Peru's blueberry industry is as recent as it is successful. According to Carlos Gereda, the founder of the company Inka's Berries, a reference in the production of blueberries in the country, “Peru has become the mecca of blueberries.”
Gereda was a pioneer in perceiving Peru's potential as a blueberry producer. “It all started in Chile,” he recalled in an interview with the BBC. “My father got word of the success of Chile's blueberry industry thanks to some friends that traveled there,” he stated. After traveling to Chile to see this success for himself, Gereda embarked on an adventure that not many believed in. The literature said blueberries couldn't be produced in Peru because they wouldn't get enough cold hours. The challenge was to grow blueberries on the desert Peruvian coast and, consequently, find a variety that could be produced there.
“In 2006 I started looking for plants to bring to Peru. I was surprised that they had to be ordered from the United States or Chile, that they had a very high cost, and that they took two or three years to arrive.” Convinced that his project required producing the plants in Peru, Gereda took more than 10,000 plants of 14 different varieties in Chile to test them in Peru.
He then started a project in collaboration with the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT) of the National Agricultural University La Molina to clone them in vitro by meristematic reproduction.
"In 2018, IBT scientists told us that they had found the way to reproduce them in vitro and I personally verified that 4 of the 14 Chilean varieties worked well."
The following year, Gereda founded Inka's Berries and began supplying four agricultural companies that began to produce blueberries with their plants, among which the Biloxi variety stood out.
“For Peru to become a player in the world market, it was essential to have fruit between the end of August and the beginning of December, because no one in the world had blueberries at that time. That's why the Biloxi variety shone,” Gereda stated, adding that this variety has been the engine of the Peruvian blueberry revolution in recent years.
Today, Peru has become the third global producer with more than 261,000 tons annually, only behind China and the United States, and the world's largest exporter of a crop that is relatively new in the country.
Source: bbc.com