Peru's Potato Custodians Turn Gathering Into Policy Platform

More than 120 farmers from eleven regions of Peru gathered in La Mar, Ayacucho, on July 9 and 10 for AGUAPAN's 2026 Annual Assembly — comfortably ahead of the turnout organizers had advertised beforehand, just over 100 farming communities from ten regions. AGUAPAN, the Association of Guardians of Native Potato of Peru, is the network of custodian families who keep the country's native potato landraces alive from one generation to the next; Stef De Haan, a senior scientist in agrobiodiversity at the International Potato Center (CIP) who leads its Andean Initiative, posted an account of the gathering afterward. The shift from counting communities to counting individual farmers makes an exact before-and-after comparison imprecise, but the direction holds either way: more people showed up, from more regions, than the promotional materials had promised.

The assembly's real output was the La Mar Declaration, a joint statement AGUAPAN members adopted covering five commitments: farmers' rights; conservation of potato landrace diversity; passing knowledge between generations; stronger alliances and shared benefits; and formal recognition of custodians as providers of essential ecosystem services. It's a statement of intent rather than a binding agreement — nobody signed anything enforceable — but the vocabulary is telling. Rights, recognition, and benefit-sharing are the language of a group organizing around policy claims, not simply marking a cultural occasion.

The declaration's framing of custodian farmers as providers of "essential ecosystem services" is the sharpest claim in it. The landrace diversity these families keep alive in their own fields is what plant breeders, processors, and researchers everywhere draw on when they need genetic material outside the narrow set of commercial varieties — a dependency that runs through the global potato industry without ever being priced or formally credited. The framing makes the stakes explicit: investing in custodian farmers, the declaration argues, means investing in the future of food itself.

AGUAPAN is already looking past this one meeting. De Haan closed his account by calling the assembly the start of "the road to AGUAPAN 2035" — a decade-long horizon, not a single gathering to celebrate and move on from. What exactly that 2035 target involves hasn't been spelled out yet, but naming it at all signals an organization treating this assembly as a planning milestone, not a one-off cultural event.