The Agriculture And Economics Of Peru Essay

The Agriculture And Economics Of Peru Essay, Research Paper

Peru’s gross domestic product in the late 1980s was $19.6 billion, or about $920

per capita. Although the economy remains primarily agricultural, the mining and

fishing industries have become increasingly important. Peru relies primarily on the

export of raw materials?chiefly minerals, farm products, and fish meal?to earn

foreign exchange for importing machinery and manufactured goods. During the

late 1980s, guerrilla violence, rampant inflation, chronic budget deficits, and

drought combined to drive the country to the brink of fiscal insolvency. However,

in 1990 the government imposed an austerity program that removed price controls

and ended subsidies on many basic items and allowed the inti, the national

currency, to float against the United States dollar.

About 35 percent of Peru’s working population is engaged in farming. Most

of the coastal area is devoted to the raising of export crops; on the monta?a and the

sierra are mainly grown crops for local consumption. Many farms in Peru are very

small and are used to produce subsistence crops; the country also has large

cooperative farms. The chief agricultural products, together with the approximate

annual yield (in metric tons) in the late 1980s, were sugarcane (6.2 million),

potatoes (2 million), rice (1.1 million), corn (880,000), seed cotton (280,000),

coffee (103,000), and wheat (134,000). Peru is the world’s leading grower of coca,

from which the drug cocaine is refined.

The livestock population included about 3.9 million cattle, 13.3 million

sheep, 1.7 million goats, 2.4 million hogs, 875,000 horses and mules, and 52

million poultry. Llamas, sheep, and vicu?as provide wool, hides, and skins.

The forests covering 54 percent of Peru’s land area have not been

significantly exploited. Forest products include balsa lumber and balata gum,

rubber, and a variety of medicinal plants. Notable among the latter is the cinchona

plant, from which quinine is derived. The annual roundwood harvest in the late

1980s was 7.7 million cu m.

The fishing industry is extremely important to the country’s economy and

accounts for a significant portion of Peru’s exports. It underwent a remarkable

expansion after World War II (1939-1945); the catch in the late 1980s was about

5.6 million metric tons annually. More than three-fifths of the catch is anchovies,

used for making fish meal, a product in which Peru leads the world.

The extractive industries figure significantly in the Peruvian economy. Peru

ranks as one of the world’s leading producers of copper, silver, lead, and zinc;

petroleum, natural gas, iron ore, molybdenum, tungsten, and gold are extracted in

significant quantities. Annual production in the late 1980s included 3.3 million

metric tons of iron ore; 406,400 metric tons of copper; 2054 metric tons of silver;

203,950 metric tons of lead; and 612,500 metric tons of zinc. About 64.9 million

barrels of crude petroleum were produced, along with 578.3 million cu m of

natural gas.

Much manufacturing in Peru is on a small scale, but a number of modern