A threat posed to global banana production and its European buyers
Fresh Banana
Published Jan 27, 2022
Tridge summary
“If the situation doesn’t change, there is no future for banana production,” says Marike de Peña, a producer of organic bananas in the Dominican Republic.I thought I knew what this story would be about: the threat posed to world banana production by TR4 Fusarium wilt, the disease that imperils a great part of the world banana industry, much as another strain of the same disease destroyed the Gros Michel variety in the 1950s.
Original content
The TR4 attacks the Cavendish variety, which is immune to the previous strains and dominates the world market.But I was wrong. De Peña is talking about the threat from European banana buyers.“The prices they’re paying per box of bananas does not cover production costs of conventional production, much less sustainable production,” she contends.De Peña is president of the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Small Banana Producers. But the problem isn’t limited to small producers.In the middle of January, the Ecuadorian Banana Cluster, one of the world’s largest producers, convened industry representatives from Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras to address the issue.“We are in a crisis, in a tremendous crisis,” said Juan José Pons, coordinator of the Ecuadorian Banana Cluster. “We’re all affected in the same way. We all have to defend production.”The basic issue will be familiar to many in the produce industry: prices are set by the ...
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