For a country like Peru, agriculture is an important building block for its development. The majority of Peruvian families not only secure their livelihood, but also use their own harvests for their Nutrition. On the other hand, there are farmers who provide the necessary food for the cities of Peru produce or sell them to companies that export their goods abroad, raw or processed. Fortunately, since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in Peru, the law has regulated that food can continue to be produced without restrictions in compliance with the quarantine regulations and has ensured that access to the country's various markets is not affected, so that many families continue to live in the country can work in agriculture.
What is the reality of agriculture in the Andes of Peru?
The farmhouses of small farmers are often widely scattered in the Andes of Peru and are difficult to reach because the roads are difficult to pass. This makes it difficult to collect harvests from the fields, especially in the rainy season. Due to the steep slopes, goods often have to be brought up to the road using donkeys or horses.
The land often cannot be worked with a tractor due to the extreme gradients. This often happens with draft animals, with the "Yunta" (two oxen or mules connected by a yoke and pulling the plow together) or purely with a hoe in the hand. The areas of the fields are often small and fragmented, measuring less than a quarter of a hectare. In many cases there is not enough water to ensure harvests throughout the year.
As with the Peruvian ancestors, today the moon is often used to determine when it will rain and when it will be dry and to plan the sowing time.
The Peruvian ancestors observed not only the position of the sun and moon, but also the way the behavior of some birds and animals changed, including the appearance of some wild flowers. Over the centuries, agricultural technologies adapted to extreme environments have been developed.
In the high altitudes of the high provinces of Cusco, for example, they have managed to grow products such as quinoa and tarwi (Andean lupins) and breed animals such as vicuña, llama and alpaca. Many of these old technologies were sustainable and environmentally friendly, they were developed without the use of agro-chemical agents.
However, the knowledge of grandparents continues to be lost over the generations and is not replaced, and climate changes due to global warming also lead to planning uncertainties in agriculture Andean production.
Concepts that are intended to seriously support small farmers must be sustainable
Over the years, we have learned again and again that projects that are intended to support and help small farmers come to nothing because the concept is not thought through to the end: The farmers receive gifts in the form of materials, fertilizer and short-term training. What is not provided, however, is training for longer-term thinking, no help is provided in finding a market, and too little support is given in understanding cost-benefit calculations in agricultural production. On the contrary, free help tends to achieve passivity. Once the projects are finished and the project managers have withdrawn, people return to the old habits and cultivation of products such as grain, peas, and corn.
Why isn't creating a market part of projects?
The basic idea of bringing farmers together with private companies that buy their goods is generally not supported because they want to protect themselves from the accusation that someone is putting their own economic interests at the forefront of their subsidies.
Low level of education
The School education of many older small farmers only reaches the fourth Class. They don't have a lot of school knowledge that they can pass on to their children, little of what's out there in the world. could be useful today. Their perspective is just as small as the windows of the farmhouses made of mudstone, which barely let in any light. The result is often that children help out in the fields and are not introduced to the (survival) importance of learning.
And even if the farmers attended the “Secundaria” (roughly equivalent to secondary school), they hardly learned anything about marketing their products on the national, let alone international market, due to the low level of education in the rural schools. Often they don't even have access to wireless networks or the Internet, so how can they be guaranteed that they will find a market for their products?
The lack of knowledge also means that more money is put into the fields than comes out as a harvest. Often people don't invest anything at all and hope that the climate and the soil happen to be such that something is harvested. There is a lack of knowledge about economics, planning and how to set up a cooperative or even a small company. Issues such as invoicing and taxation seem too complicated and paying an accountant seems too expensive. Therefore, most people prefer to stay informal. The farmer is of course not able to compete with larger companies and will therefore remain small forever. Informality is a major problem that Peru has in many economic sectors.
Peruvian organic farmers
So one cannot assume that the farmers have sufficient knowledge about the organic cultivation of their fields or that they know and meet the relevant standards. Which doesn't mean that the land is only cultivated with chemicals. Often there is not enough money for fertilizers and sprays and an organic product is created by chance. The product does not bear the stamp of a recognized certifier, but is often labeled and marketed "organic" within Peru.
Organic certification costs several thousand dollars. Hardly a single small farmer can afford these, as well as expensive pesticide tests and soil samples in the laboratory. Establishing a farmers' cooperative can be helpful here, provided the individual farmers are prepared to put money from their own harvests into a common pot, which is not necessarily a given.
Adhering to the organic norms requires even more good intellectual understanding. This also includes regularly refreshing knowledge, consistently carrying out the necessary documentation of the individual steps of organic farming and ensuring the functioning of the internal control system in which small farmers check each other for compliance with the rules.
Many things cannot be achieved without outside help. Even when committed young farmers try, they often fail because of their false, unrealistic ideas.
1. Solution approach: The new generation as an opportunity
One of the goals of working with small farmers in the Andes should therefore be to impart knowledge about correct cultivation, particularly to young people, and the right “know-how”. about watering, fertilizing and cutting the plants and determining the correct harvest time. And this is based on a method of cultivation that is as environmentally friendly as possible and preferably organic, which continues through the generations and preserves Peru's biodiversity.
CEFOP San Pablo
A successful example of a project with young people is CEFOP San Pablo, which was initiated at the request of the managing director of the local company AgroAndino, Reinhard Schedlbauer , initiated by the Cajamarca regional government in San Pablo.
CEFOP stands for Centro de Formación Profesional, which translates as “Center for Professional Training”. In collaboration with the municipality of San Pablo and the Fe y Alegría organization, the program has been implemented there since 2019. Since then, 65 young people have received theoretical and practical training. This educational offer for young people from the poorest region of Peru is intended to help improve both economic knowledge and agricultural skills. The aim is to give students a chance to integrate into the job market or, alternatively, to improve their own cultivation and make it more economical. Growing physalis for Agroandino's drying factory in San Pablo is just one of the many possibilities for their future.
With projects like these that invest in youth, we can give Peruvian agriculture the boost it needs. The hope and wish is that the knowledge it imparts will be transferred to the next generation and - like a domino effect - develop the necessary momentum of its own.
2. Solution: Support from private companies
Private companies could help market farmers' products by paying them fair prices, hiring staff to train the farmers and helping to certify the products organically. The actual basic idea is to secure the farmers' livelihood all year round with a contract and the weekly purchase of their products at fixed prices so that cultivation is profitable and their existence is not threatened by market fluctuations.
Unfortunately, this system is repeatedly disrupted by middlemen (so-called “intermediarios”). If the goods are currently in short supply on the market, they lure the farmers with higher price offers and cash payments. As soon as the market value of the harvest falls again, the farmer receives so little sole for his goods that the farming family can hardly live and plan on it anymore. These traders act selfishly and are non-committal in the end. They simply don't come back and the farmer is then left without a buyer. Unfortunately, we often see farmers thinking too short-term, who still turn to these buyers because they are getting a little more money for their harvests, but do not realize what will happen to them afterwards.
Unfortunately, private companies make life difficult for each other as competitors, when it would be much better for everyone to work together. There are companies that behave like intermediaries. They take each other's fruit by outbidding each other on price. They even claim social certifications such as fair trade, but do not behave accordingly. They are not interested in the well-being of small farming families, but rather pursue the goal of serving their own customers without losses. They even deliberately let small farmers grow Physalis without planning, so that there is an oversupply on the market and they benefit from it when prices fall as a result. No attention is paid to whether the farmers grow enough vegetables and fruits for their own needs or whether they instead cultivate all their property one-sidedly and then slide into economic ruin.