BOLIVIA-PERU: Major Efforts Still Needed to Clean Up Lake Titicaca

•  la paz
• Friday, July 08, 2011
• Inter Press Service

At 3,810 meters above sea level, Lake Titicaca is the highest commercially navigable lake in the world. It has a total surface area of 8,562 square kilometers, of which 3,790 lie on the Bolivian side of the border and 4,772 are in Peru.

Its deep blue waters are a source of livelihoods for 400,000 people who make a living from fishing, harvesting its vegetation for use as livestock feed, and building boats from the totora reeds that grow in the lake, using techniques that date back to pre-Columbian times. But the inhabitants of the Puno region in southeastern Peru are deeply concerned by the current state of the lake’s waters.

In May, Aymara indigenous communities in the region staged a two-week roadblock on the international highway used to transport Bolivian export goods through Peru to the Pacific Ocean. The roadblock was aimed at protesting new mining concessions that could lead to even further contamination of Lake Titicaca, which already receives the waste effluents of six Peruvian gold and uranium mines.

'There is insufficient treatment of wastewater and the capacity of the plants (to purify it) has been surpassed due to population growth,' technical specialist Javier Bojorquez told Tierramérica. Bojorquez heads up a water quality control project that has been carried out since 2009 by the Peruvian non-governmental organisation Suma Quta (which means 'Good Lake' in the Aymara language).

With the participation of the local population, the project monitors the waters of the Ramis and Coata Rivers, which flow into Lake Titicaca, identifies contaminants, and designs strategies to eliminate or reduce them at their sources. Laboratory studies have detected fecal waste with a high presence of the Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacterium.

On the other side of the border, Bolivian fishermen Roberto Villcacuti and Ricardo Chasqui declared almost in unison that there are no efforts being made to clean up the lake’s waters. The two men are leaders of Aymara communities in the provinces of Camacho and Los Andes, in the western Bolivian department of La Paz, where they make a living from fishing and harvesting forage plants from Lake Titicaca.

The lake’s water is 'dark, gelatinous and full of oxide residues' which pose a lethal threat to the fish that live there, they told Tierramérica. They believe that the source of the toxic waste and mineral residues is the Suches River, which springs from a lagoon in Peru and flows south into Lake Titicaca.

The decline in fish stocks has been dramatic, said Valentín Calisaya, a 69-year-old fisherman from Camacho. He remembers a time, three decades ago, when he could cast his nets overnight and harvest as many as 40 kilograms of the fish known locally as karachi (of the genus Orestias). Today, over the course of two nights the nets yield barely 10 fish. 'The lake has changed, the climate and the people too,' Calisaya commented to Tierramérica.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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