Peruvian Guano

It is five in the afternoon and the sun is beginning to sink towards the horizon over Asia Island, off Peru’s central coast. Alexandre watches the Pacific from the old helipad built during Alberto Fujimori’s years in power. Presidential helicopters no longer land on its concrete platform. When I arrived on the island, two large canvas tents stood there instead, providing shelter for some of the men working during the guano extraction season.

Alexandre was twenty-six years old and had come from Áncash. He was what is known locally as a campañero: one of the temporary workers who spend weeks or months isolated on the guano islands of Peru, collecting, sifting, bagging and carrying the droppings accumulated over years by millions of seabirds. It was his first season, and he made no attempt to hide why he had come. “I get bored here. There’s nothing to do except work. I came for the money. Unlike other jobs that are just as hard, at least here they give you three meals a day and a bed, and the pay isn’t too bad,” he told me.

He had left home with a very specific purpose: to save enough money to continue his education. “I want to study. That’s why I’m here. I need to save to pay for university. I come from a very poor family. I’ve been lucky enough to get a basic education, but I want to become an architect, and I’m going to make it.”

From the helipad, the distance separating his reality from a completely different one could almost be measured with the naked eye. A few miles away, back on the mainland, stood the houses of Asia, one of the most exclusive beach resorts on the Peruvian coast. Alexandre pointed towards them as the sun disappeared over the sea. “You see those houses? That’s where the people with money in this country live. It’s humiliating to be sitting here fighting for an opportunity, risking our lives, while the people over there have everything and don’t even know we exist. That’s Peru, brother: some people have so much and others so little.”

That image somehow contained much of the history of Peruvian guano. On one side of the water stood a contemporary expression of wealth; on the other, a group of men manually extracting a substance that less than two centuries ago helped turn Peru into one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. Only a few miles of Pacific separated those two worlds, yet the social distance between them was far greater.

Guano seems an unlikely material to have played such an important role in history. It is essentially the accumulation, over many years, of the droppings of millions of seabirds on islands where it almost never rains. It is precisely this absence of rainfall that prevents nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from being washed away, leaving them extraordinarily concentrated and making Peruvian guano a remarkably rich organic fertiliser. Long before Europe understood its value, Andean societies were already aware of its ability to enrich the soil and had developed systems to protect and manage the islands where it accumulated.

Its existence depends on one of the most productive marine ecosystems on Earth. The cold waters associated with the Humboldt Current, together with the upwelling of nutrient-rich water along the Peruvian coast, sustain enormous populations of fish. The Peruvian anchoveta occupies a fundamental place within this food chain and is one of the main sources of food for the guanay cormorant, the Peruvian booby and the pelican, the country’s principal guano birds. The fertiliser that eventually reaches a coffee, potato or maize field hundreds of kilometres inland therefore begins its journey much earlier, in the waters of the Pacific.

In the mid-nineteenth century, this natural cycle became a global economic phenomenon. European agriculture needed to increase its productivity, and modern synthetic fertilisers did not yet exist. Peruvian guano emerged as something close to a miracle substance. From the 1840s onwards, ships carrying thousands of tonnes began sailing for Britain, France, the United States and other markets. Within a few decades, a material that had accumulated for generations on remote islands off the Peruvian coast had entered the heart of global agriculture.

Between approximately 1840 and 1880, Peru exported close to thirteen million tonnes of guano. During some years, revenues from the trade accounted for around eighty per cent of the country’s public income. Guano helped Peru service its foreign debt, regain access to international credit, finance the state, develop public infrastructure and build railways. For several decades, a considerable part of the country’s future rested quite literally on the droppings of its seabirds.

But that prosperity concealed a fundamental contradiction. Possessing an extraordinarily valuable natural resource did not necessarily mean being able to transform it into lasting development. The abundance of revenue also encouraged spending, borrowing and an increasing dependence on a resource that seemed inexhaustible. When the richest deposits began to decline, Peru discovered that much of its financial system had been built on the assumption that the boom would continue indefinitely.

There was another, less visible history behind that golden age. The fortune generated by guano physically depended on the men who dug it from the islands. During the great nineteenth-century boom, a significant part of this workforce consisted of Chinese labourers brought to Peru under contracts that in many cases subjected them to extreme exploitation. On the Chincha Islands, then the centre of the guano industry, men worked amid dust and ammonia, enduring long hours and brutal discipline.

More than a century and a half later, working conditions, labour rights and the organisation of the extraction seasons are very different. Yet something remarkable remains unchanged: guano extraction in Peru is still carried out largely by hand.

When a new season begins, workers temporarily occupy a territory that otherwise belongs almost entirely to the birds. The working day starts before dawn. Some men loosen the layers of accumulated guano with picks, shovels and brooms; others carry the material and pass it through large sieves to remove stones, feathers and other impurities before it is bagged. Extraction remains artisanal both because of the difficult terrain and because of the need to minimise disturbance to the bird colonies on which the resource itself depends.

When I arrived on Asia Island, the word artisanal took on a much more physical meaning. Hundreds of bodies occupied the cliffs from the early hours of the morning. The men worked among dust and birds on uneven ground that fell steeply towards the Pacific. The smell of bird droppings mixed with sweat made parts of the island difficult to endure. Some teams loosened the guano, others sifted and bagged it, while other men carried the loads across the rocks.

Felipe Chuquilla was one of them. He was around forty years old, came from Cajamarca and carried a sack weighing approximately fifty kilos across his back. He moved over slippery ground while, only a few steps away, the cliff dropped towards the sea. “I don’t know how many loads I’ve carried, but I can assure you it’s more than a hundred,” he told me.

Felipe had come to the island voluntarily, but he spoke about the work with a profound sense of vulnerability. “They make us work like slaves here. They don’t care about us. They treat us like animals. I never imagined it would be like this.” He knew he would probably not return the following year. The work was too hard and the risk too great, but he had a family to support. “Need makes you put up with this. If you’re poor in Peru, you’re worth nothing. I have to provide for my family and try to give my children a chance.”

His words belong to a particular moment and cannot automatically be used to describe every extraction season today. Since then, safety protocols, protective equipment and monitoring mechanisms have been strengthened. Yet the essential nature of the work remains recognisable: a labour-intensive activity carried out in isolated locations, on difficult terrain, using a process that has changed remarkably little over generations.

The future of guano, however, depends less on the men extracting it than on what happens several kilometres offshore. When I carried out this work, Edgar Rivera, who was responsible for supervising the island wardens, summed up the fragility of the system in a simple sentence: “Without food, there are no birds.” The birds need anchoveta, but anchoveta is also one of the foundations of Peru’s fishing industry. Maintaining a balance between fishing, conservation and guano extraction remains one of the fundamental challenges facing the entire system.

Populations of guano-producing birds have undergone enormous fluctuations over the past century. In the 1950s, they numbered more than twenty million; today their numbers are far lower. Their survival depends on multiple factors, ranging from the abundance and distribution of anchoveta and fishing pressure to pollution and, above all, major El Niño events. When surface waters warm and fish populations shift, birds must travel much farther in search of food, abandon breeding grounds and, during severe episodes, can die in enormous numbers.

At the end of 2022, another threat emerged. H5N1 avian influenza reached the Peruvian coast and spread rapidly through some of its major seabird colonies. During 2023, hundreds of thousands of dead birds were found along the coastline, including large numbers of guanay cormorants and Peruvian boobies. The disease also affected sea lions and other species, once again revealing the vulnerability of an industry entirely dependent on an ecosystem that human beings can attempt to manage but can never fully control.

Guano, after all, is not produced by the state or by the men who collect it. It is produced by the birds. Extraction seasons can be organised, workers can be hired, fertiliser can be bagged, transported and sold, but the complex natural balance that makes its existence possible cannot be manufactured.

Many of Peru’s guano islands, islets and coastal headlands now form part of a protected network extending along the country’s coastline. Island wardens monitor the colonies before, during and after extraction seasons, while harvesting is organised through rotation periods that allow bird populations to continue their reproductive cycles and new layers of guano to accumulate. Seabird conservation has therefore become inseparable from the survival of the industry itself.

Despite the industrialisation of agriculture and the existence of synthetic fertilisers that can be produced on an incomparably larger scale, Peruvian guano continues to be used. Thousands of tonnes are distributed each year to farmers across the country for crops including coffee, cacao, potatoes, maize, quinoa and fruit. Its economic significance bears little resemblance to that of the nineteenth century, but it retains a particular value within organic and family farming.

Perhaps this is where the most profound transformation has taken place. Guano is no longer the promise of limitless national wealth. It has returned to something closer to what it always was: an extraordinary natural resource whose existence depends on respecting the cycle that produces it.

When I remember Asia Island, however, I do not first think about nineteenth-century export figures or the tonnes of guano still extracted each year. I return to that sunset and to Alexandre sitting on Fujimori’s old helipad, looking towards the houses of Asia on the mainland. Two worlds separated by only a few miles of water and by a far greater social distance. Alexandre had come to the island to carry guano because he wanted to save enough money to study architecture.

Perhaps that scene explains the history of this resource better than anything else. For almost two centuries, guano has been connected to wealth, debt, international trade, agriculture, nature and power. For years it sustained the finances of a state and transformed apparently insignificant rocks in the Pacific into internationally coveted economic assets. Yet behind that entire history there has always been someone who had to collect it.

In the nineteenth century, those workers included the Chinese labourers of the Chincha Islands. More than 150 years later, guano workers still arrive from different regions of Peru to spend a season working on these rocks, breathing the dust and filling by hand the sacks that will eventually make their way to agricultural land across the country.

The history of Peruvian guano is therefore much more than the history of a fertiliser. It is also the story of a country’s extraordinary natural wealth and the enduring difficulty of managing it; of millions of birds whose survival depends on an extremely fragile oceanic balance; and of the men who continue to extract by hand what nature takes years to produce. Ultimately, it is the story of a contradiction that runs through much of Peru’s history: the enormous wealth contained within a territory set against the precarious lives of some of the people needed to turn that wealth into value.

As evening falls, the birds gradually reclaim the spaces they shared with the men during the day. The campañeros put down their tools and return to camp. Before sunrise they will go out again and the process will begin once more, in much the same way it has for generations. What has changed is our understanding of what is at stake, because the true wealth of these islands lies not only in the tonnes of guano accumulated on their rocks, but in the fragile natural and human balance that still allows it to form.