ABSTRACT
The fisheries of Lake Titicaca, located on the border between Peru and Bolivia, provide interesting case material to examine certain aspects of the position of peasants in relation to national economies and states. The three major development efforts around the lake have been failures. Fish canneries and the two types of trout aquaculture have all declined or closed entirely, after several years of operation at different times from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. This chapter examines these three cases in some detail. The projects show certain similarities; in particular, state agencies, private capital and peasant fishermen were involved in all three, though in different combinations. To alleviate trout feeding problems, various trout producers successfully followed the lead of Altipesca in using ground ispi, a small pelagic species native to the lake. The failures of the trout farms and cages were tied to problems of infrastructure, including inadequate support structures and marketing problems.
