Inter Press Service | January 14, 2002 | By Abraham Lama
LIMA - Peruvian farmers and agricultural experts are demanding credit and protectionist measures from the government to help the impoverished rural population, most of whom still work the fields using tools whose design dates to the pre-Hispanic era.
Agriculture is the most depressed sector of Peru's economy, last year providing just nine percent of the $ 54 billion gross domestic product (GDP). In the countryside, 65 percent of the residents are poor.
But in spite of the low profitability of farming today, experts believe that it is the country's most promising sector for investment aimed at productive expansion and social development. "The misery in which the peasant farmers live, particularly in the Andean region, is due to the lack of financing. Without money there is no technology or modernization," said Elio Quispe, a one-time university student who now grows potatoes on his family's small parcel of land in Huancavelica, in the southern sierra.
"We do everything by hand, while in other countries they work with machines and plant improved seeds," added Quispe, during a visit to Lima to find out when the Agricultural Bank, created by the Alejandro Toledo government in late December, is going to begin operations.
Agronomist Matilde Berrios says access to credit is just a dream for peasant farmers, whose main concern has been to find markets to sell their harvest.
Berrios' company, which markets asparagus in the city of Trujillo, on the northern Pacific coast, is on the verge of bankruptcy because there is no domestic market. She says she would have a difficult time competing on the international market, particularly with China's cheap asparagus exports.
Jos Hernandez, a farm consultant, pointed out that "cultivated lands today cover just 2.7 percent of Peruvian territory, and their expansion would require enormous investments to pay for irrigation systems and to close the technology gap."
Hernandez has long been a proponent of implementing a new agricultural model that is aimed at competitive, sustainable development, a message he has taken to international forums.
He has asked the government to adopt a decentralization scheme that includes farmer participation, "based on watershed management for irrigation, a structure that would allow the active participation of irrigation councils, local authorities and government technicians."
The irrigation councils are rural entities with traditional roots. They consist of the owners and users of the land in each valley, and serve as a forum to discuss and decide how the irrigation water will be distributed.
The Toledo government, which took office last July, has not yet drawn up a farm policy, but has already ordered the creation of the Agricultural Bank, a project that is awaiting financing from the international community.
Ricardo Lets, a former leftist parliamentarian and now owner of cooking oil business, has also called on Toledo to adopt a "policy of protection to keep up with the industrialized countries, which spend a combined total of $ 336 billion on subsidies for their farmers each year."
"Toledo did not say a word about reversing the lack of protection for farming," the policy inherited from his predecessor Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).
Fujimori "led Peru into the World Trade Organization, where he stood out for his tremendously liberal stance, because he renounced the possibility of adopting measures to protect the country's farm trade against other nations' subsidies," said Lets.
The extremely limited purchasing power of the Peruvian people, a result of the prolonged economic recession, was evident last year in an inflation rate that was below 0.13 percent.
The economic depression aggravated the long-running problem of unemployment in this nation of 25 million people, pushing up the combined jobless and under-employment rate to 56 percent of the economically active population.
World Bank studies indicate that 65 percent of the rural Peruvian population is poor, with 25 living in extreme poverty.
In 1969, the leftist government of the time, under Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, designed an agrarian reform program that dismantled the semi-feudal structure of rural property ownership and created farming cooperatives.
However, that process was not carried out with the necessary technical support, which ultimately led to a decline in farm production and an acceleration of rural emigration to the cities.
The failure of the management of most of the farm cooperatives created at that time ended up with excessively fragmented land ownership and, as a result, the broad dispersal of agricultural products, which is now an obstacle for economies of scale-based planning.
The subsequent governments of centrist Fernando Belaunde Terry (1980-1985) and social-democrat Alan Garc a (1985-1990) promoted private and government loans to boost agriculture, but they had only limited success.
The now-deposed Fujimori, who followed a neo-liberal economic policy line, promoted the improvement of transportation infrastructure to improve access to the urban markets for agricultural products -- an approach intended to drive rural growth.
But the failure of the economic model recommended by the International Monetary Fund -- and applied to the letter by Fujimori -- unravelled into a severe economic crisis and slashed the Peruvian people's buying power as farm commodity prices fell below production costs.
Meanwhile, reduced farm yields, even for products native to the country, such as potato and maize, and the agricultural subsidies applied in the nations of the industrialized North meant that Peruvian farmers could not find relief in the international markets.
"In Peru, just 53 valleys along the Pacific coast could be considered part of the modern farming sector. But they represent less than 10 percent of the country's cultivated area, while the rest lags far behind," said agronomist Berrios.
Furthermore, she said, on 58.2 percent of the cultivated land the farmers still use the "taclla," a pre-Hispanic plough that farmers use to dig furrows using the force of their own feet.
"Next to the taclla, even the plough pulled by oxen -- used on 26.4 percent of the cultivated land -- is modern technology. As far as the use of tractors, they represent just 5.2 percent of Peruvian farming," said Berrios.
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