Loro Piana, the brand owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH, has done virtually nothing for the indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Andes from where it has been sourcing the world's finest and most expensive wool, an investigation by Bloomberg has found.
- A sweater made from vicuña wool sells for $9,000 in high-street outlets in Europe and the US, but the indigenous community in the Lucanas province in Peru gets only $280 for an equivalent amount of fibre. This is not enough to pay members of the community, who have to work for free, according to the Bloomberg report.
THE VICUÑA: The vicuña (Lama vicugna) is one of the two wild South American camelids, which live in the high alpine areas of the Andes, the other being the guanaco, which lives at lower elevations, according to Wikipedia.
- Until 1964, hunting of the vicuña was unrestricted, which reduced its numbers to only 6,000 in the 1960s. As a result, the species was declared endangered in 1974, and its status prohibited the trade of vicuña wool.
- Poachers would shoot and skin the vicuña instead of shearing them.
- During 1964–66, the Servicio Forestal y de Caza in cooperation with the US Peace Corps, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and the National Agrarian University of La Molina established a nature conservatory for the vicuña called the Pampa Galeras – Barbara D'Achille in Lucanas province.
- The Convention for the Conservation of the Vicuña helped reinstate a legal market while dictating that income derived from vicuñas benefit Indigenous Andean peoples, a historically impoverished population.
THE PEOPLE AND THE WOOL: The community in Lucanas was the first to shear the vicuña in 1994, and Loro Piana has been its buyer ever since.
- However, the trade—according to the Bloomberg investigation—has done little for the 2,700 members of the community. Most houses are made of mud, and don’t have plumbing. Older residents are subsistence farmers while the younger lot either move to cities or work in the unregulated gold mines in the region.
TRADING IN WOOL: Loro Piana’s prices have kept rising. The rate paid to the people of Lucanas for raw fibre, however, has fallen 36% in the past decade.
- In 2018 a government-commissioned study found that 80% of those living in the town said they hadn’t benefited from the community’s participation in the trade.
- Andrea Barrientos, a 75-year-old subsistence farmer quoted by Bloomberg, has never had an opportunity to make a vicuña garment. She’s never even seen one.
