mishqui-yacu, sweet water - IFAD

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There are branches and leaves everywhere hindering the flow; he
picks them all up. The canal fills with this debris every day. “Last
week I had to drag out a dead horse. It was very difficult”, says Don
Alfonso. After walking for a few kilometres, the first fields are
reached and Don Alfonso checks that the sluice gate is closed properly.
People up here are lucky due to the abundance of water.
Much further down, the dry fields close to Suscal’s graveyard are
found. Here the canal is nothing more than a dirty ditch, without
cement support and filled with dirt and trash. This is the tail of the
canal and it would have been filled with water if people higher up
had stuck to their quotas. Just a few hundred metres up, there is still
water running and people have, with the help of CARC and PROTOS,
constructed huge reservoirs and dressed the canal. Up there, several
tubes criss-cross the fields, illegally ending up in the canal. This is
the problem with irrigation canals. The less water there is, the more
eager people are to get it, and thus they happily exceed quotas and
steal water. There is not enough water down here anyway, as people
up in the mountains have taken more than they were allotted.
Social stratification is evident here. The people living by the
canal’s upper course are white and better off than the indigenous
people and mestizos living further down. The people at the bottom
work in the mingas higher up, which often leads to tension.
Another canal is being built in the lower parts of Cañar. This area
is mostly inhabited by poor mestizos, who have often worked as daylabourers
on the plantations in the Highlands and have moved down
to the dry lowlands in order to get some land of their own. Many of
these are seasonal workers in the cane fields or the huge banana
plantations near the coast. Luis Octavio Lema is the ‘master’ for the
construction of the new canal El Tormento. The building of the canal
is extremely complicated as it follows a steep mountainside consisting
mostly of fairly loose sand. It seems to be a dangerous job, clinging
to the cliff and pouring cement into the ditch of the unfinished
canal. The canal will take water to a village and will probably revive
agriculture there. Since the canal is quite short and destined for a
relatively homogenous group of people, there will probably be no
conflict surrounding this one.