Vicuña use and the bioeconomics of and Andean peasant community in Catamarca, Argentina

RABINOVICH, J. E., A. F. CAPURRO AND L. L. PESSINA

Neotropical Wildlife use and Conservation

The University of Chicago Press

Lugar: Chicago; Año: 1991; p. 337 - 358

With some minimum data on the biology and ecology of vicunas, and with basic social and economic quantitative information, we have evaluated the potential consequences that vicuna harvesting would have on a typical Andean rural community. In so doing we have resorted to many implicit and explicit assumptions and simplifications. From the ecological point of view, the high variability of the Andean environmental conditions (mainly rain) is not reflected in our analysis. Nevertheless we have shown that for the economy of the peasant community, the consequences of vicuna harvesting are more sensitive to the environment's herbivore carrying capacity than to vicuna population parameters. We have assumed that future profits from vicuna utilization will be destined mainly for the purchase of additional livestock, even to the expense of the vicuna population, despite the fact that vicunas are commercially more valuable than livestock. This is so because the peasants consider llamas and sheep as the most stable and reliable source of subsistence. Not only is the future market of vicunas more unpredictable, but recent experience has shown the peasants that government decisions are subjected to many factors (such as political changes, conservation pressures, individual decisions). This unpredictability makes such decisions unsuitable for use in making basic subsistence decisions. Throughout this study we have assumed not only a logistic type of population growth for all herbivore species but also a vicuna population management based upon a predetermined fixed rule harvest system: the maximum sustained yield, obtained as harvesting (r, K)/4 animals. This is not the best policy; a management system based on a vicuna population size estimation before each harvest (such as the bang-bang or fixed escapement rule) is preferable, for it takes into account several sources of variability, such as rains and vicuna reproduction) (Rabinovich et al. 1985). However, as our purpose was not an optimization analysis of vicuna management but the analysis of the potential consequences of vicuna utilization to the Andean peasants, a fixed rule management system was considered adequate. We did not perform an analysis of the remaining cash left from the annual profits from vicuna utilization. Social and anthropological knowledge of this peasant community indicates that any money available, after livestock investments, would be oriented toward community action to improve children's education; this would be performed by school building improvements or restorations and an increase in teachers' salaries. The latter is essential because, due to the low provincial salaries and harsh living conditions, teacher turnover is very high, causing relatively long periods with no teachers. The other alternative to improving the children's education, also costly, is to send them to the nearby city of Belen, where better and more stable school systems exist. The consequences of vicuna utilization here analyzed have a profound effect on the socioeconomics of this peasant community. However, more important consequences, related to the culture of these people, are more complex and have not been analyzed here. The possibility of a higher cash income due to vicuna utilization reverted to more livestock and children's education will inevitably break the present degree of isolation, with drastic changes in their culture, ways of life, and accumulated generational handicraft knowledge. Our simulation results show that the fraction of vicuna profit that is invested in purchasing more livestock has a much larger effect on total profits than the minimum level of vicuna to be maintained. Thus, the predictions of our analysis suggest that conservation of the vicuna population may not be at stake if the assumptions used here are confirmed in the field. However, our results are very specific to the Laguna Blanca Reserve. Andean valleys of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile not only have different ecological conditions but also peasant communities with different cultural traits, and thus our results should not be extrapolated to other situations. The sensitivity analysis carried out indicates that no reliable prediction of the socioeconomic consequences of the vicuna utilization can be made unless the following basic ecological, anthropological, and political information is collected: (1) a field estimation of the environment's herbivore carrying capacity, (2) a more accurate estimation of the vicunas rate of natural increase, (3) the fraction of profits that might be retained by the local big landowner or the government, (4) the nature of the government's political decision regarding vicuna utilization in the near future, and (5) the degree of preference of the Laguna Blanca peasant community for livestock and not for vicunas in light of (4).