Alto Miro

On the Isminio Gonzalès family's land, several varieties of cacao tree grow among orange trees. It is not a forest: in fine flavour cacao agroforestry systems surveyed in Peru, researchers counted seventeen tree species across fourteen families, a diversity they consider moderately low. What shade does, on the other hand, has been measured in the same region of San Martín, on eight plots in five communities of the Alto Huayabamba: it tempers the dry-season microclimate, limits pests and diseases, and lowers the yield. Planting under orange trees means accepting a smaller harvest in return for suffering less from drought, in a valley where legal agriculture caused half of the deforestation of the first decade of this century. And the orange trees bring in butterflies, bees and birds.