CHEESE MAKING IN
AYACUCHO, PERU
Gabriel Reaño met with Danny Bautista Cisneros, an engineer specializing in the food
industry and the main architect of a Regional Government project in Ayacucho aimed at
giving dairy farmers a professional status and reported on improvements made in cheese
production in Ayacucho. Gabriel tells us about that visit.
Practical Action’s Technical Enquiries Services introduced me to Danny Bautista; we went to
meet him so that he could show us the primary result of the project: the cheese plant. The
trip to the outskirts of the Cachi river basin in Ayacucho is along a dirt track all the way. We
travelled in a special van, as there is no public transport capable of taking us their quickly
enough. The ground was damp from the rain and the tires skidded frequently, but the driver
was unfazed. We were accompanied by Danny Bautista Cisneros, our contact, determined to
achieve our purpose of visiting the cheese plants that would convert a previously informal and
precarious activity into a professional concern, both in terms of economic value and product
quality.
Danny Bautista is 40 years old and proud to be an engineer specializing in food industries. He
has worked with the Ayacucho Regional Government and was the ideologist of the project
entitled “Improving the competitiveness of agricultural development in the Cachi irrigation
area”, which lasted from 2008 until 2010. He believes that the people themselves are
responsible for their own development. “If we don’t do it ourselves, nobody will help us” he
remarked before giving us the usual political spiel: “the governments of Toledo and Alan
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