Sleeping with the asparagus
Gilbert Klumpenaar, third-year student International Business and Languages at the faculty of Economics and Management in Arnhem, does his traineeship at a big international agrarian company in Lima, Peru.
The goal of my traineeship is to see the process of the time between the land, and the costumer, I want to see all the links and how the logistics work. Last week I had the chance to experience. My mentor took me to the cultivation fields, in the south of the country. Here, I saw the giant fields and the growth of the asparagus. Peru is a big exporter of green asparagus. The fields of the company lie between China and Ica in Peru. That is a dessert environment: it hardly ever rains there.
After a trip of 380 kilometers to come there, it was hard to realize that the people could grow the green asparagus in the middle of the dessert. My traineeship company has approximately 65.000 squares with only green asparagus, and in Peru everything is managed by hand. It’s very strange to see that the work the people do here, nobody would like to do in Holland. The employees walk around with knife attached to a stick and a plastic bag on their backs to ‘stab’ the asparagus. The ones who do this job, belong to the lowest class of Peru’s society. These people live in small cabins without electricity or floating water. The first night, I experienced what that is like. To sleep in a small cabin between 33200 square kilometers asparagus in the middle of nowhere... It was a strange experience. These people have nothing at all. After having seen this, you do appreciate the wealth and luxury you have at home. You see poverty at the television, but it isn’t comparable to the reality.
It was a special experience, again. An experience which shows we have nothing to complain about at all in Holland. And I have undoubtedly noticed that the green asparagus are tastier than the white ones!
