MARENASS / Pachamama Raymi — Prize-Based Competitions for Andean Terrace and Watershed Restoration (Peru)

Peru's Management of Natural Resources in the Southern Highlands Project (MARENASS), launched with IFAD financing in 1995, worked in the Andean highland departments of Apurimac, Ayacucho and Cusco, where pre-Columbian agricultural terraces (andenes) had fallen into disrepair.

Rather than a conventional extension-agent model, the project used the Pachamama Raymi ('Mother Earth Festival') methodology: cash-prize competitions in which families and then whole communities competed on the quality of resource-management practices they adopted, with communities controlling the resulting investment funds and hiring their own local technical specialists (yachachiq).

Total financing was about US$15.14 million (79% IFAD, 19% Government of Peru, the remainder from communities), reaching 360 communities and an estimated 52,800 families. In 260 of those communities the project produced roughly 440 hectares of new agricultural terraces, 1,740 kilometres of irrigation channels and improved irrigation on about 2,475 hectares.

IFAD's evaluation credits the model with building a local market for paid technical assistance and reducing dependence on purchased agrochemical inputs, and the methodology was later adapted for other Andean programmes. However, the 440 hectares of new terracing address only a small fraction of Peru's much larger restoration backlog - of roughly one million pre-Columbian terraces nationally, only about 30% remain usable - and no independent, quantified erosion or yield data beyond the project's self-reported figures was found.