The Ministry of Agriculture, INIA and INCAGRO

Tuesday afternoon Daniel and I set out to Cusco with the intention to track down someone from the University of Cusco's Department of Agriculture. The campus of the Agriculture department is on the outskirts of Cusco, a 20-30 minute bus ride from the main campus. We arrived around 3pm and found out that the classes end by 1:30pm and that all of the professors and the dean were gone. With no other choice we headed back to the center of Cusco to visit the Ministry of Agriculture to see if we could find someone to speak with.

At the Ministry, we checked in with security and asked where we should go to find someone who worked in organic fertilizers. We were directed to the second floor of building to the rear of the lot, where INIA was stationed. INIA is the National Institute of Agricultural Innovation, part of the Ministry. The engineer who works in organic agriculture was traveling for the week but we were given his email address and told that the morning of the following Tuesday would be a good time to meet with him. We were also given the telephone number for the dean of the Department of Agriculture, something we weren't able to obtain at the campus security station.

On our way out Daniel noticed another office he wanted to look into. INCAGRO is a small office within the Ministry of Agriculture lot and we stopped in to present our work and find out what they do. We discovered that the office is in charge of a competition that awards funds to agriculture producers (associations, communities, etc.), based on the evaluations of proposals that such producers submit to the agency. These proposals must be sustainable and benefit their community. The funds used for the competition come from the World Bank and the agency is run by the state, the employees are paid by the state, the World Bank funds are only given to the agriculture producers that win the competition. The current competition is in the evaluation phase and the next competition will start in 2011.

We are still waiting on the community assembly in Media Luna, it has been postponed yet again to November 22nd, the day before I leave Urubamba. This is extremely frustrating as we cannot make any concrete decisions without the consent of the community. Hopefully, I will be able to present the findings of the diagnostic to the board of community leaders on November 8th.

A Different Spin on Organic Agriculture

The director of the Urubamba Agriculture Office referred us to Ing. Ciro Palomino Rivas, an expert in organic agriculture. After sending him an email on Tuesday, I received a very warm response the following day. Absolutely incredible after what I've come to expect when attempting to contact professionals by email. Saturday morning Daniel and I went to meet Ing. Palomino Rivas at his organic agriculture store in Cusco. We told him about our project in Media Luna and how agriculture had appeared as one of the most pressing problems in the community. The fact that the high price of chemical fertilizer and the damage it does to the soil entraps the residents of Media Luna, and other agriculture based communities for that matter, in a vicious cycle of spending more and more of their earnings on chemical fertilizers whose amounts need to increase every planting season to produce the same crop yield.

He gave us an introduction to the process of restoring the soils of the Sacred Valley to an organic state and also provided an overview of his products. Such products, he claims, work to restore the soil in one planting season rather than the five-year process discussed by other agriculture professionals. However, there is a high initial cost to switching to his products because the first year demands a large amount of product to treat the soil. Each following year the amount decreases and saves money in the long term compared with the use of chemical fertilizer. A primary difference between his products and chemical products is that improving the quality of the soil is the objective of organic fertilizer rather than individual crop growth. So instead of designing products that are crop specific, the organic alternative aims to restore the soil to a state that would benefit all crops.

Although the information he provided us is useful, it was surprising that there may be such an efficient way to convert the fields of Media Luna to organic fertilizers. So surprising that we know we need to find case examples of such transitions to ensure that the products really work that well and that he's not just saying what's necessary to obtain Media Luna as a major client.

Organic Agriculture

Some progress was made this week, despite an unsuccessful trip to Cusco on Wednesday. Daniel and I traveled to Cusco Wednesday morning to visit the Agriculture department at the University of Cusco and to meet a contact given to us by the director of the Agricultural office in Urubamba. The contact is the owner of a store devoted to organic agricultural products.

He was traveling for the week but we were given his business card and contact information. We then went to the University of Cusco to see whom we could find from the Agriculture department. To our dismay, we discovered that the Agriculture Faculty resides on the other side of Cusco, about 40 minutes away from the main campus. After waiting about 30 minutes for a bus to take us there, we decided to go another day because we wouldn’t arrive at the other campus until 1pm, just as the leisurely Peruvian lunch hour begins. We saw the Cusco counterpart to the Agricultural office of Urubamba and went in to see if we could find anyone but everyone was on lunch.

Wednesday night we finally got in touch with Zenobio, the president of Media Luna, and set up a meeting for the following morning. Thursday morning we met Zenobio at his chacra, located outside of Media Luna. The first order of business was discussing the date for the next assembly. Since we’ve completed the survey, I’ve compiled the results of the survey into a presentation needs to be shown to the community members of Media Luna. Also since the completion of the survey, the assembly date has continued to be postponed. Due to a number of holidays and days set to work on community projects the assembly is now supposed to take place the first weekend in November, however it is unclear whether it will be Sunday November 1^st or the following weekend. Regardless, we haven’t been able to do much without the occurrence of the assembly.

On a positive note, he showed us the mix of compost and manure that he uses as an organic form of fertilizer. When using organic fertilizer, the process of preparing the land for planting is much more time consuming and effort intensive. Instead of spending a week preparing the soil with fertilizer, Zenobio told us that he treated the soil with the organic fertilizer for six months before planting. He also told us that he planted 3 days after his aunt, who used chemical fertilizers, and his corn crops are taller and healthier than hers. We also discovered that there is a piece of communal land in the community (about 4,000 square meters) that can be used as part of a “transitioning to organic” pilot project.

Agricultural Support for Media Luna

The past week and a half has been spent attempting to establish contact with agricultural professionals in the Cusco region. Email does not work in the same way as it does in the U.S. When I first started to look for contacts I searched the webpage of the University of Cusco's Agriculture Department for email addresses or other contact information to get in touch with some of the professors. Only two out of fifteen professors had email addresses listed, neither of them responded to my email. Also the general email address for the department is not functioning. While I was surprised by the lack of access to the professors (I'm accustomed to being able to find any professor's email address, mailing address, phone number, etc. on their university websites), Daniel, a native Peruvian, was not surprised in the least. He was actually more intrigued by my plan to look up the email addresses of the professors. His plan was to just go to the University of Cusco and wander around until we found someone.

Since last week the plan has become somewhat more fine-tuned. Just walking around Urubamba I noticed a building marked as an office of Agrorural, part of the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture. Daniel and I went to present Nexos, our project and ourselves in Media Luna hoping that they would have some information to offer us. We explained that we've found agriculture to be the most pressing issue in Media Luna, with the high cost of fertilizer reducing the productivity of the community member's fields. Not surprisingly, we were informed that they don't work in that area but there are two other Ministry of Agriculture offices we could visit, one in Urubamba just farther down the road and the other in Calca, a town about 30 minutes away.

Today we finally were able to sit down with the director of the Agricultural office in Urubamba and were able to speak to him about the project and what steps would be necessary to take from here. The director was very informative, expressing how the soil of the entire valley has become deteriorated from the use of chemical fertilizers, one in particular doing the most damage, UREA. Each year more chemical fertilizer is necessary to replace the natural nutrients that the fertilizer strips from the soil.

It takes five years to convert the soil back to its organic nature. During these five years the soil must be treated with guano (manure) and small amounts of chemical fertilizer can be used to maintain the soil's productivity. Switching directly to a purely organic fertilizer would result in nearly no crop yield, doing much harm to the livelihood of the farmers. Although it is accepted that organic crops are better quality than the alternative, there is little incentive to produce organic crops. There is not a market for organic products in Urubamba and even if there were there's no agency responsible for verifying that a product is organic.

Another problem plaguing the effectiveness of fertilizer is the method used to irrigate the fields. The fields are irrigated basically by gravity, the flowing of the water strips away the nutrients, chemical or natural. The director explained that another form of irrigation, such as micro pressure, would reduce the amount of nutrients removed from the soil during irrigation. This process would have a high initial cost, i.e. installation, but overtime it would provide more water to the field as well as produce crops in a greater quantity and of better quality.

However, the Agricultural office we visited is primarily administrative in its duties and does not provide technical support. The director told us that it is necessary to have a soil conservation professional conduct an analysis of the soil; this could be a professor or possibly students of agriculture. Following the analysis, a parcel of the community's land must be secured for agricultural demonstrations. Although we still have not secured support for the project we have been introduced to important information regarding the nature of the Sacred Valley's soils and possible agricultural contacts in Cusco.