Bolivia: Land Of Poverty, Hope

Mary Losure, Contributing Writer

Ever since Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, took office a year ago, he has promised to raise the standard of living for people in the poorest country in South America.

Many Bolivians take that promise seriously; in a country with an indigenous majority, Morales is an Aymara Indian -- the first indigenous president Bolivia has ever had. The landslide vote for the left-leaning Morales was widely seen as a call for change and a sign of the need to solve many of the country's long-entrenched problems.

A look at everyday life in Bolivia shows how difficult that may be. It's a place where things work differently, nothing is predictable and the future is up for grabs.

Bottom-Up Economy

They call it Bolivia's Wal-Mart; the vast open-air market, said to be one of the largest in South America, sprawls for blocks in the central Bolivian town of Cochabamba.

Running shoes dangle from strings next to booths crammed with cell phones. Indigenous women wearing broad-brimmed straw hats and velveteen skirts sell piles of pineapples and mangos laid out on clothes on the sidewalk. Amid the rumble of brightly painted buses and the honking of car horns, booths offer everything from soccer balls and luggage to Andean potatoes, coca leaves, incense and dried llama fetuses.

Like Wal-Mart, this market, known as the Cancha, sells an immense variety of goods to low-income consumers. But if Wal-Mart is the poster child for a top-down, centrally organized, tightly controlled business model, the Cancha is just the opposite. It's a bottom-up, catch-as-catch-can, anything-goes style of doing business, and it's typical of a vast section of Bolivia's economy.

Like some 70 percent of Bolivia's businesses, most of these booths are unregistered and pay little or no taxes. Pablo Artero, who as the head of Cochabamba's equivalent of a Chamber of Commerce represents the 30 percent of "formal" businesses that do pay taxes, jokes that he's sometimes tempted to go over to the other side.

"I'd be better off. ... I'm losing here," he says.

Artero's company, a manufacturer of metal products, employs 150 people, paying them on-the-record, taxable salaries, but he says most of his competition does not.

"You have to live with it," he says. "What can you do?"

Artero and other owners of established businesses say many of the goods in the Cancha are contraband, smuggled over Bolivia's borders to avoid paying the high tariffs the country levels on imports. There's even a section known as the "thieves market," where people go to buy stolen goods or to search for their own stolen belongings.

Yet without street markets, Bolivia's poor would have little access to food and consumer goods they could afford. Since formal businesses have little interest in marketing to the average consumer in a country with a per capita income of just over $1,000, street vendors are "meeting a very real need in the economy," says William Glade, an economist at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. "It's a kind of second-best solution."

It's also a solution that provides no social safety net for its workers. Jorge Gutierrez and his wife run a juice, soft drink and pastry stand they opened 18 years ago after losing their jobs with an American company when it left Bolivia.

"We couldn't find work," he says. "People said, 'We can't get jobs. Our only choice is to start our own.'"

By noon, when the morning rush is over, Gutierrez stands behind the counter in the 10-by-10-foot stand amid a welter of empty pop bottles and dirty glasses. They've been able to send their three sons to college on profits from the stand, but now they face an uncertain future.

"We're concerned, my wife and I, because as we get older we don't have retirement or social security. We're worried about that," he says. "Thousands of people are in the same situation."

Gutierrez says his business holds steady from year to year, neither improving in good economic times nor declining in bad ones.

"We don't really feel a difference," he says. "Everybody eats. That doesn't change."

Water Is Life

His feet shod in dusty sandals, Germán Sandóvol scrambles down the rocky slope past thorn bushes, cactus plants and bleached desert grasses. The landscape looks like California in the days before vast stretches of it turned green with the coming of irrigation projects. Sandóvol dreams of a similar transformation for his small village.

A small hole marked by red plastic sheeting held down by stones marks the spot where he hopes one end of a dam will be built. Pulling a slingshot from his pocket, he shoots a stone across the canyon to show where the other end would go. Then he talks about what the water, stored behind the dam and released through small cement-lined channels to the patchwork of small fields below, would mean for the villagers.

They could grow cereals, vegetables and fruit, he says, his voice filled with longing. They could raise dairy cows and sell milk.

"Now we wait for the rain and it comes in December. Two months later, it's dry." He bends down and demonstrates the height of the corn the villagers grow in their un-irrigated fields. With his hand, he shows the crop getting taller and taller till it's about 3 feet high. "Then it dies," he says.

The dam Sandóvol is hoping for would be a project of a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization, Mano a Mano, which is considering several different sites for small-scale water projects. After Mano a Mano officials visit the canyon above Sandóvol's adobe-walled village, Choquechampi, village leaders offer them a meal of lima beans, potatoes and guinea pig, hoping that will cement the deal.

"Everyone wants water," sighs Mano a Mano President Segundo Velasquez. "Water is life."

Tens of thousands of small farmers in this area, the valley region around the city of Cochabamba, are in the same situation: struggling to make parched land produce enough to live on. For these farmers, water can make the difference between poverty and relative prosperity, says Julio Alem, former director CIDRE, a Bolivian nonprofit organization working on irrigation and rural development issues.

"There are enormous possibilities," he says.

Alem's organization works with banks to make small loans to peasant farmers to drill wells and install irrigation systems. He says of the 120 loans they have made over the past 15 years, all have been paid back.

"All of these small projects are working," he says. "The results are clear ... we've never lost a loan."

In one project, farmers growing irrigated peaches are earning $12,000 a year on their tiny plots -- a fortune for a peasant farmer in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in South America.

But such stories are still a rarity here. Figures from the Bolivian Ministry of Agriculture show that in the Cochabamba valley region, only 12 percent of the land is irrigated. That leaves out some 200,000 peasant farmers, each tilling dry plots averaging less than 3 acres, a tiny fraction of the size of an average American farm.

The obstacles between these small farmers and a source of reliable water are formidable.

The country's Byzantine land tenure laws make it impossible for farmers in this region to pay for irrigation systems by borrowing money against their land from private lenders. In addition, the aquifer under the growing city of Cochabamba is being drawn down as fast as it is recharging, so more wells would upset that balance.

"The situation is precarious," admits Alem.

Experts say it's unlikely that huge irrigation projects to transport water into the area -- projects such as the ones that made California's once-parched Central Valley flourish with fruits and vegetables -- will ever be built.

"Not in the foreseeable future," says Bruce Brower, a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development working on agricultural programs in Bolivia. "Around the world, large-scale irrigation projects are famous for falling apart."

Nearly half of Bolivia's population depends on subsistence farming, so the fate of its peasant farmers is key to the country's future.

"The solution in the long run is to have a developed economy," says Edgar Guardia, executive director of FDTA-Valles, an organization that oversees the funding of agriculture projects. He envisions a day when many Bolivian farmers will move to the cities and find work there, the way U.S. farmers did in the 1940s.

"That's the process of any developed country in the world. Bolivia shouldn't be an exception," he says. "But in the meantime, these people need to eat. And agriculture is the only thing they know."

Julio Alem dismisses the idea that Bolivia's peasant farmers will ever be able to find decent jobs in the country's cities.

"What can they do in the urban areas?" he asks. "They'll go to the USA. Or Spain. Or Italy."

"Fruits, vegetables, milk. That's the future of Cochabamba," he says. "If you have water, you can survive. If you don't have it, you immigrate."

Next Flight Out

Outside the wooden gates of the immigration office in Cochabamba, at the base of a dusty hill, hundreds of people wait patiently in the shade of the whitewashed wall that surrounds the building. They're hoping to immigrate not to United States, which requires them to have a visa to enter, but to Spain, which for the time being, anyway, does not.

Street vendors sell the crowd pastries and Coca-Cola. For a fee, an open-lawyer with a manual typewriter pounds out the letters needed to request a passport. Nearby, in a corrugated steel shack, you can get documents photocopied for 40 Bolivian centavos -- about 5 cents -- apiece.

Recently, as many as 15,000 Bolivians a month have been crowding flights to Spain, joining an estimated 200,000 of their compatriots. Many enter by passing as tourists; only about one-fourth of Bolivians living in Spain have work permits, according to the Bolivian newspaper Opinión.

A notice posted on the wall near the outdoor copy machine gives a number to call for jobs in Spain. Those who respond are offered a year's contract working at a restaurant outside of Madrid for more than $1,000 a month, a wage comparable to a professional salary in Bolivia.

Jorge Alfonzo, a carpenter wearing a neatly pressed shirt and dress pants, is gong to Spain to join his brother.

"There's not a lot of work here," he says, and in Bolivia, he makes only about $200 a month.

There are reports of Bolivians being turned back by immigration authorities in Spain, but that doesn't seem to deter Maxima Torres, a farmer from the Chapare, a rural area on the other side over the Andes from Cochabamba. She wears the traditional full skirt and long braids of indigenous women here, along with sandals and an apron. She plans to join her husband in Spain, leaving their four children behind with her mother in the Chapare.

She's nervous. She says softly, "I wonder what will happen."

Miriam Molina, 25, says she plans to stay in Spain for five years, and then return home. "We can see that things are improving," she says. "Life is getting better."

But Eduardo Gaurachi, a 29-year-old cashier, doubts his prospects here will improve any time soon. "The politicians just think about themselves, their families and their friends," he says.

Running On (Natural) Gas

Edgar Zambrana whips his taxi around the traffic roundabouts and winds his way through the honking streets of Cochabamba, a portrait of the Virgin gazing down on him from beside the rear-view mirror.

The fare for a taxi ride inside the central city is only five Bolivianos, about 60 cents, but these days, Zambrana's fuel costs are lower than they used to be. Like the vast majority of the taxi drivers serving this city of 800,000 people, he's converted his taxi to run on natural gas.

"Gasoline is expensive, twice as expensive as natural gas," Zambrana says.

A tank in the trunk holds the compressed natural gas, which is available at any service station. A control near the steering wheel lets him switch back and forth between natural gas and gasoline. Natural gas works better on the flat valley floor, but to climb the dry hills that surround the city, he uses gasoline.

Before he converted his taxi, it cost him 70 Bolivianos a day to run. Now it costs him 40.

Statistics in Bolivia can be hard to come by, but in interviews, taxi drivers and taxi companies in Cochabamba estimated that 90 percent or more of the city's taxi drivers have converted their taxis to natural gas. The conversion costs about $700 U.S.

Experts say when compared to gasoline, natural gas has a number of environmental and social benefits. In addition to being less expensive than gasoline, it burns cleaner, causing less air pollution. It also produces less of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

In the United States, substituting natural gas for gasoline in vehicles would reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil.

Right now, less than 1 percent of United State's more than 240 million vehicles run on natural gas, which raises the question: If struggling taxi drivers in the poorest country in South America can convert their cars to natural gas, why can't we?

Richard Kolodziej, president of NGVAmerica, a trade group pushing for natural gas vehicles, said the answer is complex, but for one thing, in South America, national leaders have made "a concentrated effort" to develop the vehicle market for natural gas to take advantage of abundant, cheap supplies. In the United States, there's been no comparable push.

The U.S. nationwide total of natural gas fueling stations is only 737 -- less than one for every 1,000 gas stations and convenience stores that sell gasoline. California, the nation's leader in natural gas for vehicles, has 175. Many states have only one or two. Iowa, a bastion of the rival corn-based alternative fuel ethanol, has none.

Only one model of natural gas-fueled passenger car, the Honda Civic GX, is currently available for sale in the United States, and it costs nearly $7,000 more than a standard gasoline-fueled model. In this country, a conversion kit to allow cars to run on either natural gas or gasoline costs about $5,000.

Kolodziej says the obstacles preventing widespread use of natural gas in passenger vehicles could be overcome if policy-makers here put their minds to it.

"If the federal government said, 'This is the answer,' I could give you a hundred good ideas as to how we could do it," he says.

For Bolivians, meanwhile, the use of the country's home-produced natural gas is a source of national pride. Bolivia's natural gas reserves are the second highest in all of Latin America.

"We don't buy it from any other country," says taxi driver Zambrana. "Natural gas is ours."

Mary Losure is the co-founder of Round Earth Productions, an independent production company that reports on Latin American issues for radio, print, and web distribution. Major funding for the project comes from the W.K.Kellogg Foundation. For more information please visit roundearthproductions.org.