In the world’s highest tropical mountain range, the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, impacts linked to climatic change, increasing pressures on water resources, rapidly rising petroleum costs and shifting market conditions are threatening the viability of agricultural systems. Currently, these distinct processes of change are converging in ways that significantly enhance and reinforce their negative ...

Did foragers become farmers because cultivation of crops was simply a better way to make a living? If so, what is arguably the greatest ever revolution in human livelihoods is readily explained. To answer the question, I estimate the caloric returns per hour of labor devoted to foraging wild species and cultivating the cereals exploited by the first farmers, using data on foragers and land-abun...

In the definition by Kerr, 2002, watershed is “an area from which all the water drains to a common point”. There is therefore an interest in creating infrastructures that allow to store this water so that rain fed crops do not need to rely so heavily on the weather conditions, mainly in drought-prone regions. In rural areas where farming is the main livelihood, even slight variations in climate...