Peru: The Backyard Farmers Who Grow Food With Fog
In one of the world’s driest cities, an ingenious system channels water from the air to those who need it most.
By: Peter Yeung & Melanie Pérez Arias
Reasons to be Cheerful
September 18, 2023
Excerpts:
In June, the project received a significant boost when it signed an agreement with the Mayor of Lima to install 10,000 more fog catchers in the hills surrounding the city in the next four years. The municipality, which relies heavily on water desalination, said the project has the potential to “reforest, create ecological lungs, ecotourism and at the same time provide water for human consumption, for bio-orchards, botanical gardens, washing clothes, utensils and more.”
In Los Tres Miradores, the 40 fog catchers — which were installed in 2021 — provide enough water for 180 families, whether to bathe, clean, drink (after being filtered at home) or to irrigate crops on small garden patches. The nonprofit provided the materials for free, and the community put together the infrastructure themselves.
The fog catchers go some way toward addressing the grim inequalities of water supply in Peru. In Los Tres Miradores, a typical family consumes about 50 liters of water per day, according to Cruz, while the average water consumption in Lima’s richest neighborhood, San Isidro, is around 250 liters per family per day. He says that those unfortunate enough to be outside of the remit of the city’s water utility, Sedapal, have to pay 10 times more for water that is instead delivered by trucks.
Proponents believe that fog catchers have the potential to improve water supply for communities around the world amid ever-challenging circumstances. The UN, which has targeted universal access to clean water by 2030, estimates that even though water use has become nine percent more efficient, the global urban population facing water scarcity is projected to rise from 930 million in 2016 to between 1.7 and 2.4 billion in 2050.
