With the PRA Project’s support, the Importaciones and Exportaciones Felles Company has positioned itself as a major peach supplier to the Ecuadorian market.

Saúl Felles, a member of the Muzga farmer community of the Huaura province in the sierra region, had a peach orchard back in the late nineties. Tired of being cheated on weight and bad price information by buyers, he decided to sell his and others’ produce in the wholesale market.  He soon learned how to add value to peach production by gathering, selecting, and processing the best quality peaches and packaging them in hard cardboard boxes instead of low quality crates. In 2000, Saúl Felles started to sell his peaches to Ecuadorian buyers on the border with an initial volume of 300 boxes per trip; a volume that has increased steadily thanks to growing demand.

In order to meet the Ecuadorian market demand, the PRA Project helped Felles’s company design a large-scale peach selector machine to optimize the time of selection and, therefore, to accelerate peach processing. This machine cleans, disinfects, and automatically selects the raw material before being packed in boxes.

The PRA Project is also helping 300 small producers to meet Felles’s company production requirements, aiming at strengthening their abilities to increase productivity and improve quality so they can be fully integrated with the market and, therefore, increase their incomes and overcome poverty. These small producers are located in the regions where USAID’s resource partners Buenaventura and Los Quenuales mining companies work.

Importaciones y Exportaciones Felles has recently tripled its shipments to the Ecuadorian market, increased its buyers from seven to 21, and expanded its supply centers from eight to 12. Exporting peaches to foreign markets has helped keep prices profitable for local farmers who now access full market prices and receive prompt payment. Now Saúl Felles aspires to establish his exporting company to supply quality Peruvian peaches to other neighboring countries.