Flooding caused by heavy rains in central Peru in March displaced hundreds of Indigenous families and destroyed their sustainable agroforestry projects, raising concerns about how they’ll recover and what steps need to be taken to protect against future extreme weather events. Heavy rains likely caused by El Niño began flooding the Ene River the first week of March, with waters reaching around 2 feet high and spreading across 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres) of land occupied by around 300 Indigenous Asháninka families. The flood destroyed their crops and forced them to relocate to nearby communities. It represents a major setback for an embattled Indigenous group that has managed to develop sustainable agroforestry projects and protect surrounding natural habitats. The flood destroyed around 300 Indigenous Asháninka families’ crops and forced them to relocate to nearby communities. Image courtesy of CARE. “Many of us have had our products affected, our crops,” said Ángel Pedro Valerio, resident of the Asháninka Central Indigenous Organization of the Ene River. “We have to start over again from scratch.” The Ene River, a tributary of the Amazon River, hadn’t flooded for nearly 16 years, catching the communities off guard despite the increasing frequency of extreme weather events caused by climate change and El Niño. Five Asháninka communities have been most affected. Many lost their homes as well as years of work on the agroforestry projects, which included cacao, coffee and timber, among other products. For more than a decade, their cooperative, Kemito Ene, has been working with the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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