Food insecurity: 4 out of 10 farmers are poor in Peru

He agricultural sector in recent years has been hit by various crises, including the rise in fertilizer prices and weather phenomena such as droughts and heavy rains. This has led to an increase in the level of poverty of farmers.

Currently, 4 out of 10 people are poor in agriculture, a situation clearly more critical than poverty at the national level where the percentage is 27.5%, says Miguel Pintado, an economist at the Peruvian Center for Social Studies (Cepes). In fact, in 2020 monetary poverty in agriculture was 36.1%, in 2021 it climbed to 39.1% and last year it reached 41.4%, according to the Institutional Statistics and Informatics (INEI).

The specialist highlights that, during the last ten years, the incidence of poverty in agriculture had had a downward trend similar to the national indicator and even maintained resilience in the face of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. However, this apparent resistance has vanished in the last two years as a result of temporary inflationary pressures that have made almost all the goods that make up the basic food basket more expensive, as well as the rise in agricultural inputs such as urea and fuel.

“These different factors are leading to the gradual decapitalization of farm families in the country, which is reflected, today, in the rise in poverty rates,” says Pintado.

In this sense, it maintains that the support and emergency measures applied to the sector such as FertiAbono, FAE-agro, Agrarian Emergency Plan, Con Punche Perú Agro have been necessary, but not sufficient to cushion the negative impacts on the economy of these families.