Peru between water, lithium and satellites: how to face new global conflicts without losing Pachamama

Peru exports gold, copper and fish, but it even imports the sensors that measure air quality in Lima. As the world fights over lithium, freshwater, and satellite orbits, the country has become a privileged observatory of lethal interdependence; its glaciers store 70 percent of Andean water, the neighboring Salar de Uyuni contains half of the world's lithium, and its coastline is home to the tracking stations that China and the U.S. want to monitor space. The question is whether Peru will continue to be a logistics corridor for others or will it manage to turn its geography into strategic sovereignty.

Water is the first front. The Cordillera Blanca has lost 40% of its volume since 1970 and the Rimac basin – which supplies 10 million Lima residents – reduces its flow by 3% per year. Chile plans to divert the Lauca and Bolivia wants to irrigate the Altiplano with water from Titicaca; without an updated trilateral treaty, Lima could be forced to desalinate the Pacific, which would raise its energy bill by 25% and increase dependence on lithium that others extract from the highlands.

Lithium, precisely, passes by without stopping. Peru does not have salt flats comparable to those of the Argentina-Bolivia-Chile triangle, but it is home to 6% of the world's reserves of tantalum – an essential mineral for cell phone capacitors and electric cars – and high-grade copper that is already quoted as a "critical metal" in Washington. The risk is to repeat history: export copper concentrate to China and buy back the high-voltage cables. The expanded Toromocho Project could add a copper-electrolysis smelter if it is required, as Indonesia did, that all gross exports be accompanied by a local refining plan within five years.

Biotechnology opens a reverse window; to export knowledge about biodiversity before others patent our life. The Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia sequenced 1,200 Amazonian plants and released the database under a Creative Commons license; there is a lack of a bio frontier fund – financed with 1% of the mining royalty – that pays Peruvian PhDs to edit these molecules with CRISPR and releases the results without royalties to indigenous cooperatives, blocking biopiracy by European pharmaceutical companies.

Food is already generating diplomatic shock: when Russia invaded Ukraine, Peruvian wheat rose 40% and bread became news. The country imports 80% of the wheat it consumes, but exports asparagus and mangoes that require water that we do not have. The solution involves drought-resistant wheat seeds developed at the La Molina experimental station and a dry corridor of technified irrigation in Piura and Lambayeque that reduces water consumption by 30% using copper-tantalum sensors made in Peru.

Space is the new plateau. The Chilca tracking station that China built in 2019 – without going through a public tender – captures data from BeiDou satellites that guide missiles and distribute credits on the Belt and Road. Peru has just signed the SPARTAN program with NASA to monitor glaciers, but there is no law that requires the sharing of the images with the Peruvian State. An earth observation law could require that any satellite contract cede 20% of the images of its own territory to Peru, as the European Union already does with Copernicus.

Artificial intelligence is militarized before it is regulated. The Peruvian Army tests AI-edge drones to monitor the VRAEM, but the chips come from Silicon Valley and the analytics cloud runs on AWS. A Peruvian military CERT — funded with 0.5% of the defense budget — could develop local algorithms on open RISC-V hardware and store metadata in a government cloud that already operates the National Document Management System, preventing a contractual blackout from blinding anti-narcotics operators.

Peru doesn't need a new Marshall Plan; it needs to turn its strategic geography into locally captured value. If Lima demands copper refining, Loreto releases patent-free CRISPR seeds, Piura reduces water with national sensors, and Chilca shares satellite images, the country will go from being a commodity corridor to a node of Andean-Amazonian sovereignty in the era where water, lithium, and data are worth more than the gold we already mine.