The sweet story of Peru’s blueberry boom

PERU’S blueberry harvest is just beginning, and Ivan Jauregui, an agronomist, looks excited. At a farm he oversees about 100 kilometres north of Lima, the capital, workers are gently twisting the fruit from their bushes. Staff in a newly built packing-plant load the best berries into refrigerated shipping containers, then pack them off to the port of Callao. Jauregui says he once squeezed 35 tonnes of blueberries from a single hectare of land; he is always hoping to beat this record. “Every year we have to grow and improve,” he says.

Peru caught blueberry fever a little over a decade ago. Farmers noticed that their counterparts in Chile were making a lot of money selling the fruit during the off-season in the United States, when prices are high. They sought to do the same – and things have worked out better than anyone dared hope. Back in 2013, Peruvians earned about US$17 million exporting blueberries; by last year receipts had soared to US$1.7 billion. In 2019, Peru became the world’s single biggest exporter of fresh blueberries. Nowadays, it sends more than twice as many berries abroad as its closest rivals.

The country owes much of its success to novel kinds of blueberry bush. Historically, the fruit has grown well only in places with chilly winters. Peru’s blue revolution relies on newfangled “low chill” varieties, developed in the US, that thrive on Peru’s coast.