peru before it can be exported — a measure intended to protect local businesses. They say seeds were also smuggled out illegally, despite a ban meant to prevent the root from being grown anywhere else.
“Thousands of acres are being grown outside the country without authorization,” Peruvian National Commission Against Biopiracy president Andres Valladolid said.
Oswaldo Castillo, a maca grower and processor, worried that the Chinese “will get a monopoly over maca and be able to set the price on the world market.”
He said that some farmers had sold maca seeds to Chinese buyers.
“We can’t let the seeds leave the country,” he said. “Maca is our ancestral food. It’s our pride.”
The Chinese buying spree and the clandestine export of whole maca and seeds has raised questions about the ability of developing countries to control access to native species.
However, it has also stunned buyers of the root in the US, Europe and Japan, who suddenly saw prices of processed maca shoot up, or were told there was simply no maca left to ship to them.
Zach Adelman, the founder of Navitas Naturals, based in Novato, California, one of the top importers in the US, said his company previously paid about US$8 a kilogram for maca powder. Now some suppliers are asking for more than US$44 a kilogram.
At Whole Foods stores, the price of Adelman’s organic maca, labeled “Incan superfood,” recently increased to US$66 a kilogram from as low as US$44. Next year, he said, shoppers will pay up to US$176 a kilogram.
“It’s going to hit them like a ton of bricks in the new year when they go and find a bag that’s three times as much,” he said.
In June, as the harvest started, Chinese buyers arrived in Junin, a town of 10,000 people, which sits at 4,130m above sea level on a bleak plain surrounded by windswept dun-colored hills.
SOARING PRICES
Within weeks, the vegetable, a member of the mustard family with a pungent smell and taste, soared in value, from about US$4 a kilogram to more than US$24 a kilogram for the most sought-after variety.
Fortunes were made overnight.
Many of the Chinese who bought maca this summer loaded the dried vegetables onto trucks and sent them clandestinely across the border to Bolivia, according to government officials. That hurt local processors. However, of greater long-term concern were news reports that farmers in China had begun growing large amounts of maca.
Valladolid said those plantings could have been started only with seed smuggled out of Peru illegally.
Because maca rapidly depletes the soil, sucking out its nutrients, farmers typically plant a field for only two years, after which it must lay fallow for as long as 15 years. That has forced farmers to go farther and farther away to find land to plant, often tilling dizzyingly steep hillsides.
That is the problem faced by Hugo Arias, 53, considered by many here to be the maca king for his extensive plantings. This year, he farmed more than 243 hectares and said he would increase that by 20 percent for next year’s crop. He said he had used much of this year’s profit to buy farm equipment and rent more land to grow maca. He is also building a large new house in town.
On a recent day, Arias exhorted about 200 workers harvesting maca, in a field at a breath-sapping 4,500m, to work harder. A frigid wind blew mist across the pampa as vicunas grazed on yellowed tufts of coarse grass.
Victor Parra, 56, one of the workers, said it is so cold sometimes that he could barely pick the maca out of the soil. The harvesters were given short rest periods, he said, and brought their own food and water. They travel to and from the fields in the back of cramped trucks.
“A kilo of maca is how high?” Parra said. “So why do they pay us so little and treat us badly?”
THEFTS
The price jump has also brought trouble. Growers said they were staying up at night to guard drying tents and storehouses from thieves. Their worries increased after the storehouse of a Japanese buyer was raided. The company’s local representative said the thieves hit him on the head, then loaded sacks of dried maca into a pickup truck.
“I never thought the price of maca would go so high,” said the man, Alex Rojas, 33, who said the thieves threatened to shoot him.
Juninos, as residents here are called, typically consume maca two or three times a week, at breakfast. They boil the root and blend it with milk, fruit and sugar, turning it into a hot drink called maca juice.
However, with the rising price, many now forgo the staple.
“The poor person in Junin can’t eat maca anymore,” said Olga Rapri, 48, who has a clothing shop in town. “Now you have to be rich to have maca.”
She said sales at her store had increased as money poured into town during the harvest, but less than she had hoped.
“People would rather buy cars, motorcycles, tractors, seed,” Rapri said. “They would rather invest in growing more maca.”
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