Until a few years ago, Peru barely produced blueberries.
Today, it is the largest exporter in the world and agricultural companies from all over the planet invest in the country to join a boom for which there is no end in sight.
“When we started, they were barely produced and today Peru has become the mecca for blueberries,” Carlos Gereda, founder of the Inka’s Berries company and a benchmark in the production of these fruits in the South American country, told BBC Mundo.
He was the pioneer, the first to detect the potential of his country as an area for cultivating a fruit that did not grow there and launch himself to exploit it.. He is the great architect of the explosion of recent years.
This is his story.
It all started in Chile
From his office in an office tower in the Lima district of Magdalena del Mar, Gereda recalls that her project began in 2002, after a trip to Chile with some of her father’s friends.precisely the country that Peru has ended up ousting in the regional market.
“I was studying Engineering and Business Management at the time, but I was a farmer at heart, because my parents were farmers in Chincha, and my father discovered through some friends who had traveled to Chile how successful the blueberry industry was there,” he says.
After traveling to Chile himself to see it with his own eyes, Gereda embarked on an adventure that not many believed. “The literature said that blueberries could not be produced in Peru because there are not enough cold hours,” he recalls.
In agriculture, the hours when the temperature does not exceed 7 degrees Celsius are known as cold-hour. In Peru, that only happens in areas of the Andean highlands, but producing there was not an option.
“Logistics there are very difficult, because it is a very rugged area and there is little access,” explains Gereda.
“The big agricultural companies are on the coast, and I knew that to be profitable our industry had to be able to produce there.”
But the arid Peruvian coast, a desert for the most part, did not invite optimism.
Then began the search for a variant of the plant that could be produced in the temperate environment of the Peruvian coast.
It was necessary to find a variety of shrubs of the genus Vaccinium, the plants from which blueberries are obtained, capable of reproducing and producing in the dry and inhospitable environment in which Gereda dreamed of establishing his business.
“In 2006 I started looking for plants to bring to Peru, but I was surprised that they had to be ordered from the United States or Chile and they took between two or three years to arrive, plus they were very expensive.”
Convinced that his project required producing the plants in Peru, Gereda obtained more than 10,000 plants of 14 different varieties in Chile to test them in Peru.
He then began a project in collaboration with the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT) of the La Molina National Agrarian University to clone them in vitro by meristematic reproduction, a method that allows the creation of new plants from a plant tissue called meristem.
It is a procedure that has become common in recent decades to obtain healthier crops or crops with specific characteristics.
Thus, two parallel paths were opened. While Gereda tested the 14 Chilean varieties on his family’s land in Chincha, the IBT scientists searched in the laboratory for a way to propagate them in vitro.
In 2008, the long-awaited eureka arrived. “The IBT scientists informed us that they had found a way to reproduce them in vitro and I had verified that four of the 14 Chilean varieties worked well on my own.”
The following year, he founded his company and began to supply four agricultural companies that began to produce blueberries with their plants and ended up verifying that the best results were achieved with the Biloxi variety, one of the four Chilean ones, which has been the engine of the Peruvian blueberry revolution in recent years.
“For Peru to become a player in the world market, it was essential to have fruit between the end of August and the beginning of December, because at that time nobody else has it in the world, and that’s where the Biloxi variety shone,” explains Gereda.
Blueberries and Peru, today
Today, Inka’s Berries, the company founded by Gereda, has grown significantly.
It produces the plants with which it supplies the main players in Peruvian agricultural exports, but also its own blueberry crops, which it sends to the European market, mainly to Germany.
It has crops in four parts of the country, with 2,000 hectares of cultivated area and 600 permanent employees that can reach 3,000 when the campaign begins.
Many others followed in his wake.
Peru has become a magnet for foreign capital seeking to invest in the production of blueberriesand companies from the United States, Australia, Spain and other countries have settled on land where no one before Carlos thought they could grow there.
The competition is now such that the price of a kilo of blueberries has fallen to historical lows in the country.
And what once was an inconvenience, the temperate climate of the Peruvian coast, has become a differential advantage, since Peru can continue producing in the summer months, in which its Chilean competitors cannot due to the high temperatures that reach in your country.
With more than 261,000 tons per year, Peru has thus become the third largest producer in the world, only behind China and the United States, and the largest exporter, with the United States as its main customer.
According to the latest annual report from the International Blueberry Organization (IBO), Peru earned more than US$1.2 billion in 2021 from its exports of this small fruit.
Although the forecasts are that the increase in production will continue, the last few months have not been easy for those, like Gereda, who live from blueberries in Peru, due to the political conflict that arose after the fall of former president Pedro Castillo and the protests against the government of his successor, Dina Boluarte.
“The industry has been badly hit because many fields have had to stop their export work. I agree that everyone has the right to protest, but the rest also have the right to work and bring food to their children,” he says.
For Gereda, the success of her business is much more than just a business project.. “One of the great satisfactions I have in life is to have contributed to the beginning of this industry.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-64739997, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-02 13:50:09
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