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One of the biggest challenges facing a small farmer with diverse varieties on their farm is getting certified. This ensures that the food that is produced is up to the markets standards of food safety, and also that the farmer can capitalize on the certification by selling to other markets.

I saw this in Junin; the farmers who gained the SGP certification were doing quite well in comparison to before, selling their goods at good prices. In order to gain the certification of SGP (Sistema de Garantia Participativa, System of Participative Guarantees), they were required to undergo a three year approval period, make changes to their farms, formalize themselves into groups, file paperwork, and let their farms be inspected by third parties. If the producers who apply pass (the procedure is strict enough to weed out people who are not truly committed), they can use the SGP seal, which communicates food safety and the environmental practices used to grow the products.

Related image
The SGP Seal.

SGP is used in a number of countries in Latin America, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and, of course, Peru. The rules SGP is run by vary depending on the country, which makes sense given that each country has different legal standards. In Peru, SGP is underpinned by the Law of Organic Production (N°29196) and the Supreme Decree N°010-AG.

The SGP is run by a national council and regional councils and are comprised of elected members: in addition, the SGP is structured to work with agricultural institutions within the country. In Peru, this is ANPE-Peru, IDMA, INIA, and ASPEC, amongst others, including regional agricultural boards (DRAs).

What all of this means is that there is a framework that small farmers can use to bring their produce to market; SGP covers their operations from the field through primary processing. While the SGP regulations are not flexible in terms of the quality expected, it is flexible about how farmers get help and encourages innovation, providing an organizational structure that bakes in training for farmers.

I keep thinking about the cuy (guinea pig) farmer in Junin who said that when she takes her cuys to market, she sells out in two hours - though much of the time, it is as little as twenty minutes! She said that her customers like knowing that the cuys were raised well, that the taste of her animals is better than conventionally-grown cuys, and that when people eat her cuys, they don't have to worry about getting sick.

Food safety, as I've said on this blog, is a massive problem not just for Qali Warma but also for the rest of the country. I can't tell you how many conversations I had (often with chatty taxi drivers) who, upon learning what I was studying, started talking about how risky Peruvian food is. (They would then often inquire gently but directly as to the state of my guts.)

As I was standing in line at the airport to take my flight out of the country, I got to talking to a guy from the department of Ancash who was going to do his masters in Maritime Engineering in Denmark; he told me he was hoping to get a job in Denmark when he graduated for a few key reasons: one, the pay is significantly better in Denmark, two, Peru's corruption is legendary, and three, that the food is not guaranteed to be safe. I couldn't disagree with him; after all, I don't eat fresh greens in Peru because I don't trust food that hasn't been cooked, either because it could be contaminated en route to the market or because the water I washed it with in my kitchen isn't clean to Western standards.

The SGP certification isn't a silver bullet: the processes that are demanded by the certification make the food significantly more expensive, and it is not a system that will be able to crank out enough food to feed a whole nation, but in my opinion, it is an important element of Peru's food system and hopefully will only become more so in the future.

The main resource I used for this blog: https://www.ifoam.bio/sites/default/files/page/files/la_case_studies_color_print_fc_0.pdf

Artichokes on a certified farm.

P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Fiestas Patrias - National Holidays - of Peru's independence. They take place around July 28th, the official day of Peru's independence from Spain, and involve a lot of patriotic brouhaha over a long weekend. I celebrated the holiday by going to the Plaza de Armas area of Lima, poking into churches, eating, and going to an art museum.

The number of flags I could see when I moved into my apartment: 1.
The number of flags I could see when I left: 14 (that's very nearly every building).

When I was in Peace Corps, we learned a classic Criolla song which is all about the fabulousness of Peru. I couldn't get it out of my head:

The images on this video show the immense natural and cultural diversity of the country; you'll be sure to recognize some of these places, and perhaps see something unexpected.

Last Thursday and Friday there was an event in Junin to show off their pilot program. I went to see what the system really looks like - and to get some sun.

Somewhere between Jauja and La Oroya.

Junin's capital, Huancayo is in the Andes east of Lima, at a high enough elevation that it catches your breath.

The event was attended by representatives of the FAO, Peruvian universities and development organizations, farmers who contribute to the program, municipalities from Junin that participate in the pilot or who are contemplating participation, and the municipalities of Piura, Arequipa, and Lima. Lima had a large delegation and its own photographer; the man leading the delegation was feted everywhere we went, giving me the impression that the event was in part a sales pitch to Lima - this makes sense, as metropolitan Lima houses about a third of the Peruvian population.

The first day was a series of presentations, followed by an excursion on Friday to a preschool, several farms, and the processing plant that the producers use.

The preschool rolled out the red carpet for us: they cheered as we entered the school, and after we saw the kitchen and went into a couple of the classrooms, we were shepherded into their auditorium, where a group of the cutest children danced for us in traditional costumes.

On the breakfast menu that day: sangrecita with potatoes, a drink with quinoa, and flash photography.

It was very obvious that this part of the day had a few purposes: 1. for the municipality of Huancayo to show what it does for its citizens; 2. to impress the attendants of the event. These events make a lot of sense when you think about how 'invisible' this pilot program is - when a mayor builds a park, there's lasting physical evidence, but when you provide good nutrition to a child, the effects of that good nutrition are not immediately apparent. Having an event like this (with pictures to splash all over the newspaper) makes the invisible much more visible.

After the brouhaha at the school, we visited three farms in the town of Pucara:

One Agrepina's tomato houses.
A cuy (guinea pig) farm. I'm told they're delicious.
Cuy is not sold into Wali Warma because all meat provided by the program must be packaged and because cuy is extremely expensive. (We went to this farm because it is part of a strong cooperative in this town.)
A farm run by a cooperative.

The farms are certified under the SGP certification (Sistema de Garantia Participativo, System of Participatory Guarantees), which requires farmers to use certain practices and to process their yield to a certain standard. It takes three years to be fully certified, and not all farmers who sign up make it to full certification. The vegetable farmers of Pucara have their own processing facility in the center aisle of a previously disused market:

Rigorous sanitation procedures are maintained; produce passes from one station to the next in an eight step process.

From here, the food is transported to schools either in the Qali Warma delivery truck or a truck they hire (and clean) for the purpose.

In all, the event was an important look into how the Junin pilot is received in the area and how it functions in the context of Pucara; I can see how the model could be flexible enough to adapt itself to other regions, though it would need to establish itself in areas with a strong agriculture sector capable of consistently providing sufficient quantities for the demand of the local schools. In areas where this is not the case, a different approach would be necessary.

Last Friday, I was able to meet with the Chief of Performance of Qali Warma; this was my first opportunity to speak to someone in the program. Our conversation covered a lot of ground and helped me to feel out the position of Qali Warma. When I asked about the possibilities of including more diversity in the menus, I was told that Qali Warma has a couple of initiatives to include traditional potato varieties in Junin and tarwi in Ancash. This was news to me, so after a Google search I was able to discover the scale of the programs.

Foto: Tarwi en floración, Comunidad de Camicachi, Ilave/A. Canahua
Field of Tarwi.

Tarwi is a traditional Andean food most commonly found in Peru and Bolivia; those familiar with flowers will recognize that tarwi is part of the lupine family. Here, the beans are eaten as an accompaniment to a meal, in ceviche (marinated in lemon juice and hot pepper), or served in a dish such as tarwi with potatoes and rice.

Qali Warma is bringing tarwi in the form of bread to six provinces of the department of Ancash, reaching 76,500 students. The tarwi is ground into flour or boiled and mashed before getting mixed into the dough.

Tarwi flowers, tarwi beans, a dish of tarwi with potato and rice, and tarwi ceviche.
papas-andinas
An array of different types of traditional potato varieties.

The second initiative is taking place in department of Junin; SENASA (the Peruvian agency that monitors agriculture and provides technical support) and the regional agriculture board of Ica have provided trainings and technical support to farmers. Farmers have formed cooperatives so that they can produce potatoes not just of sufficient quality but also sufficient quantity for the demand.

This collaboration and hard work has resulted in 336 schools in four provinces with a total of 17,352 students receiving traditional varieties of potatoes in their school meals. The estimated amount bought for 2019 is 31 tons.

 CIP
Many potato varieties have marbling of color in their flesh.

Qali Warma faces a number of troubling challenges, and as with any large bureaucracy, moves slowly. However, these initiatives and their pilot programs show that there are some in the institution who wish to make positive changes; the success of these initiatives can be scaled out to more regions in Peru. While neither of these initiatives will completely change how Qali Warma functions, they do show how the model can be flexible enough to include some kinds of non-perishable foods without endangering food safety, or bogging down the administration to a prohibitive degree.

The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) held a conference in Lima this past week. The title was: 'In Defense of the Commons: Challenges, Innovation, And Action.' They had a program with sessions Monday-Wednesday, field trips on Thursday, and a final day of sessions on Friday. The conference was held in the Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru, which has one of the nicest campuses I've seen:

The main sessions I attended were on Friday and were organized by Bioversity International, and focused on PACS, Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services.

Some of the audience at the conference; the men in the foreground of the picture are from Cusco, Peru. Every region of Peru - and particularly the Andes - has a different mode of dress; on top of this, in many places locals can tell which town people are from by their hats. (So don't assume everyone's traditional dress looks the same - there is as much cultural diversity as biodiversity in Peru. Also, these aren't their normal street clothes.)

PACS work with local communities to conserve threatened varieties, first by determining what the local varieties are, how much land is planted with these varieties (and by whom), and which varieties should be conserved. Locals have a say in each step of the process and there is competition to find out which communities will participate, building excitement and emotional investment in the scheme. Next, seed is collected; from what I have heard, this can be one of the hardest steps in the process, because there may only be a tiny amount of seed available in any one place. When enough seed is collected, farmers grow the crops; at harvest, a portion of the seed goes to a genebank and the rest the farmers can keep for themselves. In addition, the farmers receive payment of goods; the payment can be shared by the whole community or be parsed out to individual families, and it can be anything from mattresses to processing equipment to building materials: the participants of the program choose what they would like to receive.

In the morning on Friday we heard presentations from a number of speakers, showing how PACS had worked for them. There were examples from a number of places: quinoa in Puno in southern Peru, amaranth in Cusco, Peru, corn in Ecuador, corn in Guatemala, and potatoes in Apurimac in the southern Andes of Peru. In all these cases but one, representatives of the farming communities involved spoke about their experiences, either about the new passion they felt for conservation or the affirmation of their prior convictions. The farmer from Puno came with four samples of quinoa and spoke about how radically her life had changed for the better by conserving these varieties.

I have less blurry pictures, but this guy reminded me of Indiana Jones (it's not just the hat). He's a potato farmer and keen conservationist, key to the program in Apurimac.

After lunch, we broke into working groups of different categories, looking to build upon the experiences of PACS and to make them better. These groups focused on an array of topics: monitoring, conservation (including with traditional knowledge), development of value chains, access to seeds and seed banks, financing and regulation, and finally, public procurement programs.

I ended up leading that last group, considering that I was the one with the most current knowledge base of the four of us who were participating. However, one of the members was part of the administration of Qali Warma in Cusco, so no one in the group was green to the issue.

Public procurement may not at first blush seem like a logical transition from biodiversity conservation, but considering that bringing native varieties securely out of danger requires having enough land devoted to its cultivation and a market for its sale, public procurement makes sense. If a government prioritizes biodiversity, it provides a ready-made market for these varieties and products made with these varieties.

Our group spoke a lot about the twin routes for change in the system: producers need to be empowered and organized, linked with financing but also with small businesses that can make products of high quality that could be sold to the government for its programs. In return, the government must make sure that the door is open to these producers and these businesses.

Nasturtiums.

Of course, this is much easier said than done. Given the sheer number of receipts that the program has to manage, sourcing from places that would provide smaller quantities would bog down the bureaucracy, and sanitation requirements would incur costs of money and time for farmers. However, it was the consensus of the group that these changes are valuable and worth the trouble.

I was in Peace Corps in Peru for about a year and a half; I was placed in the small town of Capilla Central in the district of Olmos in the department of Lambayeque. I was there for a little over a year, and grew to love the place and the people who lived there. Naturally, since I'm in Peru there was no way that I could come to the country without visiting Capilla, so that's where I went last weekend.

Capilla is inland on the northern coast, in the dry forest (bosque seco) ecosystem.

A great many things remained the same - including the warm welcome I received - but there were a few changes, such as the huge new park, still establishing its seedlings:

The birds in front are pavas aliblancas (in English, white-winged turkeys), an emblematic fauna of the zone. I've never seen one, but I'm told they're quite graceful in flight.

Also new were the changes made to the dry riverbed since the 2017 El Niño: the Department of Transportation has lumped up a bunch of the sand into a long hill. I'm not sure what this serves, aside from ensuring that the river channel is deep enough for the deluge of water in the next fenómeno. (Seems to me that it makes more sense to truck away the sand so that it doesn't clog anything up downriver, but that's probably prohibitively expensive.)

I took this picture standing on the sand heap.

I mainly spent my time trying to ensure that I caught up with as many people as possible, handing out maple candies from Maine, gossiping like mad, and enjoying the slower pace of life out in the country.

The world's most beautiful chicken, and Modesto under the ciruela/plum tree.

However, because I stayed from Saturday afternoon to Monday afternoon, I was invited to see what Qali Warma looks like in Capilla. On Saturday, Nelly and Fanny were putting away the recent shipment of food they had received for the month, and talked to me about their experiences with Qali Warma.

Pictured is part of the delivery, and includes quick-cooked oats with things like maca, quinoa, and amaranth, wheat flour, amaranth flour, oil, rice, noodles, sugar, cornstarch, bars of chocolate for hot chocolate, cans of milk, cans of chicken or fish, galletas of various descriptions.

This opportunity gave me the answer to one of the mysteries plaguing me during my research: what, exactly, is a 'galleta'? Galleta in Spanish can translate to any number of things: cookie, cracker, biscuit. I've been using 'biscuit' in my thesis as it is ambiguous - they can be either sweet or savory. Nelly and Fanny showed me that the galletas they receive can be either, and that it depends on the rotation of things that Qali Warma send them. (And, of course, the kids like the sweet ones better - go figure.)

This 'rotation' is something new this year: so the kids don't get crazy bored with the school meals, the deliveries are on a three month rotation. There's something different for each month for three months, after which point the cycle restarts. This is something that the Buying Committee gets to decide; they stay within the regulations of Qali Warma but provide what variation they can.

This is the kitchen where the food is prepared; there's a covered dish rack behind where the photo was taken, so that dust/sand doesn't dirty the dishes before they're used again.

The cook arrives at the school around seven a.m. to start cooking the breakfast, and serves breakfast from around 7:45 to 8:30, depending on when the kids arrive. There's a dedicated place for the children to eat (which not all schools have), though considering that some kids arrived late, they had to eat their breakfast in the classroom.

On Monday, the menu was milk with cornstarch, sugar, and vanilla with a cracker that had either quinoa or maca in it. I was given a portion, and can tell you that the milk was very sweet, slightly thickened from the cornstarch, and had a nice vanilla taste; most of the kids drank all of theirs. The crackers...those mostly went into pockets. I was told that a lot of the kids don't eat the crackers given to them, instead pocketing them and giving them to their family or to pigs or dogs.

Maca is an Andean tuber, and has no English translation.

On days when there's a rice or noodle dish with some protein in it, kids may or may not eat that as well - this is because Qali Warma doesn't give money for things like condiments or spices, so it doesn't necessarily taste great. (Though I'll also note that a couple people blamed the cook for the taste of the food - but considering what she has to work with, I think she's doing fine). The parents put together money every month (4 soles/parent, ~1 USD) to buy things such as extra ingredients - this can be more of something they run out of (they usually run out of sugar, and considering how sweet the milk was that morning, I can understand why), spices, or vegetables (usually onion) - or to refill the tanks of gas that they use for cooking.

Qali Warma gave them the stove (though the cook noted that when it was delivered, one of the burners broke, so there are only two burners working), as well as the two tanks of gas. Qali Warma doesn't repay to refill the gas, but considering the large initial investment for the tank itself, that they gave the tanks is a huge advantage.

It was also good to see some of the signage that was posted in the kitchen - numbers to call in case there was anything wrong with the food, a poster on fortified rice (which, by the way, the kids don't like because of the texture), amounts of different foods to give per kid, and details on the three-month rotation. I gawped at all of it between talking to the cook and taking sips of milk.

Details of the rotation - my apologies for the abysmal photo quality.

When I asked people what they thought about the program, there were some who figured it was just fine and those who thought it was pretty boring. I think there's consensus that they would like improvements to the program, and I don't think anyone in Qali Warma asked their opinion on the matter. I'm mainly worried about how much sugar seems to be necessary to get the kids to eat their portion of milk, and how sweet the galletas need to be to get eaten in school.

In short, my weekend was a tremendous gain for me personally (I missed Capilla even more than I thought I did), and for my thesis.