State credit programs and the peasantry under populist regimes: Lessons from the APRA experience in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

A study near Iquitos, Peru, finds that a national agricultural program implemented in the late 1980s, which provided peasants with access to credit, secure land tenure, and grassroots organization, promised to reduce rather than improve the welfare of intended beneficiaries. New economic conditions and strategic behaviors engendered by the program threatened to combine through a process of community enclosure and competitive exclusion to undermine the subsistence viability of peasant communities. General lessons are drawn for more effective rural development programs, ones that pay particular attention to direct and indirect feedback effects of macroeconomic policy, the factors that limit peasant economic competitiveness, and to the fundamental “spatiality” of development processes.