Peruvian Blueberries Are Thriving Abroad, but Local Harvesters Are Left Behind

In just a decade, Peru went from not growing blueberries to leading global exports, breaking new records each year. But for harvesters, living conditions have changed little, if at all.

Since high school, Esther and Gabriela Apaza have worked as harvesters for companies that make fat wallets selling avocados, grapes, and other prized crops grown in Peru's coastal desert overseas.

“There is no shortage of work here,” says the eldest sister, Gabriela, 26, from their house made of plywood and corrugated iron, lacking running water and electricity. The Apazas live on a nameless dirt street in Villa Rotary, one of the informal settlements that sprang up to shelter agricultural workers—mostly migrant families from Peru’s interior—on the outskirts of Ica, the country’s agro-export hub, about 185 miles south of Lima.

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With half their lives spent on agriculture, the sisters are used to the seasonal rhythm of the field, moving on three-month contracts from one company to the next, from one crop to another. But over the past years, the Apazas have harvested nothing but Peru’s latest star crop: blueberries, a booming non-native fruit unfamiliar to both them and the country until recently.

Peru, once considered unsuitable for berries, grew from a few hundred acres in 2012 to becoming the world’s top exporter of fresh blueberries over the last six years.

Today, the blueberry industry is Peru’s largest agricultural employer, providing 125,000 direct jobs. The country makes over a billion dollars annually by exporting most of the 200,000 tons of blueberries it produces. The blueberry fields now span 50,000 acres, an area twice the size of Paris, primarily along the coast, where the interplay between the Humboldt Current and the Andes creates greenhouse-like conditions that support high yields and year-round production. This allows companies to sell when competitors cannot, and prices are higher on the global market.

As the world’s appetite for this healthy fruit grows, Peruvian blueberry exports break new records every year, with over half of sales heading to the United States and nearly a quarter to Europe.

But this success has not translated to everyone the same way. The living conditions of blueberry harvesters, mostly women, have changed little, if at all.

For Ica's agricultural workers, the day starts before dawn. Around 4:30am, bundled in scarves and hoods against the cold, hundreds gather at stops along the Panamericana road. Dust from their footsteps mixes with the fog and smoke from food stalls selling chicken broth.

The Apaza sisters wait for their company bus, while many others without jobs search for recruiters. “I have blueberry harvest work,” one of them shouts. A woman in her sixties asks about the daily pay. Fifty soles for 25 kilos—$13 for 55 pounds of blueberries harvested. “That’s a lot of kilos,” she replies, as she hands the recruiter her ID in resignation. 

Once in the field, workers glide into the assigned plot, enclosed by windbreak netting, and navigate the tidy rows of blueberry bushes, standing barely five feet tall. About twenty khaki safari-style hats stand out, their wide brims and back flaps halting the sun. At harvest time, pickers check cluster by cluster, fruit by fruit. If the blueberry is sufficiently large and its color dark, they carefully twist it with two fingertips, which gradually dye blue. Depending on their condition, workers sort the blueberries into different jugs hanging from a strap around their waists: the flawless to export, the rest for the domestic market. The challenge lies in finding the balance between delicacy and speed. 

“If you don't fill a minimum number of jugs, you might get fired,” says Esther, the youngest of the Apazas, now 23. If you exceed it, you earn one sol ($0.27) for each extra jug. “It’s all about yield.”

These “priority orders,” as companies call them, aren’t new. They depend on the blueberry varieties—the larger the fruit, the more kilos a harvester must pick—and companies say that they are meant to benefit workers by rewarding efficiency. But blueberry pickers claim that demands have intensified since a new agrarian law took effect in 2021 and included a 30% bonus on the farm workers’ salaries. Their basic wage is the national minimum set at 310 dollars per month at the current exchange rate.

“Companies want to avoid giving us this bonus for free,” says Walter Campos, 45, who has been working for over a decade for the country’s largest blueberry exporter, Camposol, in the region of La Libertad. “In exchange, they demand more productivity.”

Half of Peru’s blueberries are grown in La Libertad, nestled halfway between Lima and the border with Ecuador. The heart of production is its province of Virú, which embraces the valleys of the Virú and Chao rivers, as well as part of Santa, one of the largest rivers on Peru's coast. Santa springs from over 13,000 feet in the Andes. Then its waters are channeled for irrigation in the lower basins through a megaproject named Chavimochic.

It takes about an hour to reach Virú from Trujillo, the capital of La Libertad, driving through vast agricultural estates tucked behind shrubs, with signs warning of "guarded areas with armed personnel." The farms give way to hilly slums where luxury is scarce, but agricultural businesses and restaurants thrive, serving seafood to the beat of cumbia.

Campos and his wife, Julisa González, 42, live with their children in one of these settlements called Valle de Dios. She also works as a blueberry picker for Camposol. Yet together, their earnings barely cover the basic needs of their seven-person household, estimated at $120 per person monthly in Peru.

“Sometimes we don't even have enough for the children's schooling,” González says, sitting in the corner of the garage that serves as a dining room. In front of her, dozens of stacked plastic chairs lean against a bare brick wall. They are used for meetings of the Camposol workers' union.

Campos was one of the union's founders. Today, the union has more than 2,000 members, making it the largest in Peru's agribusiness, or an exception in a sector where union membership is less than 5%. Many workers don't join for fear of retaliation, they say. González used to be one of those. But she ultimately took over the leadership of the union a couple of years ago, after being “on the front lines” of historic agrarian protests.

At the end of 2020, both Ica and La Libertad became the epicenters of a widespread farm worker strike that overturned a decades-old agrarian law. The controversial rule had been enacted, on a temporary basis, in 2000, in the last weeks of Alberto Fujimori’s government. By offering generous tax benefits to companies, it sought to boost large-scale investment in the countryside, as Peru recovered from the economic crisis and internal armed conflict that marked its dark 1980s.

Fujimori’s agrarian promotion law, alongside the 1993 Constitution, still in force, and other neoliberal reforms, is widely seen as the driving force behind the surge in Peruvian agricultural exports, which have grown over 13 times since the early 2000s—blueberries are now the country’s second-largest export crop, just behind grapes. Major irrigation projects and trade agreements also helped make agricultural exports Peru’s second-largest foreign exchange earner, after mining. Yet the country has some of the highest food insecurity rates in South America, and one of the lowest tax burdens in the region.

Originally set to last for 10 years, successive governments extended the 2000 agrarian law until 2031. Farm workers protesting during the 2020 strike blamed it for putting the rights of big companies over them and keeping their wages low. They also denounced labor abuses, arbitrary dismissals, and mistreatment, calling for an end to a regime they deemed “slave-like.”

“It was very exploitative,” recalls Caleb Clemente Centón, who worked for years in Ica’s blueberry farms and other agricultural export companies. But then came the agrarian strike, and he stepped up to lead the workers’ movement in his neighborhood, popularly known as Barrio Chino. After the protests, which spread for weeks and left three dead and dozens seriously injured, Clemente claims he was threatened, arrested, and charged with criminal organization and land usurpation. “There is no guarantee I won’t end up in jail tomorrow.”

Since then, Clemente has shifted from agricultural work to running his room-rental business. He turned his home, a flimsy mix of wood planks and sheet metal on a corner in Barrio Chino, into a shelter for temporary farm workers. At the peak of the harvest season, between August and February, all 50 of his rooms are full. He rents them for about 25 dollars a month, mostly to young couples under 25 with children, who are usually left alone at home while their parents work from dawn to dusk. 

With the reform resulting from the agrarian protests, many farm workers agree that things have changed little. Their pockets barely noticed the salary bonus with inflation rising and some companies cancelling previous bonuses, such as one they used to give for “perfect attendance.” Working conditions, they say, haven’t improved significantly either.

According to data obtained through the law on transparency and access to public information, since the new agrarian law went into force, the Peruvian oversight agency has imposed at least 1,380 fines on agricultural companies, including blueberry exporters, amounting to over $19 million for violations of labor rights and wages, and inadequate safety conditions, among others.

In business circles, however, the new agrarian law is perceived as an obstacle to competitiveness as it gradually increases taxes. They blamed it for what some call a “severe crisis” in the sector.

“The investment in our agricultural extensions has fallen to zero,” says Minister of Agriculture Ángel Manero, who since taking office last year has unsuccessfully pushed to restore tax benefits for agricultural export companies. Over the past decades, Manero notes, the agro-export sector has shown that its greatest social contribution is job creation. But now “there’s a very critical employment trend largely due to over-regulation,” the minister warns. Peruvian agriculture lost 100,000 jobs in 2023 and likely lost another 85,000 in 2024, Manero estimates. 

But these job losses are also explained by poor performance in Peruvian agriculture, with 2023 being the worst in nearly three decades. That year, the El Niño event raised temperatures on Peru’s northern coast by 40 degrees Fahrenheit above average, devastating yields and causing blueberry harvests to drop by 25 percent. Despite this big toll on production, the slump in Peru’s blueberry supply in 2023 shook the global market, pushing the average price up by 70% and giving the South American country a record $1.7 billion in revenue. In 2024, production rebounded and blueberry sales reached a new all-time high of $2.2 billion.  

The recent El Niño event, along with the expectation of rising temperatures due to climate change, has accelerated efforts to develop new genetically improved blueberry varieties that can thrive in hotter climates. Future growth expectations are also focused on the Asian market, especially China, following the launch of the new Chancay mega-port, which will reduce shipping time between Lima and Shanghai by 10 days. A container of Peruvian blueberries was the first shipped when this long-awaited project opened last November.

During the day, Villa Rotary feels like a ghost town, with only stray dogs roaming its sandy streets, framed by crops and shacks competing against the desert mountains. From above, massive reservoirs filled with water pierce the green fields. Drip-irrigated blueberries require between 1.6 million and 3.7 million gallons of water per 2.5 acres each year. This is about two to six Olympic-sized swimming pools, more than asparagus but less than avocados.

As the sun sets and the shadows of the hanging sheets stretch with the last light, farm workers return home, and Villa Rotary comes alive. The Apaza sisters head straight home to take a shower. Their mother has already heated the limited water supply they store in buckets when the pipe runs, usually just once or twice a week.

Then Gabriela feeds her one-year-old son, and Esther dives into books on irrigation and agricultural sanitation. One day, she says, “I want to become a leading engineer for a major agricultural export company.”