Deep-green asparagus fields among gray sand dunes ring the city, the key to its success. Ica sits at the heart of Peru’s gigantic agro-industrial business, one of the main motors driving Latin America’s fastest-growing economy. The developers of Ica hit the jackpot by making the desert bloom. Today the biggest producers have edged out many of the smaller farmers, and they export enough asparagus, grapes, avocado and other crops to feed much of the hemisphere.
“We are an icon of successful agriculture,” said a clearly proud Jose Chlimper Ackerman, who is sometimes called the “king of asparagus” and is head of Agrokasa, one of the most prosperous agribusinesses based primarily in Ica.
Peru is the world’s largest exporter of fresh asparagus, primarily to the US, and most of it comes from Ica. Once a sleepy town known mostly for its pisco brandy, Ica is today a bustling city choked by traffic and drowned in an endless cacophony of car horns.
Billboards speak to consumerism: Nextel cell phones (“as productive as the people of Ica”), resort vacations and fashions by Kate Moss. As service industries, discotheques and shopping malls explode in numbers, hundreds of three-wheel “moto-taxis” that look like motorized rickshaws have turned the city into, as one local put it, a mini-Mumbai.
Vast expanses of farmland give way to blocks of housing, some of it solid single-family homes with jutting rebar suggesting more stories to come , followed by new prefab construction, apartment complexes and then, where the desert encroaches, rows of nothing more than tents and plywood shanties.
Yet for all the growth, real wealth has spread only so far and “zero unemployment” does not solve all a community’s ills. In fact, there has paradoxically been a rise in disease and decline in education going hand in hand with the proliferation of jobs. Professionals end up in packing plants, and many high-school-age kids opt to “go to the asparagus” (work the fields) instead of studying.
More predictable side effects of zero unemployment include inflation (prices of some basic food products such as cooking oil and rice have more than doubled in the last five years) and the social divisions that come with a large migrant influx. Authorities’ efforts to provide electricity have not kept up with the expanding grid of formal and less-so neighborhoods, and dwindling water goes more to the cash-cow farms than to the people.
The phenomenon around Ica is a microcosm of Peru’s broader economic “miracle.” Enormous growth in the past decade has been based largely on extracting lucrative commodities, whether it’s asparagus or silver and copper, and exporting them to markets, from the United States to China.
(Los Angeles Times)
