Peru pipeline

Workers put together a pipeline during the construction of the Olmos Irrigation Project in Peru's northwestern region of Lambayeque. The Olmos Irrigation Project next year will start pumping billions of gallons of water onto a nearby 170-square-mile patch of desert in the Olmos Valley near the Pacific coast. The $500 million project is the most ambitious yet in a handful of massive irrigation works that are turning large swaths of Perus historically parched coast into profitable agricultural fields. Odebrecht drilled a 12-mile (20-kilometer) hole through the Andes to pull water from where it has always been abundant - the Amazon watershed to the east - to the arid west coast of Peru that is home to two-thirds of the population and 80 percent of economic activity but only 2 percent of its freshwater.

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( ENRIQUE CASTRO-MENDIVIL, REUTERS / March 19, 2013 )

Workers put together a pipeline during the construction of the Olmos Irrigation Project in Peru's northwestern region of Lambayeque. The Olmos Irrigation Project next year will start pumping billions of gallons of water onto a nearby 170-square-mile patch of desert in the Olmos Valley near the Pacific coast. The $500 million project is the most ambitious yet in a handful of massive irrigation works that are turning large swaths of Peru’s historically parched coast into profitable agricultural fields. Odebrecht drilled a 12-mile (20-kilometer) hole through the Andes to pull water from where it has always been abundant - the Amazon watershed to the east - to the arid west coast of Peru that is home to two-thirds of the population and 80 percent of economic activity but only 2 percent of its freshwater.

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