Peruvian Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation Juan Manuel Benites is leading efforts to help farmers affected by recent flooding in the country's north, after an El Niño phenomenon led rivers to overflow.

Torrential rains caused the Tumbes and Zarumilla to burst their banks, reportedly affecting thousands of hectares of farmland and damaging nearby towns.

Photo: Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation

"We have hired heavy equipment to carry out the cleaning and recovery efforts in the areas hits by the rivers overflowing," Benites said.

"The work that we have been doing since last weekend has allowed us to bring the situation under control. We have also hired pumps to clean houses."

According to the minister, during the weekend the Zarumilla River's waters rose by 900 cubic meters of water per second, prompting the floods that occurred early hours of Sunday morning.

On the other hand, the Tumbes River reportedly rose by 1,887 cubic meters of water per second, and according to some local reports more than 5,000 hectares of rice, banana, lime, and cocoa production land have been affected.

The minister said that yesterday the amount of water flowing through the river had decreased, allowing for recovery efforts to take place in affected areas.

The government representative also mentioned he was examining the possibility of establishing a program to recover the productive capacity of affected agricultural land.

"We will see if we can support a financial program for those who need credit, and we have a program allowing us to give them seeds when the water levels drops down so they recuperate their crops in the short-term," Benites said.

Within the next few days a temporary employment program will also be implemented for affected farmers so they can earn an income through cleaning land that has been flooded.

There have been some conflicting reports in the local media of exactly how much agricultural land has been affected, with website Agraria.pe reporting that the Peruvian Association of Rice Growers (APEAR) said 6,400 hectares of rice fields alone had been affected by the flooding in the Tumbes region.

A representative from Grandules - a large producer of bell peppers, avocados, table grapes and mangoes - said the damage to his production would not be too severe as the harvest season for all those crops had already finished.

Company president Juan Varilias told www.freshfruitportal.com some fruits might be slightly affected later on this year, but overall he was optimistic it would not be a disaster.

"We think and we believe that it's not going to be a similar year to last year, when we had lots of problems. We expect that it's not going affect us too much," Varilias said.

Varilias, in addition to some local media reports, also highlighted how Peru was largely unprepared to deal with the effects of El Niño, which he said would also affect other parts of South America.

"It's definitely not a trend that is going to have an influence solely in the north of Peru," he said.

"It's going to extend to many other areas on the Pacific Coast, including Chile. We know that flooding and torrential rains have already started along the central coast of Peru, around Lima there have been discharges from water up in the mountains, and there are towns which have been destroyed - it's all a consequence of this.

"Unfortunately, these are situations that Peru has permanently, and sadly we haven't taken the necessary preventative measures."

A representative from table grape producer Agrícola Arantxa S.A. also said the harvest season in the north of Peru generally took place from October to December, and most of the negative effects for the company would be related to cleaning the farmland and removing water.

At the time of writing, representatives from major banana, citrus, and table grape associations had not yet responded to requests for comment on the situation.

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