Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. So there's this video I want to tell you about. It's from a high end Italian garment company called Loro Piano, and it's set to this ethereal music and it shows the softly lit, dramatic footage of the Andes Mountains. The goal is to give an impression of how the company sources and processes its most valuable material, the wool of a wild lama like creature called the vicunya. You see them running free
in the video. You hear the faint sound of hoofs beating against dry mountain soil, and you see shots of indigenous communities who have lived with the vicuna since the days of the Incas the company, Loro Piano doesn't say anything in the video. In fact, there's no dialogue at all, and as my colleague Marcelo rosche Brun, Bloomberg's Lima bureau chief, told me, that's part of the company's appeal.
What Lorda Piano is known for is that they make what is now known as quiet luxury. That is, garments that are really expensive, really looks serious, but they don't necessarily look that shiny, or they don't necessarily look that different than any other garment you might have. It's sort of a very subtle if you know, you know, this is very expensive.
The brand is known for these kinds of understated, high quality items. A pair of their cashmere sweatpants will run you about three grand. Kendall roy Or a logo list loro piano baseball cap on the TV show Succession, and the sweaters they make from the wool of the galloping Vikunyas in the video have price tags upwards of nine thousand dollars. But intertwined with its quiet luxury are the fates of some of the poorest communities in Peru.
Viquinyas live very high. They can live at twelve thousand feet. Indigenous communities that live in the end is at twelve thousand feet and to be very poor. There has to be a big contrast here between the wealth of the people who live near Vicunas and the people who get to wear Vicuna garnments. What happens if I actually follow this connection? What would I find today?
On the show? An Italian fashion company, a once endangered South American species, a remote Andean community, and a plan that was supposed to help them all prosper and why thirty years later it hasn't exactly worked out that way. I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. Getting close enough to catch and share of acunya is not easy.
They are way faster than a human.
It's a process indigenous communities have been refining since the days of the Incan Empire.
So indigenous communities will usually share vicunyas once a year, and so they called this a chaku, which is a ketcher where that has been in use for centuries.
Marcelo made the ten hour trip from Lima to Lucanas, a town in the southern Andanties, to see a chaku up close.
We actually walked all these miles in this part of Peru, which is called Pampa Galleas, which is a national reserve dedicated to the Vicunyans, and it is at about twelve thousand feet and it is really intense work to be able to walk miles and miles closing in on Vicunyans at this altitude. I don't know how easy it is to picture this, but it's a huge triangle with miles in length, and you carry a rope or a fence
and you start closing in on the animals. You are surrounding their territory from far away, a distance enough that vicunyas will initially not realize that they are being encircled. But that is what is happening here, just making the circle or this triangle smaller and smaller as you go. So what you see is that as humans are walking in in one direction, the viquinas were just running in the other there and what's on the other side is a cage, so they will just walk into there and be trapped.
And once they get to the cage, workers are waiting for them. I asked Marcelo whether he had touched a vacunya.
I have touched a vikunya. I don't think the viqunya enjoyed it. But they are so soft, they're so fluffy. It feels like you're touching a cloud, like and I know that nobody knows what. Yeah, you cannot touch a cloud, but it's just in my head. It's like the idea of what it would feel if you could touch a cloud.
It takes a small group of people to share a vacunya. One to grab the head and one to grab the legs. They take the vicunyas, lay them on their sides and hold them down as someone else shears layers of their golden brown bowl. Then the workers flip the vicunya back up onto its feet and it goes running off back into the wild, stunned and stressed, but otherwise unharmed. At the Chaku Marcelo attended. The man overseeing the shearing was
Abraham Waman. He's been working with the Kunyas in the community of Lucanas for almost twenty five years.
Well, for me, it's like a treasure because sometimes an animal with wool runs the risk of poachers in other place is for example, there are poachers who kill the vicunyas and take their wool. They take the skin and the wool. But an animal that is already cheered, that doesn't have any wool left is basically a safe animal.
In other words, a vicunya sheared is a vicuna saved. At one point, the animals were so heavily poached that the species was on the brink of extinction, and a bunch of Andian countries signed a treaty to protect.
Them that said two key things. When was it banned any trade of vicunya wool for the foreseeable future until the species could recover somewhat, and then the other one was that it declared explicitly that vicunas would be used economically for the benefit of the people of the Andes in the future when the species.
Had recovered and it worked. By the eighties, the population had rebounded and people started arguing that it was time to make the trade of a cunyu woll legal again. One of those voices was the maker of the nine thousand dollars sweater.
And that's when Lorda Piana comes in, or at least when Loda Piano comes in in the modern history of the of the Vicunya, and they start to lobby the government, the proving government, trying to find a way to get legal access to the vicuna.
Eventually, the government agreed they brought back the sale of a cuniu woll, with some conditions.
So only communities legally recognized by the government who shared territory with vicunyas are able to capture and chear them. So a company like Loda Piana has to go through an indigenous community. The indigenous community will share the wold for free, and then Lorda Piana will buy that wol from the indigenous community, giving it significant cash for the economic progress of the place.
The government ended up awarding one group of garment manufactures legal access to Vacunya woll.
Lorda Piana wins this as part of a conglomerate that includes two other companies, but Lordapiana is that is the main one, and then Lorda Piana becomes the preeminent player in the new legal vicuna market. And in fact, the very first place where vicunas were shared legally once again in nineteen ninety four was in Lucanas, the community that we visited.
That first newly legalized vacunya sharing was a big deal, such a big deal that the President of Peru even attended. It marked the start of a promising new chapter in the history of Acunya Woll and the Andes. Under the new treaty, the Viacunya population was flourishing, the woll was creating a new source of income in Peru's poorest region, and Laura Piana had a monopoly the world's most premium fiber.
After the break, how it all fell apart leading up to the nineteen seventies, Vicunas were on the brink of extinction, but a treaty signed by many of the Andean nations to pause the trade of their wool helped the population
roar back to life. The trade in vacunya wol resumed in nineteen ninety four under provisions that the industry would be structured to benefit indigenous communities, but in two thousand, the Peruvian government made a change that would let private companies cut indigenous communities out of the vicuna wool market. The change made it possible for any landowner to shear the wool of a vicunya that set foot on their property.
That meant companies could buy cheap land in the Antes and shear vicunas without having to pay indigenous communities.
This change was made in the year two thousand by a man called Alfonso Martinez.
Alfonso Martinez was the head of the government office that was created to regulate the new vicunya wall market, and records show that behind the scenes he lobbied hard for this.
Change, and Alfonso Martinez goes on a few years later to become the CEO of Loda Piana in Peru.
After the change in regulation and with Alfonso Martinez. Leading up their Peruvian operations, Loro Piana bought about five thousand acres of land in the Andes near Lucanas.
What that land enables you to do is you can put some vicunas in there and then you can fence the area, and this is allowed by Peruvian law, but it is a system that ensures that those vicunas cannot leave your land and that they cannot be shared by anybody else. And so Loda Piana has records show about two thousand vicunas in this part of Peru that it
cheers every year. The records are public because they have to be filed with the Wildlife Regulator, and so Loda Piana is able to get this vicuna fiber without having to pay for it, either to any indigenous community or to anybody else.
Does that fly in the face of the intent of the original treaty, which was supposed to allow indigenous communities to economically benefit from the vicunas.
Yeah, it definitely creates a competitor for the vicunya market. Indigenous communities used to have this source of revenue in the vicunya, but now it turns out that companies can go and get their own in a way like the property of the vicunya is officially still in the hands of the state. You cannot have you cannot own vicunas. But what you have our rights to use the fur,
the fiber that those animals have. And so now you have companies being able to share that fiber because they are they have privately owned land and they have vicunas in there.
Lro Piana's permit to start sharing vacunyas on its own land was approved in twenty and since then it's been buying less vacunia wool from Lucanas and paying lower prices for what it does buy. All of this has meant less money for the community. Records show that in twenty fifteen, Loro Piana paid the community nearly four hundred thousand dollars for vacuna wool. Seven years later, the company bought only
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth. Meanwhile, the prices Loro Piana charges for its vacuna garments, like the nine thousand dollars sweaters and thirty three thousand dollars coats, have only continued to climb. Marcelo asks Abraham Woman, the man leading the sharing in Lucanas about how that gap feels.
Comotesas and tipto, proper conditions sink and fifteen.
It's a deception something we feel in this community and other communities. They buy it at a low price but sell it at a higher price after transforming it into vacunyabole garments.
Marcelo reached out to Lro Piana and they said, quote, since it arrived in Peru in the eighties, Laura Piana has been committed to upholding the highest standards of ethical and responsible business practices. Laura Piana represents a key economic support locally protecting and fortifying the demand and the value of the vacuna fiber regardless of market dynamics. So is there another path here? Could the local community make money
from the vacuna wool without working with existing brands. Why can't indigenous communities just process the wole they're sharing on their own and sell their own luxury garments.
Yeah, that is one of the keys to the issue, right, And there are two problems here. One of them is just lack of access to resources. Spinning vicuna fiber is not easy just because it is so fine. Indigenous communities are very good at weaving alpaca. They can weave lama, but in the case of the vicuna, it is both very fine and very short. The fibers themselves are not that long, so you need very expensive machinery that is
not common available because vicunia is so rare. And then the second challenge is that even if an indigenous community could have access to this machinery could make garments, it is hard to sell elite products that are worth thousands of dollars unless you have the right marketing, the right connection,
the right reputation. I think the story about the vicuna is emblematic of a lot of struggles in countries like Peru and other countries in the Global South about having raw materials, being the producer of important and expensive raw materials, but then not being able to capture the value of what those materials are worth when they are converted into something else.
So has this treaty, the Vicunya Convention worked.
The treaty is still in place. The Vicuna population has grown very significantly in recent years. Prue's last Vicunya census was in twenty twelve and it had two hundred thousand Vicunas. So compare that to what it had in the nineteen fifties and sixties, when the entire world population of Yukunyas was ten thousand. It has increased massively, so it is a successful case of the preservation of his species on
the brink of extinction. But on the other hand, as it led to the progress of the people of the Andes, you cannot say that it has done very much. The Andes remained the poorest region in the entire country and people are still working mostly as subsistence farmers.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Daniel Ferrara, with additional support from Aaron Edwards. It was mixed by Ben O'Brien. It was fact checked by Stacy Renee. Our senior producers are Naomi Shavin and Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of Podcasts Special Thing. Thanks to Julianne Wilkinson and Bianca Rosario Ramirez. Thanks for listening.
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