Evaluating the Impact of Adequate Agronomy with Emphasis in Crop Nutrition in the Poverty Alleviation of Coffee Growers in Northern Peru

Summary
The Programa Familia (PF) of the COMERCIO & CIA group in Northern Peru, is an initiative that aims to train coffee growers in the use of best agronomical practices and balanced mineral and organic nutrition to raise crop yields and in turn increase profits and reduce poverty. Despite the success of PF, there is no formal measurement of the economic impact of this initiative. This pre-proposal is the first attempt to develop a socio-economic study to carry out such assessment.

Proposed Methodology
The PF initiative has been active in the Jaen province of Northern Peru, reaching an increasing number of farmers since its onset in 2004. After the price crash of coffee in 1999 many farmers moved to organic production in the hope of higher profits, unfortunately without actual benefits (see photo). What happened instead was that most farms entered a spiral of soil degradation and smaller harvests. The Programa Familia was seen as a solution to return increased yields and to improved soil through training and adequate agronomy.

Photo 1. A comparison of poor yield under organic management with no fertilizer, excessive shading and poor training (left) versus the increased yields of farmers joining the Programa Familia (right).

Despite the documented increases in yield and observed soil amelioration due to better technology, especially the increased and sensible use of fertilizer (Reiles and Espinosa, 2011), there is not an formal comparison of the impact of PF in the income of farmers.

The PF initiative and IPNI-NLA suggest to initiate an extensive survey study among three groups: 1) farmers that have been in the PF initiative for at least three years, 2) farmers in the region of impact of PF that have not join the initiative and 3) farmers in a control area with no activities of PF at all.

We aim to survey about 200 families in each of these categories, with a total between 600 to 700 families overall. These surveys will cover questions on the education, economy, technology learned and used, fertilizer used, yields, other costs and the current income of the farmers. As well, an appraisal of the soil and crop status of the farms will be carried out in random subgroups of farmers in each category.

The person in charge of this evaluation will be Mr Reiles Zapata reileszr@molicom.com.pe, an economist that has been related to the Programa Familia since its’ beginning. For this study we will hire an external economist and support staff to actually carry out the surveys and analyze the differences between groups. The timeline we propose is first, to form and train a team of pollsters and carry out test surveys in the first month of the study; then carry out the surveys in about three months in areas of the Jaen province and other province to be defined. Finally, the economists in charge will carry out an analysis of the education level and income distribution within and among the groups evaluated using three months, this last period will include the generation of a paper on the results of the study. In total we estimate to use about 8 months to complete this study.