Manila: Since April this year, real estate agent Luceno “Boi” Gomez, was optimistic that he could sell a 9.4 hectare banana plantation for P 1.2 million (Dh 120,000), owned by a banana producer in Compostela Valley, southern Philippines. Now all his dreams has been shattered, as the multi-million pesos industry has been devastated by typhoon Bopha. Most of the bananas plantations in the Valley belongs to marginal and medium-farmers, who sell their produce to exporters.
“Banana plantations owned by contract farmers are always productive in Mindanao. The Philippines is one of the world’s top five exporters of bananas. After super typhoon Bopha savaged and wiped out almost all the banana plantations in Compostela Valley, I don’t think there will be buyers and sellers of banana plantations in Compostela Valley,” Gomez told Gulf News in a phone interview.
Lamenting the loss of real estate market in Bopha-affected southern banana plantations, Gomez said apart from paying for a new banana plantation, young and would-be small banana planters would be dismayed to buy any farm in the formerly productive Compostela Valley now.
“It would take P 50,000 (Dh 4,166.66) to P 100,000 (Dh 8,333.33) per hectare to rehabilitate and make a small-sized banana plantation productive, and higher still after Bopha’s massive destruction,” explained Gomez.
Some 18 big companies in the southern Philippines that export the Cavendish variety of bananas to Brunei, Canada, China, Indonesia, Japan, Middle East, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, and South Korea braced together as soon as typhoon Bopha left for Palawan, in southwestern Philippines, another productive Philippine breadbasket and a tourist haven, said Stephen Antig, executive director of Pilipino Banana Growers and Exporters Association (PBGEA), the umbrella group of Cavendish banana exporting companies.
“It is the only Asian country which cultivates and exports banana,” Antig said.
“We have to help solve the fatal damage brought about by typhoon Bopha on almost all banana plantations in the south. Proper rehabilitation would take months,” he added.
In big banana plantations, rehabilitation cost was estimated at P 500,000 to P 700,000 (Dh 41,666 to Dh 58,333) per hectare for the cost of planting, infrastructure, offices and distribution, Antig said, whose association is fighting for a big rehabilitation fund from the government.
Because Mindanao has been called a “God-given typhoon-free enclave”, banana plantations flourished there, especially in the Compostela Valley, Davao del Norte, and Davao Oriental since the 1960s.
Banana cultivation has grown to 50,000 hectares in these areas. In 2008 alone, about 150 million boxes (with each box weighing a gross of 14 kilos) were exported from the Philippines to world-wide markets, PBGEA records showed.
The Philippines banana industry is also the second biggest in Mindanao, making it one of the largest sources of sales tax and other government revenues, such as income tax. It is also the biggest employers in the south.
About 200,000 workers are employed and nearly 535,000 people depend on the industry, PBGEA said.
Before typhoon Bopha visited and ravaged the banana plantations, the banana industry has been suffering several setbacks: China’s restrictions; embargo on Iran and the Panama disease in some plantations.
It would take about two years — one year for rehabilitation and another year to wait for the harvest — for the southern banana farmers to erase the sorry slump caused by Bopha.
