Peru Turning to Armed Guards to Protect Precious Bird Shit

You may have heard of Peak Oil, but how about Peak Guano? Guano, otherwise known as bird shit, was once so much in demand that wars were fought over it. After synthetic fertilizer was invented, the industry nearly went extinct – but as organic fertilizers come back into vogue, officials in Peru are finding themselves needing to protect it again.

From The New York Times:

The worldwide boom in commodities has come to this: Even guano, the bird dung that was the focus of an imperialist scramble on the high seas in the 19th century, is in strong demand once again.

“Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it,” said Pablo Arriola, director of Proabonos, the state company that controls guano production, referring to conflicts like the Chincha Islands War, in which Peru prevented Spain from reasserting control over the guano islands. “Guano is a highly desirous enterprise.”

It is a minor miracle that any guano at all is available here today, reflecting a century-old effort hailed by biologists as a rare example of sustainable exploitation of a resource once so coveted that the United States authorized its citizens to take possession of islands or keys where guano was found.

Guano sells for $250 per ton, going up to $500 when it’s headed to countries like the U.S., France and Israel. While it’s highly prized as an organic fertilizer, it isn’t all rosy. The anchovies that the seabirds eat to produce the rich guano are being overfished, and the bird population is shrinking. Peru is working hard to protect the birds, going so far as to introduce lizards to hunt down ticks that infest the birds and posting armed guards to prevent fisherman from scaring them away. Where once 60 million seabirds flew overhead, there are now only about 4 million.

Peak Guano is coming, no doubt about it:

Uriel de la Torre, a biologist who specializes in conserving the guanay cormorant and other seabirds, said that unless some measure emerged to prevent overfishing, both the anchovetas and the seabirds here could die off by 2030.

“It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies,” Mr. de la Torre said. “But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.”

Link [The New York Times] via [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times

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