Unlocking high-value agriculture in Peru

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Just over ten years ago, in 2012, Peru didn’t export blueberries at all. Now, it’s a world leader in blueberry exports, and the industry employs an estimated 135,000 people during the growing season. This was no accident. But how exactly did Peru’s government make this happen, what specific steps did they take, and what lessons were learnt about the bottlenecks to pursuing high-value agriculture?

In this episode of Ideas in Development, part of our series on growth policy, Kartik Akileswaran and I talk with Peru’s former Minister of Production, Piero Ghezzi, about the tools Peru used to become a global leader in exporting high-value fruits and vegetables, including the experimental industrial policy tool at the heart of this story: the Mesas Ejecutivas (executive round tables).

Our conversation covers Peru’s attempt to move from episodic growth to more deliberate productive transformation; why the state needed to rethink industrial policy; how Mesas Ejecutivas helped unblock bottlenecks for the private sector; and what this all means for jobs, informality and the future of development policy.

In the early 2010s, Peru was one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America. But this growth wasn’t accompanied by the “virtuous cycles that are normally associated with development in terms of strengthening of institutions, strengthening of human capital”.

Instead, Piero and co-author José Gallardo wrote a book diagnosing what they called episodic growth – impressive macroeconomic performance sitting atop weak microeconomic fundamentals.

Piero cites the 2011 elections as an example of this, where two non-establishment candidates moved to the second round of elections. The mismatch between elite optimism and popular discontent signified the need for a different development strategy.

After publishing their book on Peru’s development challenges, Piero was invited to become Minister of Production, with his responsibilities including industry, SMEs and some cross‑cutting productivity issues.

Rethinking industrial policy: Productive diversification instead of picking winners

Piero arrived in government convinced that Peru needed to adjust its development model. The goal was not to abandon markets or macro stability, but to be “a little more aggressive with some industrial policy” so that growth would generate learning, capabilities and structural change.

Crucially, he wanted to move away from a narrow focus on manufacturing and instead promote productive diversification across multiple sectors.

“Instead of talking about just manufacturing industry as a source of growth, we should focus on more productive diversification because it's obvious to us that as important as what you do is how you do it, right?”

He also had to navigate Latin America’s political aversion to industrial policy, rooted in the region’s disappointing history with state‑led development.

“Pedro Malan famously, the minister of Fernando Henrique Cardoso said, the best industrial policy is no-industrial policy”.

In response, many countries rebranded industrial policy as productive development policies, which was a euphemism to talk about the same policies, and also opened the door to working on sectors beyond classic manufacturing, such as agro‑exports.

So Peru’s challenge was to design modern industrial policy tools that avoided the old pitfalls of picking winners and offering blunt subsidies, while still actively tackling real‑world bottlenecks.

Mesas Ejecutivas: A new tool for public–private problem solving

When Ghezzi got into office, international consultancies were quick to offer diagnostic reports and detailed roadmaps.

These traditional exercises, he argues, “normally don't work for development” because they lack the flexibility to deal with uncertainty, coordination failures and technological change. They also take too long: with less than three years in office:

“had we… followed the advice of these consultancies, it would have taken like a year or more to write a diagnosis. So we would have had no time to implement.”

Instead, he and his team pioneered a new approach by convening public and private stakeholders into highly execution-focused working groups that became known as Mesas Ejecutivas. Ghezzi’s starting point was a blunt assessment of existing government ‘mesas’ and commissions:

“We analysed what these mesas typically were doing and we did just the opposite.”

Traditional ‘mesas’ didn’t genuinely engage the private sector, sent under‑informed public officials, lacked empowered teams, and produced long meetings with no follow‑through. In contrast, the new Mesas Ejecutivas had four distinctive features:

• Productivist – everything was about unblocking constraints to productivity and investment in specific value chains.
• Execution – quick wins were pursued alongside medium‑term objectives, and progress between meetings was treated as central to the method.
• Learning – rather than a linear diagnosis‑then‑implementation model, the mesas updated their understanding of the sector as they worked.
• Dedicated teams – staff were hired to work primarily on mesas, rather than adding them as a minor extra task.

A particularly crucial aspect of these mesas was that they were demand‑driven. Business associations were asked to propose priority sectors, rather than the government announcing them top‑down.

“We started with the sectors that demanded to participate in this co-creation”

This gave the process legitimacy and ensured that firms had skin in the game.

Another success factor was how the Ministry of Production interacted with other ministries. To avoid turf wars, Ghezzi made sure that line ministries got the credit.

“If something good happens, it's because the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Tourism… were the ones who did it.”

Combined with his close relationship with the Minister of Finance, this helped overcome bureaucratic resistance and ensured that bottlenecks identified in mesas could actually be funded and fixed.

Over time, it was actually the private sector itself which coined the name that stuck - “These mesas are very ejecutivas”.

Collaborating with the private sector helped to unlock Peru’s agro‑export boom

Peru’s spectacular rise as a global exporter of blueberries, grapes, asparagus, avocados and mangoes pre‑dated the Mesas Ejecutivas, but the same logic of close public–private collaboration was already in play in the agro-export sector.

Ghezzi recalls attending a major conference in 2013 where most sectors spoke about how they would grow despite the state, assuming outright that the government is a failure. The agro‑exporters were the exception, closely collaborating with the Ministry of Agriculture and SENASA, the phytosanitary authority.

That cooperation was essential because no matter how good Peruvian producers were,they needed the support of the phytosanitary authority in order to export to foreign markets. Public agencies had to secure foreign market access, while firms invested in production and learning.

Several key policy pillars underpinned the agro‑export boom:

• Large-scale irrigation projects that diverted water to the coastal desert, making high‑value crops viable there.
• The creation and strengthening of SENASA, enabling Peru to meet sanitary and phytosanitary standards in global markets.
• A sector‑specific agrarian law that allowed seasonal labour contracts to match the intense but short harvesting periods.
• A network of free trade agreements that lowered tariffs and opened markets.

Within this enabling environment, blueberries became the emblematic success case. Peru’s agro‑export sector discovered that:

“A blueberry in Peru grows in seven months. In Chile, Argentina grows, they grow in three years.”

That huge difference in growing time accelerated both productivity and learning, allowing Peruvian firms to experiment rapidly with varieties and management techniques.

Ghezzi emphasises that modern agribusiness is much closer to manufacturing than to traditional farming.

“They may not be producing iPhones but they're still a factory, it's a factory for grapes mangoes avocados blueberries.”

The real sophistication lies not in processing fruit into jams and juices, but in what he calls the “industrialisation of freshness”:

“The real value added is being able to generate a fresh produce with the quality characteristics… that consumer in the Northern Hemisphere is demanding.”

‘Mesas’ in agriculture built on this tradition of collaboration, focusing less on discovering the next crop and more on solving regulatory, logistical and institutional issues once a promising product or market was identified.

Tourism, mining and other bottlenecks

The Mesas Ejecutivas methodology was applied to a range of sectors beyond agriculture, from tourism and mining to food processing and factoring. Across these areas, the mesas often uncovered surprisingly small but highly consequential bottlenecks that were invisible to senior officials.

In the food industry mesa, for example, firms raised an issue with new labelling rules.

Because octagons were already used to signal harmful levels of sugar or fat, using the same symbol for gluten‑free foods sent exactly the wrong signal to consumers. Within the mesa, public officials recognised the mistake and agreed to fix it on the spot.

In the tourism mesa, stakeholders worked together to activate a regional airport several hours from Lima. By coordinating airlines, local authorities and the hotel industry, the mesa helped launch flights and significantly increase tourist arrivals.

A mining mesa revealed that exploration projects were being delayed by an obscure agency under the Ministry of Agriculture, which had responsibility for approving environmental sampling (“muestras”) but lacked staff, guidelines and budget. As Ghezzi explains, the authority “had nothing to do with mining… but had huge impact on exploration.” By staffing and reforming this unit, the mesa reduced a backlog of six to eight months to zero, unlocking new investment.

These examples illustrate the core intuition behind Mesas Ejecutivas:

“The guys who normally have the power don't have the knowledge. And the guys who have the knowledge don't have the power.”

By bringing them together in a structured process, they were able to generate information, trust and continuity that could withstand frequent political turnover.

Jobs, informality and the search for future growth in Peru

Looking ahead, Ghezzi is clear-eyed about the scale of Peru’s remaining challenges. The most pressing is the lack of good jobs in the modern private sector. Despite past growth and sectoral success stories, around 70% of workers remain in informal employment.

Peru – like much of Latin America – lacks good jobs, and has too few productive firms to absorb labour at scale. Ghezzi argues for a twin strategy:

• Productive transformation led by medium and large firms, including new agro‑export and other high‑productivity sectors.
• Productive inclusion for micro and small enterprises, helping them plug into dynamic value chains instead of surviving on the margins.

Here again, mesas can help reduce transaction costs and build partnerships between anchor companies and small suppliers, particularly in agro‑exports and in regions like the Amazon where the structure of the economy differs from the coast.

At the same time, he is realistic about the constraints imposed by Peru’s fragile politics and institutions. The country has cycled through multiple presidents and finance ministers in recent years, making it hard to sustain coherent reform.

This is part of why he sees tools like Mesas Ejecutivas – which can survive across administrations and adapt to different sectors – as valuable pieces of institutional infrastructure in an uncertain environment.

If you want to read more about the blueberry sector in Peru, Valeria Piñeiro, Yostina Girgies, Fernando Martín, Juan Pablo Gianatiempo, and Joseph Glauber have a brilliant write up: Peru’s rapid rise as the world’s leading blueberry exporter