Coping with Uncertain Times: Farmers, the Pandemic, and Climate Change in Galapagos

By Julio Rodríguez Stimson (Anthropology PhD candidate), University of Oxford

"Without a vision of the future, the present becomes hollow," uttered a distraught Galapagos resident during the ongoing pandemic. Worldwide, we have all been thrown into a state of collective shock and uncertainty. On our globalized planet, even a remote archipelago like the Galapagos Islands has experienced over a thousand cases of COVID-19, resulting in a collapsed tourist industry. Although climate change is also a risk, it doesn’t appear that many people are actually worried about it because the economic hardships created by COVID-19 and people’s fears of contagion have eclipsed all other concerns.

The world-famous Galapagos Islands have drawn visitors due to their emblematic species seen in Attenborough documentaries and due to Charles Darwin’s historic visit in 1835, which inspired his theory of evolution by natural selection. Surprisingly, most people I speak to internationally do not know that the archipelago hosts a resident population of over 25,000 people. These ‘invisible people’ are now being harmed by a seemingly invisible threat and generally there is a sense of abandonment by both public and private institutions. The pandemic struck the population like a bomb shell, creating ghost towns out of what used to be a bustling tourist industry, with over 270,000 tourists visiting in 2019.

I arrived on the Island of Santa Cruz in mid-September 2020 as an Anthropology DPhil student from the University of Oxford in order to study how locals perceive, understand, and respond to ‘climate change’. Despite the challenges of conducting social research in a time of ‘social distancing’, I have found that most people in Galapagos (and especially farmers) are willing to discuss their present hardships. Although I have only just begun my year of fieldwork, here are seven initial observations that I have made from interviewing 77 individuals:

1.     Farmers are definitely aware that the climate is changing, has become more unpredictable, and is causing difficulty with growing crops. However, when asked specifically about the concept of ‘climate change’, there is less of an understanding of the greenhouse effect, as people speak about the hole in the ozone layer, plastic pollution, local deforestation in the agricultural zone, or speculations that the Earth’s poles have shifted.

2.     For years the local population has experienced dry conditions that are remedied by water tankers brought from the port town of Puerto Ayora to the highlands. In other words, money can solve the issue of water scarcity. For large-scale farmers, this isn’t much of a concern, but many smaller producers (or poorer families) will be unable to afford water if the drought hits during the present COVID-induced economic crisis. In other words, COVID-19 accentuates inequality.

3.     Ever since a strong drought in 2016 that destroyed crops and killed hundreds of cows on the island, this recent memory has led people to be a little more forward-thinking in the use of cisterns and geomembranes to accumulate water in the rainy season. Nevertheless, most locals admit that they are short-term thinkers and aren’t entirely prepared for another drought. Since 2021 is predicted to be a ‘La Niña’ year, some are concerned about another severe drought like that in 2016. Many farmers experienced bountiful crops in 2020, so they are mainly worried about being unable to sell their produce under the current lack of demand caused by the pandemic.

4.     Invasive species have been a long-standing worry for farmers and this hasn’t changed during the pandemic. Every year, new pests (insects, plants, fungal pathogens, etc.) arrive in the islands and affect their crops. With one or two exceptions, every farmer I spoke to uses pesticides to some degree, a practice they are becoming more and more reliant on despite trying to avoid putting too many toxins into the soil. Although some invasive species in Galapagos (rats, goats, guava) have a long history, most farmers recall only having big problems with invasive species in the last decade or less. In addition to more introductions of species, it has been suggested by Larrea and Di Carlo (2011) that invasive species will spread more rapidly in Galapagos due to climate change.

5.     So far, my participants have laid the blame squarely on the Ecuadorian government and financial institutions for not providing sufficient support during the pandemic: they request a debt moratorium and access to credit, but it is either too bureaucratic or out of reach for people without collateral. However, as one participant highlighted, the government is also going bankrupt, so they don’t expect to see any support. Generally, the sentiment here is one of total neglect by public institutions, which has only been offset due to people’s solidarity during the worst times of the pandemic: fishermen distributed food in the highlands and multiple private grassroots entities and NGOs have been distributing food baskets to those most in need. The government has also been providing some financial and nutritional support, but people complain that it’s too little and hasn’t reached the majority of the population.

6.     The pandemic has altered socio-economic relations. On Facebook, numerous barter pages have emerged and become quite popular due to the lack of financial liquidity. Those with access to land, including a number of currently unemployed naturalist guides, have been very active in growing crops during the pandemic. In response to this, farmers say they finally feel their work is appreciated even though the price of goods has dropped and their income is lower. They are satisfied that people are learning how hard it is to grow food in Galapagos due to invasive species, the unpredictable climate, and the thin topsoil covering the lava rock.

7.     For many of the older residents, the pandemic has brought back aspects of the old days – barter, a stronger sense of community, fewer people due to the outflow of recent migrants, less reliance on the mainland, etc. This ‘blast from the past’ is different from earlier times in many ways: Galapagos is still highly interconnected with the globalized planet, and despite the return of barter, people are much more individualistic and money-oriented ever since tourism began in the 1970s (which also coincided with the birth of neoliberalism under Richard Nixon). Despite some hopes that the tourist industry will become more inclusive of locals and money will be distributed more equally, a lot of people would simply prefer a return to the old economic system in order to put an end to the worst crisis Galapagos has experienced in historical memory (there are only three generations of locals in the oldest of Galapagos’ families, since back in 1950 there were approximately only a thousand residents).

 Since Galapagos is famous for having inspired Charles Darwin, it seems appropriate that many of the locals refer to the need to ‘adapt’ or ‘evolve’ in order to confront present hardships. Entrepreneurship is thriving and as 2020 came to an end a surge of local Ecuadorian tourists sparked new hope for the archipelago. As the weather shifted from a cold, cloudy and rainy season to the dry and hot season just after Christmas, I am still left wondering what is in store for the upcoming year and how COVID-19 may accentuate problems if the rain doesn’t come.

References

Larrea,  I.  &  Di Carlo,  G. (2011). Climate  change  vulnerability  assessment  of  the Galápagos Islands. Quito: WWF and Conservation International.

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This DPhil project is funded by the Frederick Soddy Postgraduate Award (Royal Geographical Society) and the SAME Doctoral Scholarship (University of Oxford).

* Please note that this commentary (written in January 2021) is based on first impressions of my ongoing year-long research. I have refrained from a thorough academic process for the sake of making my perspective available in the midst of the ongoing pandemic.*