|
Peru Agriculture
Perhaps the most important fact about the agricultural
sector
is that its production has not kept up with the growth of
population. Total output of agriculture and fishing
combined rose
63 percent between 1965 and 1988, but output per capita
fell by
11 percent. Output per capita started falling in the early
1950s,
climbed back up again to its 1950 level by 1970, then
began a
more pronounced and prolonged fall through the 1980s. Per
capita
output of food, as distinct from total agriculture, did
better:
it increased 1 percent during the period from the early
1980s to
the late 1980s.
The downward trend in agricultural production per
capita was
accompanied by a fall in the share of output going to
exports.
From 1948 to 1952, Peru exported 23 percent of its
agricultural
output; by 1976 the export share was down to 8 percent.
The trade
balance for the agricultural sector remained consistently
positive through the 1970s but then turned into an import
surplus
for the 1980s (see
table 11, Appendix).
Although agricultural production in the aggregate
failed to
keep up with population growth, a few important products
stood
out as exceptions. With favorable support prices, output
of rice
increased at an annual rate of 7.9 percent in the 1980s.
Changes
in production techniques helped raise output of chickens
and eggs
at a rate of 6.5 percent in this period. The Ministry of
Agriculture interpreted these positive results as evidence
of
what could be accomplished more generally with better
incentives
and improvement of agricultural techniques. For many
crops,
extremely wide variations in output per hectare, even in
similar
conditions of land and water supply, suggest that if
effective
extension services were implemented average productivity
could be
raised to levels closer to those achieved by leading
producers
(see People, Property, and Farming Systems
, ch. 2).
Contrary to
the experience of many other countries in the region,
productivity for most crops other than rice showed little
or no
improvement from 1979 to 1989.
Obstacles to increasing agricultural production include
the
poor quality of much of the country's land and the high
degree of
dependence on erratic supplies of water, plus the negative
effects of public policies toward agriculture. Frequent
recourse
to price controls on food and in some periods to
subsidized
imports of food have hurt agricultural incentives as a
byproduct
of efforts to hold down prices for urban consumers. In
general,
government policies have persistently favored urban
consumers at
the expense of rural producers.
Another important set of questions bearing on
agricultural
productivity concerns the effects of the Agrarian Reform
Law of
1969. The reform itself came long after the beginning of
the
decline in output per capita and was at first accompanied
by a
brief upturn. But the downtrend set in again from 1972 on
and
continued through the 1980s. The major question about the
effects
of the reform on productivity concerns the fact that most
of the
large estates taken away from prior owners were turned
into
cooperatives, made up of the former permanent workers on
the
estates. One problem was that the workers lacked
management
experience and a second was that incentives for individual
participants were often unclear. Shares in earnings of the
cooperative as a whole were not closely related to the
individual
member's time and effort, with the result that many of
them
concentrated on small parcels allocated to production for
their
own families rather than production for the cooperative.
The
performances of the cooperatives turned out to be highly
varied.
Some, particularly those with relatively good land and
markets
were able to raise output and group earnings more
successfully
than the previous landowners. But many were not, and by
the end
of the 1970s many of the cooperatives were either bankrupt
or
close to becoming so. The tension between individual
incentives
and concern for the functions of the cooperative as a
whole led
to a general turn toward "decollectivization" at the end
of the
1970s, breaking up the cooperatives into individual
holdings.
When the practice was made legal by the Belaúnde
government in
1980, it spread rapidly. The decollectivization has given
Peruvian agriculture a much stronger component of
individual
family farming than it has ever had before. The large
haciendas
are gone, and the new farms are closer to a viable
family-supporting size than has been true of the
minifundios (see Glossary)
of the Sierra. The consequences for agricultural
productivity and growth were still unclear in 1991:
incentives
for individual effort were greater but the smaller
production
units may have lost some
economies of scale (see Glossary). An
econometric study of land productivity in north-coast
agriculture, tracing output from prior cooperatives
through
individual results with the same land in the 1980s, brings
out a
wide variety of results rather than any great change in
total. It
shows that the individual holdings have on average done
slightly
better than the preceding cooperatives on the same land,
chiefly
by greater inputs of labor per hectare, but not enough
better to
make any convincing case of superiority. The authors of
this
study rightly emphasize that results in the 1980s cannot
be
explained adequately only in terms of farming practices
because
productivity was also adversely affected by the
deterioration of
the economic system as a whole.
In addition to the negative effects on agriculture of
economy-wide disequilibrium in the 1980s, some areas were
badly
hurt in this period by increased violence and partial
depopulation. The violence worsened from 1988 through
1990,
driving people out of farms and whole villages and leaving
productive land and equipment idle. In some of the
worst-hit
areas, production had fallen in half.
Data as of September 1992
|
