ABSTRACT
One of the most important contemporary impacts of the global heating crisis for agricultural communities has been a dramatic change in weather predictability. In the Colca Valley, a rural region in the southern Peruvian Andes, agriculture is essential both for active subsistence farming and as part of a once-bustling market economy in quinoa, fava bean, barley, and potato cash crops. In recent testimonies, Colca villagers primarily engaged in agricultural labor describe destabilizing changes to the agricultural calendar, with particular concern about the unpredictable rainy season. This chapter compiles local observations of altered seasonality and argues that climate change exposes the broken promises of small-scale market-based agriculture. This emerging disappointment is becoming clear after decades of development projects that promoted cash crop markets as a dependable source of resilient prosperity built on a predictable agricultural calendar. In attending to how this broken promise compounds the challenge of the newly unpredictable changes to agricultural timing, the chapter reads climate observations from Colca Valley residents as local articulations of environmental injustice. Agriculturalists’ observations of altered seasonality demonstrate how climate-related damage colludes with other marginalizing forces in ways that intensify the unjust burdens of reimagining rural livelihoods.
