Agricultural history of Peru
From Freepedia
Much of the pre-history of Peru has been wrapped up in where the farmable land was located. The most populated coastal regions of Peru are the two parallel mountain ranges and the series of twenty to thirty rivers running through the coastal desert. In dry periods only the mountains are wet enough for agriculture, and the desert coast is empty, while in wet periods many cultures have thrived along the rivers of the coast. The well known Inca were a mountain based culture that expanded when the climate became more wet, often sending counquered peoples down from the mountains into unfarmed, but farmable lowlands. In contrast the Moche were a lowland culture that died out after a long drought.
Peru is both afflicted and blessed by a peculiar climate due to the Peru Current. Before overfishing killed it's fishery, Peru had the most productive fishery in the world due to the cold Peru Current. The current brings nutrients from a large portion of the Pacific floor to Peru's doorstep. On land, it results in a cold mist which covers coastal Peru to the extent that the desert plants have adapted to obtain water from the air instead of from the infrequent rainfall. The soil on the wet side of the mountains is thin, and the rivers on the dry side are few. This means all the water must be brought from the Atlantic side of the mountain ranges that split Peru.
The ancient people of Peru built water moving and preserving technologies like the aqueducts of Cumbe Mayo (c1500 B.C.E.) or the Nazca's underground aqueducts (c600 C.E.), or the terraced gardens of the Huari. But by the mid-19th century, only 3% of Peru's land was still farmable. It lagged far behind many other South American countries in aggriculture.
There were many obstacles to improving Peru's agricultural production. Since the conquest of the Inca, Peru has always been rich in natural resources such as Tin, Silver, Gold, Guano and Rubber. These resources share the attribute that, at least in Peru, they were found, not grown. The train tracks laid in Peru didn't connect its peoples, they connected the sources of these valuable resources to the sea. So there are few ways to bring aggricultural products to market. The road system is still primitive today in Peru, there is no connection to Brazil and only a little over a quarter of the 15th century Inca road system has been rebuilt as modern highway. Another obstacle is the size of Peru's informal economy. This prevents Peru from practically applying an income tax, which means much of it's revenue comes from a 13% tax on gross agricultural sales. This means Peruvian farmers must produce that much more product per dollar just to break even with farmers in countries that tax farmers on net profit. They have no chance at all of competing with agricultural products from countries that actually subsidize farmers, such as Japan, the United States and Europe. The looming threat of a free trade agreement with the United States threatens to destroy Peru's aggricultural economy even quicker than NAFTA destroyed Mexico's economy.
In the 19th century the Inca fertilizer, Guano, aka saltpeter, became the most important resource in Peru's modern history, both for it's use as a fertilizer, and as firepowder. But Peru lost it's guano reserves to Chile (backed by the British Empire) in the War of the Pacific. By the late 19th century, 50% of the Peruvian government's revenue was going to pay off loans that been guaranteed with guano sources that Peru lost to Chile, these were debts were eventually paid by sending all the remaining guano to France when they were preparing for war. The Germans invented the Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixing process shortly after the breakout of World War I, after which guano became almost worthless.
Today Peru grows several agricultuaral commodities such as potatoes, maize, rice, and coffee. Peruvian aggriculture actually uses synthetic fertilizers rather than the still abundant guano due to infrastructure issues. The collapse of Peru's bird population after the collapse of the fishery also limits future supply of the fertilizer. The maize is not exportable due to large subsidies in Europe and the United States to its high cost producers, but coffee is exportable. In recent years Peru has become the world's primary source of quality organic coffee. Peru does not have a quality control program such as Kenya's but its government has worked to educate farmers on how to improve quality. This basically comes down to picking only perfectly ripe berries and properly drying and fermenting the beans. Despite the glut of coffee producers in the market today, coffee production in Peru is still promising. It naturally has the high altitudes and partial shade desired by Coffea Aribica, and it much more of such perfect land available than similar competitors such as Jamaica and Hawaii.
Recently experiments have been conducted in reintroducing land reclamation techniques invented by the Tiwanaku, contemporaries of the Huari the inventors of terraced mountain farming. The Tiwanaku method allows slightly saline water to be used in aggriculture by using deep and relevantly frequent water trences and then letting the soil filter the water before it gets to the roots of the freshwater plants. This allows the abundant, but slightly saline water in the Lake Titicaca region to be used for farming.
