Throughout history, humanity has interested in different resources. Maybe the Gold fever It is the best example to see how the obsession with a specific one unleashes the madness in those who seek to make it its main source of income, arramping with everything they find without thinking that it can be bread for today, and hunger for tomorrow. With the case of gold it is logical, but … Did you know that something very similar happened with excrements of sea birds?
This is the story of the guano, the ‘white gold’ that transformed the Peruvian economy for both better and bad.
White gold. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a man with a lot of free time. Born in 1769, this German was a philosopher, scientist, geographer, naturalist and explorer, among other things. During a trip through South America in 1802, Humboldt He visited the Peruvian coast and was interested in how the premises used a white element as substratum For crops. His name was Guano, and it was the result of the dry excrements of sea birds.
HE says That, walking through an area where there was a lot of stored guano, he began to sneeze out of control, and it was his curiosity that encouraged him to send samples to Europe to study his components. What happened next is not something that caught us by surprise at this point: pre -Columbian civilizations were generations using the substrate, Europeans found that the guano was a magnificent fertilizer and began to be interested in him.
Pass. The guano is literally fertilizer. His own name “Wánu” in Quechua means “fertilizer”, and really had a unique composition to enrich soils. This guano was a wonderful result of the conditions of the area. The mixture between the dry climate of the Peruvian and Chilean Islands, the composition of the rocks on which they fell and the excrement fruit of the marine diet of the birds resulted in a compound Rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium and potassium.
It was ideal for improving the health of plants and promoting their growth, so European and American farmers began to pay close attention to the substrate. The reason? The increase in the population was causing an overexploitation of the fields, which led to its exhaustion and a series of unsuccessful crops. You had to find a miraculous solution, and the guano had all the ballots to be that solution.
Peanut mine. The two territories began to exploit the resource based on good. Between 1840 and 1880, the demand for the guano exploded and the Peruvian islands became a very precious good. The United States and the ‘Old Continent’ carried dozens of ships with this white gold and Peru came nothing wrong. In those 40 years, Peru exploded about 11 million tons of guano, with estimated revenues of about 38 million dollars.
That decontextualized amount may not tell us too much, but the guano’s income allowed the country to develop with ports, railways and roads. Not surprisingly, the first year of exploitation of the guano, the appeal contributed 5% of the income to the country. Facing the last decade of Bonanza, that input It was 80%. A real barbarity.
The “Guano War”. It was so popular that the United States, to anyone’s surprise, believe The Guano Law of 1856, for which any American citizen could claim uninhabited islands that had guano deposits. This led to the private appropriation of a hundred of islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, but the thing became serious between 1879 and 1884.
It was when the “Guano War”, A conflict between Peru, Chile and Bolivia for the control of the richest deposits of both Guano and Salitre. As a result, Chile attached some very important enclaves, such as the Atacama desert (which today is one of its wonders for the production of renewable energy), and things for Peru began to change course.
Interestingly, the nations that entered that war had been allied against Spain, where guano control was also an important point in the Hispanic-Sudamerican War.
To produce, beautiful
And crisis. Peru focused so much on the export of the guano that, when the fever sent at the end of the 19th century, the country entered In an economic crisis. It is not that the world stopped wanting Guano, since it was still a very precious resource, but there were two reasons that led the main buyers of the substrate to look the other way. The first was that the reserves began to exhaust and the rate of production could no longer be maintained.
The second was that synthetic fertilizers began to appear that could be more or less efficient, but above all they were cheaper because they did not have to bring them through dangerous crossings of thousands of kilometers by boat. The lesson in the Peruvian economy was that they could not focus on a single resource and its economy could not depend From something like that, which highlighted the need to diversify to avoid similar situations in the future.
Present. Now, the Guano is still an excellent fertilizer and not only produces the Pacific Sea Birds. The bat guano also has fantastic properties such as fertilizer (in addition to being easier to obtain). And the resulting of the excrement of seals and penguins is also highly valued, but also a very expensive resource because the populations are diminishing.
In the end, the Guano played an important role not only in the economy of the countries involved, but at the beginning of the modernization of agriculture, by stimulating investment in fertilizers and, when they began to scarce, to the development of artificial fertilizers.
The cycle is repeated. On the other hand, it was One more example How from the Old Continent exploited the resources of Latin America, using local labor under conditions of almost slavery for the benefit of the stranger.
And, writing these lines, it is impossible not to draw parallelism with the Rare earth At present, where most of the production It depends on a single country -china- With the rest of the West as crazy looking for resources, and a United States with an eye on Ukraine and Greenland due, precisely, to these rare earths.
Vital. Apart from the economic consequences, the indiscriminate ‘harvest’ of Guano has caused the colonization of remote islands that were only inhabited by birds and the loss of the guano causes the disappearance of dozens of species that depend, directly, on the substrate. It is its food and, for example, there are fish ecosystems, bacteria, fungi and invertebrates that depend on it.
Now this balance is something that is taken into account when collecting the guano (and other resources), but in the time of maximum exploitation, it must have been one of the latest variables to consider.
Images | Acatenazzi, SANCHEZN, Putneymark
In Xataka | The new “gold fever” is under the Atlantic. And we have let the perfect opportunity to regulate it