Tacna in southern Peru, close to the border with Chile, is where an ambitious new pomegranate farm and pack house has been built. This will benefit 100 small farmers in this fruit fly free area in Peru says one of the founders of Evergreen Agro Farms (EGA Farms) Roberto Persivale.
Aldo Fuster and Roberto Persivale showing the first harvest in their packhouse
“Last year was our first harvest and we exported 8 containers of fresh pomegranate fruit of excellent quality to Europe. We had to use another packing house since ours was not ready when the season started (February to May 2022) and shipped it through the Callao port which is 1 000 km away from the plant. This year we will start using our processing packing unit located at the Tacna free trade zone and 50 km away from the port of Arica, in Chile, where we plan to ship 30 containers of pomegranates this coming season. We also plan to integrate a couple of producer associations of oranges for a trial export to the US in May through July,” states Persivale.
EGA Farms is a holding company that has three subsidiaries in the agribusiness exporting of fresh fruits with the participation of smallholder farmers in Tacna. As with any new business there are several challenges for them to overcome says Persivale.
The team inspecting trees
“One challenge is our business model such as financing and keep training the growing number of farmers we are engaging with, over 50 this year and most likely over 100 in 2024. The certification processes for exports are very demanding as well and most of the farmers did not have prior experience in this area. Quality assurance and biological controls are an integral part of the business since it is required by the local and destination Agriculture authorities such as Senasa in Peru and USDA and Aphis in the US.
"Our plan is to incorporate EGA USA to manage the importing and distribution of our fresh products, so by 2024, we will have around 300 containers to ship of 3 to 4 different products. The main strategic reason is that Tacna is the only area where we are free of fruit flies, just as in Chile. Chilean fresh fruits do not need to undergo any cooling treatments or irradiation while Peru does. This slows the introduction of our fruits into the market and creates huge additional costs for our fruit which is passed to the returns of the growers. We believe we can take care of the process with the local Senasa but really need help to not only develop a thoroughly structured plan and process with the entities involved for this process in the US and touch base with the stakeholders as well,” he explains.
Evergreen Agro was created in 2017 by Aldo Fuster, a business leader from Tacna, Gaby Bronfman an Israeli sustainable business developer, and Persivale, a social and environment-focused entrepreneur. The purpose of the company is to develop several products and services for smallholder farmers throughout Peru. They started with the first project of pomegranate fruit production for export with the engagement of 23 smallholder farmers. They are early adopters who received a technology kit which included high- quality Wonderful pomegranate biological material from Israel and a technology transfer program on how to grow the trees until production.
The started packing oranges too
“In 2018 we created Granadas del Sur which is a sustainable farm with 50 acres of land to develop a farm operation of pomegranates trees that will complement the supply from the smallholder farmers for future exports and will serve as a demonstrative farm for them. We raised $400 000 from 10 angel investors, who we call virtual farmers. Evergreen Agro operates the farm with state-of-the-art solar panel pumps and has planted a third of the area with pomegranate trees.
"Finally, the third company is EGA Agroindustrial which was incorporated in 2022 and has built a million-dollar packing house facility to process the fruit from our associated pomegranate growers and other potential cooperative farmers in the area who are growing avocados, oranges, sweet potatoes, and watermelon. We believe we can grow with a subset of approximately 1 000 smallholder growers in the area. The quality of the fruit is spectacular due to different climate conditions as well,” says a hopeful Persivale.
For more information:
Roberto Persivale
Evergreen Agro Farms
Tel: +51 941101 892
Email: rpersivale@gmail.com