José del Carmen Portocarrero Santillán is 82 and has spent most of his life as a farmer in the Peruvian village of Ramos in the Amazonas region – like his parents and, at present, the majority of his seven children and his more than 20 grandchildren. Don Carmen owns 3 hectares of land that he has divided among his children. They grow a variety of crops: coffee, yucca, beans, bananas, pineapple and small amounts of sugar cane. All are for home consumption except the pineapples, which are the family’s only significant source of income. Don Carmen and his wife also own some poultry, horses, a cow and a calf: the milk is for the household.

In good weather 20–130 pineapples are harvested a day, in bad weather the yield may be halved. The land is not irrigated, and the family maintains its fertility with a system of crop rotation. In recent times, says Don Carmen, “the weather is becoming more regular, so the crops are improving”, but pineapple productivity has been affected by disease. The promised aid from the Ministry of Agriculture to prevent infestations has not materialised.

Ramos is in the district of Santa Rosa, in the province of Rodríguez de Mendoza. A village of about 45 families, it is relatively isolated, being half an hour’s walk from the next village. The farmers’ harvests are too small to allow them to save and buy a vehicle to transport their goods further afield. “We cannot save money; we only buy things for the day,” explains Don Carmen. They remain dependent on bartering or selling their pineapples at very low prices with “the Huambinos” (people from the neighbouring province of Huambo).

The low levels of cash income also prevent the villagers of Ramos from working collectively and increasing their bargaining power: “…people don’t have time or ability enough to manage [farming associations]. To form a committee costs much money, we have to book it in with the Public Registry, and we don’t have [the funds].” But Don Carmen doesn’t lack community spirit: he has been a Justice of the Peace and has held other positions of authority in Ramos, helping with construction of the school and church.

Family is everything to Don Carmen. He and his wife recently celebrated 50 years of marriage and all his relatives came together to give them a party. The one thing his family does not lack is “love”, he says, but as for other resources: “We cannot supply our needs. When we have to go to [the provincial capital] Mendoza, or to the health post if we fall sick, we cannot get money [to do this] because we haven’t sold enough…” Despite the precariousness of their lives, things were worse, he explains, when he was a boy: “There was more poverty – sometimes we didn’t even have anything to eat.”