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Glaciers aren't just important to penguins and polar bears. In fact, they contribute to the water you drink in parts of Bolivia today.
Photo: Anders Backman, Redi Images
Not far from La Paz, on a lonely mountaintop, sits a building surrounded by rock. This is the Chacaltaya ski resort, once the highest in the world. But today the ski lift is closed because the glacier it relied on has melted away.
Most glaciers are located at very high or very low latitudes, the kind of freezing cold, extreme places you'd expect to find masses of ice. But a small percentage are tropical, and of those the vast majority are found in Peru, followed by Bolivia. Gazing around the city of La Paz, glaciers are not hard to spot, from the gleaming peaks of Illimani shining in the south, to the wedgelike Mururata and the single summit of Huayna Potosi. But could these ancient glaciers be headed the way of Chacaltaya, so that looking around La Paz in 20 years we see just rocky peaks without their icy caps?
Andean glaciers are shrinking at alarmingly rapid rates. In fact, according to the European Geosciences Union, 'Since the 1970s, glaciers in tropical Andes have been melting at a rate
unprecedented in the past 300 years,' and have shrunk by an average of 30 to 50 percent. This melt is vastly more important than the loss of a single ski resort, and affects tens of millions of people throughout the Andes who rely on glacial water for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectricity.
A glacier is like a viscous, slow moving river of ice that relies on snow and freezing temperatures at it head to recharge a mass that usually migrates downward at a snail's pace. In Chacaltaya's case, the mountain's altitude means it simply became too warm.
‘There are many causes for glacier melt,’ says Gabriel Zeballos, Teacher and Researcher at the Geographical Engineering Program of the Escuela Militar de Ingeniería in La Paz. ‘The fundamental cause is global warming, and that controls the recharge level, which keeps rising. That's what happened to Chacaltaya – there was no recharge given that its peak is relatively low in altitude - only 5300 meters above sea level.’
Today, residents of La Paz rely on glaciers to provide some 15 percent of our drinking water, according to recent studies by an international team of investigators. If that water source eventually diminishes, and it seems it will, El Alto and La Paz may have to construct more dams to retain river water. But dams bring their own set of problems, especially for communities downstream, which often see their access to water radically restricted.
Zeballos says that, according to the book Gestión de Aguas, Conceptos para el Nuevo Milenio by Margot Franken, La Paz - and all major cities - needs to change the way it uses water to deal with both an increasing population and the possible loss of part of its water supply. ‘We take potable water and use it for everything, even toilets. We dirty the water, and then we pump it into a dead river,’ he says, referring to the contaminated Choqueyapu River, which flows through parts of La Paz and carries water away from the city. A more sustainable solution would be that instead of sending this valuable resource away, water from sinks and showers be re-used for purposes like irrigation, returning it to the land locally.
As global temperatures continue to rise, Andean glaciers, due to their special position at high
altitudes near the equator, will continue to be disproportionately affected by climate change. We're probably not looking at the total disappearance of Andean glaciers in the next few decades, but they will continue to melt and become smaller in ways that spell change and hardship for many communities.
Photo : Valeria Wilde
Elidet Ruth Mercado is a young woman with a lot to say. She loves to talk and explain her opinion, and from the look on her face and the tone of her voice you understand her desire to be heard and the seriousness of every single word. Elidet, whose friends call her Charito, is a 27 year old Community Director and President of a group of young people in the Guaraní community of Guirapayete.
Being a single mother to two young children in the conservative community of Guirapayete, an Indigenous Guaraní community 220 km from Santa Cruz with around 40 families, has been a challenge for her. When Charito remembers the hardship of having to come to terms with her reality she cannot help but let a few tears roll down her face and her voice shakes slightly as she continues her story:
“As a mother, I would not want the same for my daughters, I want things to be different, I want the chance to work and to be able to help my daughters so that they can be better than me. That they could have a profession and could be somebody in their lives. I would like my children to go out and to know about new things.”
Like many young Guaraní, Charito wants more opportunities for herself and her children, but is looking toward an uncertain future for her people and their culture, as she sees many of her peers drawn toward cities where they face discrimination.
Guaraní people arrived in the Bolivian Chaco from Paraguay before the Spanish conquest. They first fought against the Incas and after that came the colonization with all its implications.
Amongst a Guaraní woman’s greatest challenges in facing the modern world, Charito mentions the discrimination she feels on leaving her community. Discrimination for dressing or speaking differently or for not having a similar level of education to those who live in the city. “They make us feel smaller or inferior for being Guaranis. We do not speak Spanish well but neither do we speak Guaraní. They discriminate against us because we lack resources but above all, because of our lack of education.”
Many people take education for granted, but Charito does not. She wants to study Social Communication and her greatest dream is to have a video camera in order to capture the customs and traditions of the Guaraní people, so that the number of people who know about their dances, foods, dress and crafts gradually increases.
Charito says that the current generation of young people in her community lack a feeling of identity. They are caught between two worlds, since they do not completely fit in when they migrate to cities, but at the same time their own traditions are disappearing. Older women still dress in a tipoy, a long white tunic made of rough cotton with bands around their heads, painted cheeks and collars, in the traditional style. They speak perfect Guaraní and can weave and participate in other activities specific to place. However, the young women have started to copy different customs in their attempt to fit in with Bolivian life outside the community. They have abandoned traditional dress and whilst the vast majority understand Guaraní, they don’t speak it. This means many adults are regretfully seeing their language diminish. It seems the next generation will determine if Guaraní continues to be spoken in communities.
Living in Guirapayete is far from simple. Using a mobile phone or the internet appears futuristic. Just a year and a half ago they received basic services like water and electricity, but the worst of all this is the absence of projects and policies that would allow community members to keep their families united within the community instead of migrating to cities - quality education and access to healthy forms of entertainment. Customs are disappearing and in many cases it seems children living today in Guirapayete or one of the other 320 Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco are destined to search for better chances and abandon their communities.
The effect this migration of the young has on communities is defined by the Director of the Social Sciences Faculty at the UMSA, René Pereira, as social or demographic aging. It leads to a large absence of youth in rural areas, leaving communities partially deserted and us wondering what the future holds for them.
For Charito, there is an internal struggle between being proud of her origins and her community, and wanting to offer her daughters the possibility of education and professional jobs. Her vision means giving them what they need to establish themselves as people and spend their lives doing what makes them happy - even if it means leaving her community.
As the country’s young population ages into the workforce, can the government provide employment and training?
Strolling—or, rather, panting—up Avenida Montes from Plaza San Francisco towards the highway to El Alto one recent early afternoon, I came across gradually larger groups of school-age children in impressively consistent uniforms. My best guess was that La Paz’s Escuela Militar del Ejército had just finished another school day, but what struck me most was that these groups of young people were large enough to make passing—on the largest boulevard I’d seen since arriving in Bolivia—difficult, and they just kept coming.
Bolivia has an overwhelmingly and disproportionately young populace. More than 4 million of the country's 10 million–strong population was 19 or younger in 2010, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE). In contrast, the UK's 2011 census found just 23.9 percent of its population in that same age bracket. Bolivian population trends are anomalistic within South America, too.
For example, only 27.7 percent of Colombia's population was 14 or younger in 2013 (compared with 35 percent in Bolivia), according to the United Nations’ “World Population Prospect”.
This poses an economic challenge for Bolivia: With an estimated 120,000 young people entering the labour market each year, the formal employment sector can only provide work for a third of them. At the same time, however, Bolivia's adult population continues to age, primarily as a result of a steadily increasing life expectancy. And with over half of Bolivians over 60 living in poverty, how can the working-age citizenry support even the minimal assistance offered by the state to this vulnerable group of people? Can the Bolivian government cope as the composition of its population increasingly means too few opportunities for those who can work, an increased need for quality education, and an increasing commitment to its older citizens?
In December 2010, President Evo Morales introduced a new pension scheme for Bolivians. This not only reduced the retirement age from 65 to 58 (and to 55 for women with three or more living children), but also promised those who are informally self-employed (who account for 60 percent of the Bolivian workforce) the opportunity to invest in the state pension. This goes against current global trends of raising retirement ages and restricting state pensions. Indeed, it was met with much criticism by those who said the policy was unsustainable.
Government officials justified the policy by explaining that the harsh nature of much Bolivian employment means people are less able to work as they grow older. Ministers also defended the move by highlighting Bolivia's relatively low average life expectancy of 66.9 years (65.1 for men and 69.2 for women, according to the World Health Organisation), arguing that a lower retirement age therefore makes sense. But with the World Bank predicting an average Bolivian lifespan of over 70 years by 2020, will the policy prove a strain on the country’s economy?
Patricia Urquieta, a researcher at CIDES—a research division of the San Andrés University that specialises in development sciences—told Bolivian Express that the elderly population is not entirely dependent: ‘The older adult population is not passive—they fulfil many functions.’
For example, Urqueta highlighted the way in which many grandparents, in addition to working in small stores, provide childcare for their grandchildren. In this way, they provide much needed services for the working-age members of the family, allowing them to work and, as is sometimes necessary, travel to do so. Though the ageing population has this integral social role, it doesn’t obviate the state’s need to provide assistance to the elderly.
Photo: Michael Dunn
In a recent interview with El Sol de Santa Cruz, the director of Renacer—a charity that promotes the interests of the elderly in Bolivia—proclaimed that ‘Santa Cruz needs a geriatric hospital.’ It is perhaps the provision and extension of these sorts of supportive infrastructures and facilities that future governments must prioritise in order to ensure the health and security of the growing elderly population.
Further complicating the issue, ageing does not take place homogeneously across the country. There is a key distinction to be made between a ‘biologically ageing’ population, one whose average age is increasing, and a ‘socially and demographically ageing’ population, one in which social trends begin to parallel such biological divisions. In an interview with BX, René Pereira, the director of San Andrés University's social sciences faculty, spoke of the way in which the dominant young population is migrating in large numbers to cities and leaving behind concentrated rural areas of the elderly, what he calls ‘the most vulnerable population’. This is something future governments must acknowledge, said Pereira—populations of elderly people without access to any kind of insurance or familial support.
For future governments, Pereira recommends a strong focus on education. ‘Bolivia must diversify’, he said, and the best future policies should focus on ‘productive transformation’, which will allow the country to become more prosperous. This, according to Pereira, is how the government can best accommodate the two-thirds of 120,000 young people new to the labour force and without work each year.
Indeed, Urqueta said that ‘a great challenge for future governments is the formation of policies that are more productive of work’, and providing education that prepares people for work. However challenging the composition of Bolivia's population may be, Urqueta reaffirmed that 'this is an entirely positive thing'. Such a large working-age population, augmented with workplace training and education, can surely be a good thing.
