| Georg Ismar |
ORURO, Bolivia (dpa) – At first sight, it’s picture-postcard perfect. Thousands of beautiful pink flamingos flock to Lake Uru Uru in Bolivia, where they stalk through the water on their long, thin legs.
But as you climb out of the jeep and approach the edge of the lake, you can’t miss the underlying reality. What visitors are seeing is an ecological disaster in progress.
There’s a terrible stench in the air and there’s hardly any water in this lake.
The flamingos are wading through mounds of plastic rubbish.
And many of them are only there because an even worse ecological disaster has taken place just 60 kilometres away.
Lake Poopo, Bolivia’s second-largest lake and once one of the biggest in South America, has essentially disappeared. It just evaporated. Uru Uru is not looking too healthy either.
Farmer Juan Iquina tries to catch fish in an irrigation channel, which farmers have diverted from the Rio Desaguadero river, near the village of Eucaliptus, Bolivia, in this file photo from January 23. Due to water shortages in the highlands of Bolivia, farmers are building ever more channels, depriving the river of water
Flamingos wade in what is left of Lake Uru Uru in Oruro, Bolivia, January 23. Due to Lago Poopo 60 kilometres away drying up, many have migrated here permanently, but the lagoon is polluted and the flamingos are facing an ecological catastrophe if this lake goes too. PHOTOS: DPA
In this file photo, a boat lies in the dried-up bed of Lago Poopo in Bolivia, January 23
Nasa recently published two pictures, one from 2013, showing a lake of azure waters, and a second, from 2016, showing Poopo’s dried-out salt bed.
The lake once spread over 3,000 square kilometres and supported the livelihoods of dozens of indigenous communities who fished in its waters.
Though it has dried out in the past only to reappear, in 1994 for example, scientists don’t believe that will happen again this time.
As you drive along the Rio Desaguadero, the lake’s main tributary, which flows from Lake Titicaca, the biggest lake in South America, you discover some of the reasons why.
While the river is still a red, roaring gush at the village of Eucaliptus, there are lots of silver and ore mines which have diverted the water.
Farmers have also begun to build irrigation canals to divert the water for their crops of quinoa, potatoes and alfalfa.
“We only have around a tenth of the rainfall that we’ve had in other years,” says Juan Iquina, who sits by a small canal trying to catch the red-coloured fish that swim in the red-coloured water.
“There’s lots of these canals, we just build them. We don’t need any approval,” says Iquina.
“The alternative is not having anything else to eat.”
The indigenous people, who’ve been living up here at an altitude of 3,700 metres for hundreds of years, know keenly how global warming and the El Nino weather phenomenon affect their lives.
There’s currently no prospect of any rain to refill Lake Poopo.
“There’s a clear link to climate change,” says Raul Perez Albrecht, country head of the environmental network Red Latinoamericano Ambiental.
Rainfall has decreased drastically he says, and the average temperature here in southwest Bolivia has climbed by 1.8 degrees Celsius since 1982.
Footprints in the dried-up bed of Lago Poopo in Bolivia. Before drying up, it was the second-largest lake in Bolivia. Hundreds of fishermen have lost their livelihoods and animals have lost their habitat
NASA’s photo from space of Lake Poopo in Bolivia, which has essentially dried out
“The process [of drying out] has been accelerated also because the lake always had a very limited depth,” he adds.
“If we’re lucky, we could perhaps save a third of Lake Poopo.”
Crisostomo Martinez, a 77-year-old quinoa farmer, stands by the edge of the Poopo, chewing coca leaves and trying not to worry about the future.
“It dries out every 12, 15 years in some places,” he says. “But this time it’s different.” And it’s a big problem for the farmers.
“We have much too little quinoa,” says Martinez.
In the village of Huari, the catastrophic effects of the evaporation of the lake are especially clear to see.
The jeep first passes by patchy quinoa fields and then suddenly the ground turns to clay crusted with salt, where nothing more grows.
It takes a moment to realize that the jeep is now driving over what was once Lake Poopo.
In the evening twilight, upturned fishing boats lie on the lake bed, while on the horizon the mountains are reflected in the last few pools of the lake, just centimetres deep.
The lake was once Severio Rios Choque’s livelihood. His house used to stand on the water’s edge and every morning the 56-year-old rowed out in his silver-coloured boat to catch the arroba fish, earning about 22 dollars a day from his catch.
Now the boat lies upturned in his garden and the children use it as a climbing frame.
“The lake’s been drying out for five years. Now there’s nothing left,” he says.
There are 90 fisherfolk families here who used to rely on the lake.
Now they only have state handouts of rice and pasta to eat.
If he could make one request of President Evo Morales, who was born nearby in a small clay hut, what would it be?
“An irrigation system so that we could turn our hands to farming. We’re hungry,” says Choque.
Everything has changed he says, and it seems to be irreversible. And there’s another thing he’s himself noticed. “All the flamingos, they’ve left.”
