Perhaps, together with Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and the Central American countries, the Peruvian countryside is among the most backward in Latin America, which is evidenced by the poor standard of living of thousands of peasants. Departments such as Huancavelica, Amazonas, Apurímac, Cajamarca, Ayacucho, Pasco and Madre de Dios are the most backward and their levels of extreme poverty are below the country's average.
However, there are poor areas that border the cities and are also in poverty and extreme poverty, despite having rich natural resources. For example, we refer to broad sectors of the departments of La Libertad, Piura, Arequipa, Lambayeque, Junín and Ica. The highland provinces of Lima do not escape this reality either. For years, central, regional and municipal governments have always ruled behind the backs of their peoples.
For example, Canta, Cajatambo, Huarochirí, Barranca and Oyón have very poor Andean communities and are in Lima. In many cases, this poverty dates back decades and even dates back to previous centuries. Despite this, the various authorities did little or nothing to reverse this situation.
It is stated that Peru is a leader in microfinance, but this reality is not felt in the agricultural and livestock sectors of different parts of the country. Although it is true that some municipal savings and credit banks, non-governmental development organizations, Small Business Development Entities (Edpyme), finance companies, cooperatives and rural banks, are already working in these sectors, the development revolution has not yet has reached the field.
Perhaps the rural savings banks, Banco de la Nación, Agrobanco and some CMACs are working in these areas, but there is so much to do that the efforts are hardly noticeable. It is the beginning of a long way to go, to invest and to work in a coordinated manner among the institutions that operate in these sectors.
However, there are still serious problems to be solved. Among them are the lack of infrastructure, the very serious management of risks that limit rural financial activities and the environment where these finances operate, which are not always willing to continue supporting agriculture. Those are some limitations that the sector has.
This means having concerted actions between government institutions that are already working in these areas, such as Agrobanco, Banco de la Nación and COFIDE (as a second-tier bank that finances projects). These organizations are striving to give their best, but each one works on their own, when they can do it in a coordinated way.
Likewise, the government should generate public policy schemes to efficiently support agriculture from the perspective of rural microfinance. These should be discussed with representatives of the financial sector to see how they can collaborate with public policies that are sustained over time and that in turn allow the development of the financial system, especially those who support small commercial agriculture.
A revolution is urgently needed in the countryside, not in the communist style of the old Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung, but in the social model that Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio “Lula” Da Silva has been developing. In the 1960s, Brazil had an agricultural underdeveloped due to the land problem, and now it is one of the largest economies in the world and the main one in Latin America.
