For the Rural Poor of Peru, the Social Agenda is Far Away

“The day will come when people do not have to go to the cities to overcome poverty,” says Elmer Pinares, mayor of an Andean highlands municipality in Cuzco, in southern Peru, where malnutrition and lack of support for subsistence farming are among the main problems.

“If I were president of Peru, I would reactivate the Andes highlands by supporting small-scale agriculture and training women and men in the face of climate change, so that communities can take advantage of their resources and families can have a good quality of life,” the mayor of Huaro, a town of 4,500 inhabitants located at 3,100 meters above sea level, told IPS.

Huaro is one of the 12 districts (municipalities) of the province of Quispicanchi, in turn one of the 13 that make up Cuzco, a department with high rates of inequality and poverty, despite being Peru’s epicentre of tourism and source of high-protein foods, such as quinoa, tarwi (Lupinus mutabilis) and amaranth (Amaranthus caudatus).

"In our administration, we aim to combat chronic child malnutrition and we have focused our efforts on guaranteeing food security for families in a situation of extreme poverty, then we will sell outside if there is a surplus." -- Enrique Achahui

These problems translate into high rates of child malnutrition and anemia in the highlands areas, curtailing opportunities for the rural population from early childhood, said Pinares, who after finishing his three-year term in 2019 is determined to return to teaching at the local school.

At total of 38,533 girls and boys under the age of three are malnourished in the Andean communities of Cuzco, where the population is predominantly native Quechua, he said.

Peru, a country of 32 million people, has made progress in reducing child malnutrition in the last decade, but official figures show that in this region of 1.4 million people malnutrition remains high at 53.1 percent of children, almost 10 percentage points above the national average of 43.5 percent.

“This is the reality in the highland communities of the Peruvian Andes, which the national government ignores,” said Pinares, who during his term has promoted the development of productive projects for the benefit of families, with the support of a small team of local technicians.

And the situation in Huaro, IPS found during a tour of rural communities in the area, is repeated in other districts located over 3,000 meters above sea level, which forms part of the territory where rural poverty is concentrated in Peru.

According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics and Information, from 2016, overall poverty in Peru stands at 20.7 percent of the population, but rural poverty climbs to 43.8 percent, and of that proportion, 13.2 percent live in extreme poverty.

For this group of Peruvians, food security is still a distant goal, as acknowledged by another government study from 2017. (IPS)