"By using terraces, water, which is increasingly scarce in the northern part of the country, is utilised in a more efficient manner," Aranguiz, a junior professional officer on family farming with the United Nations FAO, told IPS from the agency's regional headquarters in Santiago, some 1,400 km south of the town of Caspana in Chile's Atacama desert.

In this country's Andes highands, terrace farming has mainly been practiced by the Atacameno and Quechua indigenous peoples, who have inhabited the Atacama desert in the north for around 9,000 years.

Principally living in oases, gorges and valleys of Alto Loa, in the region of Lima, these peoples learned about terrace farming from the Inca, who taught them how to make the best use of scant water resources to grow food on the limited fertile land at such high altitudes - Global Issues Report 

We have vast arrays of information available. We have a lot of models around the world that could aid us to adopt sustainable practices. The challenge is to ensure we embrace sustainability as a lifestyle at the earliest. Only then can we survive and thrive.