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WATER POLITICS

Via The Desert Sun, a sobering report on Peru where thriving agribusiness and declining aquifers are leading to conflicts over water

The fight began early one morning on a sandy dirt road between fields of lima beans, where farmers discovered an excavator machine digging a trench for a water pipe. Infuriated that the pipe would carry water pumped from beneath their farms, a crowd gathered and drove away the crew of workers in a fit of shouts.

Then the protesters set fire to the plastic pipes, leaving them charred and warped on the side of the road.

As tensions rose in the days after that confrontation, threats flew between the protesters and a group of men sent by the company that was laying the pipes. Some of the men wielded wooden clubs, a machete and a baseball bat. Some of the protesters faced criminal charges.

In this feud over water, small farmers in the Peruvian town of Ocucaje are trying to challenge what they view as a water grab by a company that exports grapes and asparagus. It’s a type of conflict on the rise in parts of the world where groundwater is overexploited and in decline. And in southern Peru, disputes over water have grown especially bitter as some big farms have bought up wells and started piping water to fields miles away.

During the past two decades, an agricultural boom has transformed the Ica Valley, turning a desert bordered by sand dunes into rows of asparagus, grapevines and avocado orchards that supply supermarkets in the United States, Europe and Asia. As more and more water has been pumped from wells, groundwater levels have been falling throughout much of the Ica Valley.

Some wells have gone dry, and farmers with small plots complain the newly arrived mega-farms are using up their water.

Leading the resistance in Ocucaje is Joselyn Guzmán, a 21-year-old college student whose family grows lima beans, corn and cotton on their 25-acre farm.

If the company manages to lay the pipeline, Joselyn said, it would then be able to send the water miles away to one of its farms. She and others in town fear that could leave their fields dry.“We don’t want them to come and exploit our water,” Joselyn said emphatically as she walked down an unpaved lane, followed by more than a dozen farmers and townspeople.

“That’s what we don’t want, for them to take Ocucaje’s water,” Joselyn said. “We don’t want the water to be taken away because it’s the only livelihood we have.”

The company, Agrícola La Venta, has applied to the government water authority to start pumping from three inactive wells that it bought from an association of local farmers. Water from the wells would flow through about eight miles of pipes to a farm that produces table grapes for export.

The company insists its wells wouldn’t have any negative effects for neighboring farmers. But Joselyn and others are worried that allowing the pumping would shrivel their crops, which are flood-irrigated once a year when the Ica River swells with seasonal rains, and are then sustained by the moisture that remains in the soil.

They’re also alarmed about the idea of letting the company pipe away water because in town they’re already struggling with serious water shortages. Their drinking water comes from a well located beyond some dry hills on the other side of town.

The taps usually flow just once every 10 days or so, and people collect their rations in buckets and barrels. Those struggles for water, Joselyn said, have magnified people’s outrage about the company’s plans.

“What is it they want? To extend their pipes in order to just wait for the permit and suck out the water and take it to their farm,” Joselyn said. She stood beside the charred sections of water pipe, which were strewn in the sand along the road several hours after the confrontation.

Pointing down the road, she exclaimed: “Look there. There are the thugs.”

In the distance, a group of men stood among the trees near one of the company’s wells. She said they weren’t from Ocucaje and had been brought in by the company to intimidate the protesters. She said the men had insulted and threatened people.

“Every time we want to defend what’s ours, because in reality it’s ours, they always send thugs, always,” Joselyn said.

Townspeople stood around listening to Joselyn. Her mother, María Agustina Trillo, chimed in: “We’re David and they’re Goliath.”

When night came, the group retreated to a crossroads in the countryside. They vowed to keep vigil through the night to prevent the digging machines from coming back.

The next morning, Joselyn said she had heard the company was digging in another spot, and she wanted to go. She led the way, giving directions from the backseat while I drove.

On the road, we passed the men who had been standing guard at the well. I had tried to talk with them earlier, but one of them had told me “we’re just workers,” and said we could talk with a higher-up later.

Now, as we drove past them, one of the men held a large machete as he walked. Others carried wooden clubs. They were joined by a woman who stood watching us pass, holding a baseball bat at her side.

As we drove on, a car cut in front of us and stopped, blocking the way. Men climbed out.

They no longer held their weapons, but they quickly approached the car. As one man walked toward us, he motioned for us to turn back, his hand making a circle in the air.

“What’s going on, buddy?” Joselyn asked as she opened the door and stood to face him.

Without warning, he threw a punch. The jab hit her squarely in the mouth.

As she retreated into the car, one of the men cursed. Another yelled: “We’re going to go to your house!” They tapped on the windows.

The man who had punched her yanked open the front passenger door. “Don’t film!” he barked at us.

Another man slammed the door shut.

“Back up, back up,” Joselyn said as we began to roll away. In tears, she held a hand to her mouth and phoned her parents. “Mamá! Come over here. They’ve hit me.”

Running ‘stoplights’

Along the highway north of Ica, a large sign reads: “The Drilling of New Wells is Prohibited.”

At the bottom is a phone number and a plea: “Report clandestine drilling.”

The signs were put up by the National Water Authority to underline a ban on new irrigation wells that has been in effect for many years in this part of Peru.

Despite the ban, new wells have continued to proliferate across the Ica Valley and the neighboring farming areas of Villacurí and Lanchas. In one 2012 report, the government estimated that 74 percent of the 1,760 wells in the area were unlicensed and illegal.

The declines in the aquifers have been so pronounced, and so potentially devastating to the local economy, that the water authority’s officials say they have been trying to reinforce their policies and get a better handle on the quantities of groundwater being used. This year, the government has for a limited time allowed owners of unpermitted wells to apply for licenses and avoid penalties.

It’s unclear whether that step will bring greater order to a situation that some describe as a chaotic, unmanaged free-for-all in which the aquifers are being progressively depleted.

“The same thing is happening with water as it is with other aspects of society in Peru. That is, there is no regulation,” said María Teresa Oré, a professor of water resources management at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima.

“You can see the same thing in traffic. People don’t obey the stoplights. They blow the horn. That’s what is happening,” Oré said. She said regulations have been largely unenforced, licenses for wells have been doled out despite the ban, and heavy pumping has been allowed to continue unchecked.

“If you have the ability to run your pump 24 hours a day, you do it,” she said. “There’s nobody who can tell you no. And that’s what has happened.”

The depletion of coastal aquifers in Peru mirrors similar crises in places from California to China and India. Year after year, much more water is being drawn from the ground than the rains and snow can naturally replenish.

Measurements taken by NASA’s GRACE satellites, which have been monitoring changes in water supplies around the world, show losses of water since 2002 across large portions of South America.

The satellites have measured the impact of severe drought in Brazil and the melting of glaciers in the Andes due to global warming. They have also recorded major declines in parts of Chile and in the vast Guaraní Aquifer, which underlies farming areas and cities in northern Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil.

A team of researchers led by University of California, Irvine professor Jay Famiglietti, who is also senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has produced maps from the satellite data. The map of South America shows the melting of glaciers in Peru, Bolivia and other Andean countries as patches of yellow, orange and red. But the map doesn’t capture the depletion of smaller coastal aquifers, apparently because of the relatively large-scale nature of the satellite data, which show regional changes at a resolution of roughly 200,000 square kilometers. There are also other limitations with the satellite data, including that the effects of groundwater pumping are lumped together with changes in rainfall, snowpack and surface water.

Still, measurements of water levels in wells show that significant groundwater depletion is occurring in parts of Peru.

The aquifers in and around the Ica Valley are a case in point. The National Water Authority has estimated that wells are pumping out roughly double the amount of water – in some areas more – than what naturally seeps back into the aquifers from the water that flows down from the Andes.

A USA TODAY/Desert Sun analysis of Peruvian government data found that groundwater levels have been falling in about 60 percent of the wells for which measurements are available in the Ica area. The average drop over the past 12-18 years has been about 16 feet.

In some areas, the water levels have plunged by more than 80 feet since 2001. In one well in Villacurí, the water table has fallen 128 feet since 1997.

The drawdown accelerated in the 1990s, when the Peruvian government started a push to attract more investment in export crops.

In the Ica area, the acreage planted with asparagus has exploded, skyrocketing from 1,015 acres in 1991 to 25,698 acres in 2011. Peru has become the world’s top exporter of fresh asparagus.

Other crops such as grapes and paprika peppers have also proliferated, along with pomegranates, blueberries, snow peas, tangelos and avocados.

Much more groundwater is pumped from this stretch of the coastal desert than any other part of the country. The National Water Authority has warned in its most recent plan for the Ica area that without action to slow the decline of aquifers, severe water shortages could lead to plunging farm output and job losses within years.

This illustration shows amounts of groundwater pumped from regions in Peru. In one year, 35 percent of all groundwater pumped nationally in the regions studied was pumped in the Ica area, represented by the largest blue circle. Other dots represent relative groundwater pumping by comparison.

While large farms have been investing to keep the water flowing, other farmers in the area are struggling.

In the community of La Venta, an association of farmers sold two of their wells a decade ago to an asparagus export company because the wells were failing and no longer worked. The group didn’t have the money to fix the wells, and facing debts, they chose to sell.

Looking back on that decision, Mamerto Cuya Villagaray said his 15-member association ended up with a raw deal. The new owners promptly fixed up the wells and ran pipes miles away to its fields.

“These wells run day and night, and we’ve realized that it’s taking away flow from the wells around here,” Cuya said, standing next to the brick pump house, which was topped with an electrified fence. “They’ve caused us harm.”

He complained that the company quickly obtained permission to run a power line to the well, something he has been unable to secure for his association’s one remaining well, despite years of trying. “Maybe they need to be bribed. I don’t know. I’m waiting for them to give me the license.”

Without electricity, they must rely on a diesel pump which costs more to run.

“Every year we end up in debt,” Cuya said. The banks have started foreclosing and farmers have been losing their land.

Wells all around the area have been declining, he said, and within several years the association’s well could go dry.

“It’s going to make us disappear,” he said. “Without water, what are we going to do?”

At dawn, Cuya flicked a switch and the diesel motor roared to life, sending water coursing through a canal to flood rows of cotton.

Near the well, he passed an empty field dotted with scraggly weeds. The farmer, he explained, couldn’t afford to pump water to this part of his land. “If you don’t have money, you can’t buy water.”

A bitter feud

In the moments after she was punched, Joselyn held a hand to her mouth and wept. She met her parents and a dozen other townspeople on a dirt road just outside town. They crowded around her to hear the story: how the men surrounded the car, how one of them gave her a kick and punched her.

“We were going through a public place,” she said, anger rising in her voice. “I’m going to continue with this. This gives me even more courage to continue on. I don’t care if my life’s in danger. I don’t care.”

She went to the doctor and filed a police report that same day in August. Some people from the town kept watch on a dirt road, saying they hoped to prevent Agrícola La Venta’s workers from starting to lay pipe again.

The company has offices in Lima and Ica, and on its website promotes its efforts to be socially responsible and use water sustainably.

Reached by phone, Javier De los Ríos, the company’s manager and director, insisted he wouldn’t approve of any violence by his workers.

“I haven’t hired anyone to attack anyone,” De los Ríos said. He said the people who were trying to block the pipe-laying work had acted aggressively and forced the company to pull its machines out of the area. “Didn’t they go looking for a fight, as we say here?”

“They burned seven of our pipes,” he said. Referring to Joselyn, he added: “The little chubby one, the one that you say they hit… she poured the gasoline to set the pipes on fire.” He said his workers had seen her do it.

As for the rest of the incident, he said, “I’ve asked my security people and they’ve told me that they haven’t tried to do anything to the journalists who came and that they haven’t seen them.”

“They could be lying to me because they aren’t exactly little angels, and if that were the case, I apologize. But that’s not endorsed by us,” he said.

De los Ríos defended his company’s plans. He said the company didn’t yet have government permission to use the three wells but was applying for authorization.

As for his opponents in Ocucaje, he said, “the issue here is political.” He said an “ultra-leftist” group has been stirring up controversy, and he accused a local governor of being an “agitator.”

He argued that pumping water from the aquifer won’t affect the shallow layer of moist soil that the town’s farmers rely on. Their complaints, he said, are based on false concerns.

He pointed to one 2014 report by the government water authority showing groundwater levels remain relatively high in Ocucaje – between 7 feet and 23 feet underground – and that the water level has been stable in the area. The report focused on the problem of salt buildup in the soil, which has ruined some farmland, and concluded it’s due to poor drainage and farmers’ reliance on flood irrigation.

In another report in 2012, government engineers recommended monitoring groundwater levels and allowing Agrícola La Venta to start using three wells.

The National Water Authority is still evaluating the company’s proposal. Jorge Ganoza Roncal, director of the authority’s regional Chaparra-Chincha branch in Ica, said the agency will determine whether local farmers would be affected by the pumping. While the company has been awaiting approval, dissension has been festering in the town.

De los Ríos said some people in Ocucaje have faced death threats for siding with his company. He pointed out police detained three men suspected of making those threats after finding ammunition and explosives in their car. According to an account in the Peruvian newspaper Correo, a prosecutor found the evidence insufficient and released them.

Joselyn argued the explosives were planted to discredit those who oppose the company. As for the torched pipes, she said, “it was the people.”

“If we didn’t burn something, they weren’t going to pay attention to us,” she said. “It was a protest.”

She and four other people are facing criminal charges including endangerment of public safety, causing damages by starting a fire, extortion and rioting.

Their conflict parallels similar frictions between small-acreage farmers and large industrial farms in places around the world. And it also carries echoes of Peru’s right-versus-left political battles and entrenched tensions between the poor and the wealthy.

Companies have been buying up wells from old farming cooperatives. Those cooperatives are a legacy of the agrarian reform of the late 1960s and 70s, which was promoted by the leftist military ruler Juan Velasco Alvarado and involved seizures of plantations nationwide.

In Ocucaje, Agrícola La Venta bought inactive wells from one of those farming cooperatives. The deal was approved in a vote by the cooperative’s members, and while the company obtained legal title to the wells, complaints about the process have persisted among some in Ocucaje.

In Joselyn’s home, a protest sign hangs on a wall facing the front door. It reads: “DON’T TAKE AWAY THE WATER, WE’RE THIRSTY”

She said her family’s farm is at risk along with others. If they company is able to pump from the wells, she said, it could end up taking over much of the area and pushing out the small farmers.

“It’s our water,” Joselyn said. “I want people to realize the danger we’re in.”

Her mother, María Agustina, added: “The water belongs to the people – to us, who were born and raised here.”

She vowed to continue the fight, and tears welled up in her eyes.

‘As efficient as we can be’

When strong winds blow in from the Pacific and sweep across the dunes, they stir up huge clouds of sand and dust that blot out the sun. They leave towns covered in an orange-brownish haze.

These dust storms are a reminder that the desert of southern Peru is among the driest places on the planet. But where water is pumped from beneath the sand, the desert blooms into productive farmland.

At the end of a road that cuts through wind-rippled sand dunes, Miguel Bentin and his brother Juan Pablo have created an island of green in what was previously barren desert.

When they founded their company, Valle y Pampa, in 2008 and started building a fence on the land, some veteran farmers were skeptical they could make farming work among the undulating dunes.

“When we first came, you needed a GPS to know if you were in or outside the property,” Miguel said.

They had studied the area in the province of Pisco, north of Ica, and had confirmed there was water to be tapped. The Pisco River lies about 4 miles to the north, and they found water underground that appeared to be seeping downhill from the river.

They have six wells on their 3,700 acres but for now are using only two. On more than 500 acres, they’ve planted asparagus, blueberries and pomegranate trees.

They also invested in an ultra-efficient irrigation system. Called high-frequency irrigation, the system uses sensors called tensiometers to measure the moisture in the soil and automatically sends out small pulses of water at short intervals throughout the day in order to keep soil moist around the plants’ roots. This technology, while costlier than others, uses much less water than conventional drip irrigation.

“We are as efficient as we can be with the conditions we have,” Miguel said, standing on a dune overlooking the pomegranate trees.

The Bentin brothers have made efficiency a priority because they want to avoid the water problems that are plaguing other areas. While groundwater levels have been falling elsewhere, Miguel said the levels of their wells have held steady.

That doesn’t mean technology alone can save Peru’s aquifers, he said, because when farmers can squeeze more earnings from the same amount of water, they can be tempted to vastly expand their acreage and keep overpumping. But he said the technology, combined with other efforts, can certainly help.

“I think we have a green future,” he said, “if we do things right.”

His brother Juan Pablo led a tour of the farm, where workers were moving along rows cutting sprigs of asparagus. Harvesting the crop is especially labor-intensive because a shoot of asparagus can grow 4 inches in a day. If it isn’t collected quickly enough, the asparagus can grow too large for export and be wasted.

“This crop is coming very well,” Juan Pablo said, driving past a field of bushy plants. While asparagus requires more water than other crops, he said, their farm has managed to grow it with half the water that other farms use.

To the south in Villacurí, flower farmer Amalia Ghiglino has also adopted similar water-saving technology. She said her company, Florisert, has cut its water use by more than 50 percent by switching from a conventional irrigation system to high-frequency irrigation.

She made that change after the water from one declining well became too salty and the farm lost more than 60 acres of wax flowers. Ghiglino secured permission to seal the well and drill a new one, and since then has dramatically reduced the farm’s water footprint.

“People are getting more conscious of the importance of maintaining and taking care of our water,” Ghiglino said. She said farmers, after years of overexploiting the aquifer, now realize that without action, “we can just collapse.”

Groundwater levels in the area have fallen from 131 feet to 177 feet deep during the past 15 years, but she said the water table has recently stabilized. And her business has taken off, sending wax flowers that end up in bouquets in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Korea and Japan.

Working with the government, she and other farmers in Villacurí have formed an association. They’ve been backing a government plan, the Pisco River-Seco River Basin Water Consolidation Project, which will capture water from the Pisco River and bring it by canal to supply farms and relieve the pressures on the aquifer, which receives very little natural recharge.

The canal is to be built with both government money and private sector funding, similar to the Chavimochic Special Project, an irrigation system that channels water from the Santa River to Peru’s northern coast and has made possible a major expansion of farmland.

Building the canal from the Pisco River would help ease the water problems in the Villacurí area, but the proposal doesn’t make it any less urgent for farmers to reduce their water use, said Micha Hadas, an Israeli irrigation specialist who works with both Ghiglino and the Bentin brothers. He said if more of the big companies that use the bulk of the water shift to similar water-saving systems, they would go a long way toward safeguarding groundwater.

“It’s definitely in danger due to overexploitation, due to wasting of water, due to irrigating in a less efficient and irresponsible way,” Hadas said.

He said if the authorities would simply enforce the rules that already exist, that could help address the depletion problem. “We take the water, and everybody takes what they can. It’s without control and without discipline.”

“We’re damaging the aquifer in an almost irreversible way,” Hadas said. “The aquifer is falling and the water is growing saltier and saltier. In very little time, that could cause an economic disaster.”

Struggles for water

In Ica, mototaxis swarm around the entrance of the shopping mall, where the bustling crowd shows how the farming boom has rippled through the economy.

A billboard across the street advertises a new housing development, apparently for the wealthier set, with an attractive pledge: “A home with water 24 hours a day.”

Many people in the area would jump at the chance to have that. In rural towns south of Ica, residents say their taps have been running once or twice a week, usually for just a couple of hours.

Farmworker Marta Bellido, who was at work harvesting asparagus, said the water often comes on while she and her husband are at work. When they can’t be there, they ask neighbors to collect water for them in jugs and barrels.

“We get what we can, and sometimes there’s none,” Bellido said after emptying a load of asparagus into a crate.

“The big farms have water. We on the other hand don’t,” she said. “They have it because they have money to bring groundwater.”

She said she wishes her family could receive at least an hour of water a day.

Many Peruvians lack access to running water, both in rural areas and in growing urban slums.

In the slums that blanket the hills around Lima, tanker trucks rumble down dirt roads selling water. On some of the hilltops stand large rectangular nets that capture droplets of water from the fog that rolls in from the ocean. Water trickles from the netting and is collected to be used in community gardens.

In the Ica Valley, public water agencies run the taps sporadically. Jesus Natividad Neyra said she pays 8 soles – or about $2.50 – a month for water that comes twice a week.

“We have to fill up quickly because it’s only two hours that they give us,” Neyra said. She had just finished filling her plastic barrels with a hose and was scrubbing laundry in a tub on her front porch. When the hose stopped flowing, she said: “They should give us better service.”

On another street, farmer Flor Gamboa said that on top of the dismal water service, less has been flowing to her field of asparagus from a well operated by the local farming cooperative. She said in the past there was plenty of water, but that changed when Chilean-owned businesses put in large farms nearby.

“Where is there going to be enough water? They dig deeper. They take the entire flow. Nothing is left here, just very little water,” Gamboa said. “The big farms hurt us, the small farmers. They harm us a lot.”

She said some of her neighbors have stopped farming due to the lack of water, and at some point the only option may be to go work for a big farm. “What do they care? They only care about shipping off their crops.”

Human rights activist Jorge Aparcana said agro-export companies have been aggressively buying up wells, pumping heavily, and leaving small farmers with dry wells.

“That’s injustice and exclusion,” said Aparcana, a leader of the Ica Human Rights Commission. “I agree with having investment, but it can’t be done in whatever way without any sort of control.”

Aparcana said it’s nothing short of a “crime” to grow asparagus in the desert because it’s such a thirsty crop. He argued there ought to be gradual efforts to outlaw water-guzzling crops in the area. And even though the big farms have brought jobs, he said, tensions have grown as small farmers have been pushed aside.

“My fear,” he said, “is that it could be a breeding ground for more violence.”

Conflicts have surfaced before, such as in 2009, when protesters tried to block a company from laying pipes to carry water from wells to farmland miles away. Police in anti-riot gear were called out and used tear gas to disperse the crowd. The company eventually was able to complete its project.

David Bayer, an American activist who has lived in Peru for decades and who joined farmers in those protests, said he’s concerned about the potential for violence and hopes conflicts can be avoided. If supplies of drinking water run out, he said, anger could spill over.

Bayer is a former USAID official who first came to Ica as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, and he has studied and written about the problem of groundwater overdraft in Ica. He said one agro-exporter who moved away to another area had acknowledged being concerned about possible violence. Bayer said the man told him he feared that if townspeople run out of water, they could storm his farm and burn it down.

“It’s a very serious situation,” Bayer said, “and the most important thing is we have no emergency plan.”

Others argue the agro-exporters unfairly get a bad rap. They say that the big farms use water much more efficiently than small farms, and that towns have faulty water service due to a lack of government investments in infrastructure.

“I’ve had problems with communities that think by putting a well in an area, we’re affecting water they never had,” said Jorge Vargas Corbacho, who grows avocados, grapes and citrus on about 1,200 acres. “There’s a lot of ideology in this issue because there are people who complain, rightly, that they don’t have water, but the government doesn’t have a presence in some communities, and the one they complain to is the business next-door or the biggest farmer, which doesn’t replace the government.”

He acknowledged that agriculture is using much of the water and it’s leading to declining groundwater levels. But he said if a drinking water well is drilled deep enough and in the right place, it will gush water. He offered an analogy: “The government has to build a sidewalk for people to walk on.”

Driving out the gates of his farm, Vargas Corbacho continued to a neighborhood where he said the city government had paid a high price to drill a well – and in an area where there’s little water to pump. Only small quantities have been flowing from the well, leaving people coping with a shortage.

“Close to the hills is the worst part, and they drilled it right over there,” he said, pointing to the pump house. “A bad place to look for water.”

Disappearing water

In the middle of the desert, a lagoon shimmers.

The oasis of Huacachina has long been naturally fed by groundwater seeping into a low spot between mountainous sand dunes. The views of silvery water and palm trees against the sand have made it a popular destination. People come to explore the waterfront and take tours on dune buggies that go racing over the hills of sand.

The lagoon that visitors see isn’t entirely natural anymore. Its water level has been falling. In order to maintain it, the community has been periodically pumping water into the lagoon to offset the declines.

Water was added twice during the past year because the shores were receding, said Luis Oliva Fernandez Prada, a former mayor of Ica. “They regained one meter.”

Fernandez Prada said he also refilled the lagoon once during his tenure as mayor a decade ago. He suspects less water from the Ica River is recharging the aquifer because the city has grown, covering the ground with concrete and homes in areas where water used to seep into farmland.

The city’s name, Ica, means “springs” in the indigenous Quechua language. A century ago, water gushed from the ground in several spots around the city, including in its central plaza. Those springs have long since disappeared, along with other wetlands similar to Huacachina.

Despite the decline in the aquifer, Fernandez Prada is optimistic. He said farms are making water-saving changes, the government is improving its oversight by making sure wells are licensed and metered, and projects are being drawn up to bring more water from the Andes to the desert.

“This place has generated jobs, money for the country, food for the world,” Fernandez Prada said. “Ica is destined to be the California of Peru in accelerated economic growth.”

The future of this farming region, though, depends on a supply of groundwater that continues to shrink. And the country also faces challenges as Andean glaciers melt and rainfall patterns shift due to global warming.

Groundwater could help the country through dry times, but there will be less to draw on if Ica and other regions continue to draw down their reserves.

In a detailed 2010 report, researchers with the organizations Progressio, Water Witness International and the Peruvian Center for Social Studies concluded that unsustainable water use in the Ica Valley has had a negative impact on small and medium-sized farms and has contributed to social conflicts.

“Unless action is taken, the overexploitation of the aquifer will eventually exhaust the water resources which the city of Ica and its population of over a third of a million people depend on,” the researchers said in the report. “In a perverse process of self-destruction, all but the most powerful farmers will be forced out as the resource becomes scarcer and more expensive to access.”

Peru passed a water law in 2009 that established measures to regulate groundwater. Since then, organizations made up of groundwater users have been formed. But in practice, government controls remain weak and rules often go unenforced.

The government has recognized the proliferation of unlicensed wells as a problem and is trying to solve it by permitting well owners in the Ica area to apply for licenses this year, said Ganoza, director of the National Water Authority’s regional branch. Anyone caught drilling a new well without permission in 2015 or thereafter, he said, could face criminal charges.

Ganoza said regulators are also working to gather better information about how much groundwater is actually being pumped.

When the agency studies whether to grant permission for a well, officials look at whether that pumping would affect other adjacent wells. Ganoza said he has assured people in Ocucaje that the agency will carefully evaluate whether the proposed pumping by the company would be detrimental to their farms. And if there are harmful effects, he said, the water authority would not grant permission.

Water managers in Ica have also been backing proposals to capture more water in the Andes and route it to the Ica River to alleviate the stresses on the aquifer.

There have long been tensions over water between Ica’s farm owners and people in the neighboring Andean region of Huancavelica, where impoverished communities that rely on herding llamas and alpacas have opposed the diversion of water to the coast.

Government officials from both regions have recently been in talks backed by the Peruvian government aimed at smoothing over those tensions. They’ve been discussing a proposal to build a canal that would bring water from the Pampas River, which flows on the other side of the Andean divide toward the Amazon, to the Ica River.

Bringing more water from the highlands is critical in order to avoid a “collapse” in the Ica area, said Alfredo Sotil, manager of the Ica Valley Groundwater Users Board, who recently attended a meeting in Lima where officials of the two regions discussed plans for a watershed-level council.

Sotil’s association has already been carrying out projects to recharge the aquifer using water from the Ica River. He said those efforts seem to be paying off. Up until 2013, the aquifer was declining by an average of about 1.5 meters per year. But last year, after the organization routed more water to areas where it could seep into the aquifer, he said, the average annual decline slowed to about 1 meter.

“If it’s slowing down the decline, we know that some of what we’re doing is working,” Sotil said. He said the area can still capture more of the water that flows down the Ica River, and that can help farms use their wells less.

“The aquifer could end up being in balance at some point,” he said. “That’s the idea.”

Slowing the depletion will be a monumental challenge, especially because water levels have been dropping so rapidly.

Peruvians could look to neighboring Chile for examples of ways to manage their dwindling coastal desert aquifers. In Chile’s Copiapó Valley, in the Atacama Desert, wells have gone dry and some farmland has been abandoned as groundwater levels have dropped. To try to address the problem, the association of groundwater users in Copiapó is actively monitoring water levels in wells, promoting water-saving irrigation and working on a proposal that would require cutbacks in water use.

As Peruvians confront growing strains on water supplies, they could also look to the country’s ancient waterworks for an example of collective ingenuity that carried a sustained flow of water to the coastal desert year after year.

Centuries ago, people built the Aqueducts of Cantalloc – dozens of subterranean water collection tunnels that capture groundwater from sources at the base of the mountains and carry the water downhill to farmland in the desert. Archaeologists say this engineering feat was the work of the Nazca people, the same culture that left the mysterious Nazca Lines in the desert.

They built distinctive spiral-shaped openings above the canals called puquios.

Some of the aqueducts have been cleaned and maintained by groups of farmers, and they still carry water to fields of potatoes and other crops. Standing above a puquio, it’s still possible to see water flowing down through a passage that was built perhaps 1,500 years ago.

In Peru today, the question is whether people will develop analogous innovations to use water more sustainably – and whether they will act before many more wells dry up.