It’s everywhere: in smoothies, in bowls, in salads. The demand for blueberries has been exploding for years. No wonder, the sweet little berry is a healthy jack of all trades: it has now been proven that the blueberry has an anti-inflammatory effect. The blue fruit contains antioxidants that protect the body from free radicals. It is also a vitamin bomb, lots of vitamin C and vitamin E can be found in the blueberry. It is considered a local superfood. It’s good if she really does come from her home country, but the reality is different, as revealed by a video in the foreign program “Atlas” by “Funk”. Our unquenchable hunger for blueberries is changing one country in particular: Peru.
The goods that we buy in the supermarket are often shipped 10,000 kilometers across the Atlantic. You have to imagine it like this: In the middle of the desert there are millions of blueberry bushes, all in plastic bags filled with hummus. How are the local people doing and who is benefiting from the blueberry boom? Blueberries are a real export hit in Peru. The amount exported has increased 13-fold in the last six years. Peru wants to ship 200,000 tons of blueberries this year. Experts assume that the annual increase will remain at least 20 to 30 percent.
Peru is reacting to the demand from Europe. The berries must be firm and thick so that they can withstand the long journey by sea, and they should also last a long time in the refrigerator. Germans now eat six times as many blueberries as they did ten years ago. It is assumed that consumption has not even peaked yet. For Peru, this means that the economy is booming, but the environment is suffering. If the areas under cultivation increase, this has devastating consequences for nature, because the blueberry needs one thing above all: water. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a water emergency several times. The groundwater level is falling and the soil is becoming salty.
The superfood hype from Germany, Europe and the USA has made Peru the largest blueberry exporter in the world. But it doesn’t come without a price.
