What COVID-19 Meant for Wild San Pedro
Volume 3 | 8 July 2021
What COVID-19 Meant for Wild San Pedro
With international flights canceled and all types of gatherings prohibited, San Pedro tourism in Peru has been all but nonexistent for the last year, leaving curanderos and facilitators scrambling to find other ways to put food on the table.
The fact that few people were holding ceremony and the export market was frozen was a godsend for wild San Pedro populations. It meant that the usual estimated harvest of at least 100 metric tons of wild plants annually simply…didn’t happen. Throughout Peru, people were remarking on the cactus bloom, which they hadn’t seen the likes of in two decades.
Investigating San Pedro in the markets of North Peru this year, we spotted a trend everywhere: vendors had large stored stocks of San Pedro cuttings (destined for the cookpots of Northern shamans), but they hadn’t sold any plants since the pandemic began in March 2020.
The plants were in bad shape. Crammed together without adequate ventilation, many of the cuttings were rotting in place. Stored for over a year in the dark, their heads were growing thin, white, and fragile. Peru is still in the trenches of COVID-19 as I write this, and half of these plants were already half-dead.
What is more, these very plants came from some of the most prized (and most threatened) populations of San Pedro in Peru. In the valleys and cliffs that the Salas variety of San Pedro comes from – places that were at one time forests of cactus – we found only a handful of plants surviving under the care of community members.
We saw an opportunity, and took it.
Josip traveled in June to Chiclayo, Trujillo, and Chimbote with one mission: to save as many plants from the markets as his time and our budget allowed. With the help of our co-founder Felipe Pereda and old friends Beto and Manuel, Josip purchased 344 individual plants and transported them to Casa Mullu in Chaclacayo, Lima.
When the heads of San Pedro are cooked, their story ends there and then. Northern curanderos buy the plants they need from the market, cook them, and serve them to their patients. Most have never questioned this practice, because until recently, there has been enough wild San Pedro to cover their needs.
Exploding urban populations coupled with more outside interest in San Pedro means this is no longer the case. When we ask market vendors about the Salas San Pedro, they shake their heads sadly.
No hay, ya no traen más. There isn’t any. They aren’t bringing the plants to market anymore.
The 344 San Pedros that Josip brought back to Lima will not be cooked – they will be planted. And they will be in good company: at Casa Mullu Chaclacayo, there are at least 4,000 individual heads of San Pedro, a mix of varieties from all over Peru. This land (where Josip was born and raised) has been a sanctuary for the plants for twenty years.
These new Salas plants are soaking up the sun and acclimating to their environment while their new bed is prepared with compost and sand. Once in the ground, they will take around seven years to surpass head-height, sprout new arms, and start to fall naturally from their own weight (and from our cats using them as jungle gyms).
In seven years, we will begin to cook them and work with them as medicine, always re-planting their heads.
In seven years, we will take the first of the fallen heads back to North Peru and collaborate with their communities of origin to re-forest their lands with endemic San Pedro.
Which, in the end, is what it’s all about.
Love,
Laurel
Above are some 10+-year-old plants from Arequipa at Casa Mullu Chaclacayo... let's root for the 344 new babies going in the ground this year!
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