ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Planet Money's Erika Beras just got herself through a long winter by consuming vast quantities of blueberries. When she looked at the packaging, they were all from Peru. And the reason for that, she learned, is cocaine.
ERIKA BERAS, BYLINE: In the '70s and '80s, while the U.S. fought what they named the war on drugs, it wasn't just here in the U.S. Robert Rogowsky, former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, says we also fought the supply side.
ROBERT ROGOWSKY: It was a Colombia thing. It was the Colombian drug cartels.
BERAS: Cocaine was the big thing. That came from those Colombian drug cartels. But the coca plants also grew in Bolivia, Ecuador and mostly Peru. To get farmers to stop growing coca, the U.S. began what it called its Andean strategy. American law enforcement agents outfitted the Peruvian military and local police with equipment to literally root out the problem.
Were they actually going and ripping...
ROGOWSKY: Yes.
BERAS: ...The plants out?
ROGOWSKY: Sure. Oh, yeah. We gave them technology to identify where these crops were being grown. They would send troops in, and then they would just go in and burn it up or destroy it, pull it out of the ground.
BERAS: The thing was, farmers could make 10 times more growing coca than other crops. So, Robert says they needed to entice farmers to grow something else.
ROGOWSKY: A good war policy is destroy the enemy but create something that incentivizes that enemy to do something else that makes them an ally.
BERAS: The plan - to make Peruvian farmers our economic partners. Programs like these are informally called Aid for Trade. Instead of sending a country aid, you send them aid that will help them trade. So the U.S. started sending assistance for farming infrastructure and seed research to figure out the right crop for export to the U.S. Congress also eliminated tariffs on almost everything grown in that Andes region.
Along Peru's sandy coast, USAID scientists identified a seed that could flourish - not blueberries, but asparagus. And over the next decade, those USAID seeds helped sow a new era for Peru. The country had a big new export, and in the U.S., we started eating twice as much asparagus. Peruvian businessman Jose Antonio Gomez-Bazan grew up visiting the coast when it was just sandy dunes. Then he left to study and work. When he came back in 2011...
JOSE ANTONIO GOMEZ BAZAN: It was a green ocean.
BERAS: All that asparagus.
GOMEZ BAZAN: I couldn't believe it. I was like, where's the desert? Where the desert went?
BERAS: But by this time, there was more competition in the asparagus market from Mexico and China. So now, with USAID working in other parts of the country, it fell to Peruvians like Jose Antonio to identify a new seed, a new export that Americans would buy and Peru could grow. At his job with the produce company Camposol, Jose Antonio was looking for something that would do well in sandy soil, stay fresh on a container ship and hit U.S. markets in the winter. He liked a North American fruit, the blueberry. They landed on a big round, crunchy, tart type called Biloxi.
GOMEZ BAZAN: Biloxi was literally the leader that conquered the Peruvian desert right after asparagus.
BERAS: After cold-calling American distributors and then stores, Jose Antonio got a contract with Costco, then Walmart and Publix. Today, Peru is the world's biggest exporter of blueberries. America's investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars plus a series of free trade agreements were fruitful. While back in 1990, Peru exported about $60 million worth of produce worldwide, more recently that number is closer to $7 billion.
Until President Trump cut almost all of USAID's budget, the U.S. was sending millions of dollars to Peru annually for programs like crop substitution, and it had a huge impact. Peru became a close trading partner, and coca was no longer its dominant agricultural export. But those coca farmers in Peru didn't all move over to other crops. Now, Robert Rogowsky says Peru exports lots of blueberries and still lots of coca.
ROGOWSKY: Because now it can grow both products and generate wealth this way. So in terms of just pure wealth generation, it's a plus for Peru.
BERAS: And an unintended consequence of so much legit shipping out of the country - sometimes, hidden in a steel container, there might be some cocaine riding shotgun. Erika Beras, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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