Neglected

Perhaps, under a Duterte administration, our banana industry will finally get the attention it deserves.

Banana exports bring in over $1 billion to our economy. It is the second largest agricultural export after coconuts. Unlike coconuts, bananas use much less land per unit of value and brings higher incomes for the farming communities involved with the crop.

Yet there are no public agencies providing scientific, financial and technical support for the banana industry – unlike comparable agencies established long ago to support the coconut and sugar industries. We have a Philippine Sugar Commission and a Philippine Coconut Authority but nothing for banana producers.

The Philippine National Bank (PNB) was originally set up to provide financial services to the sugar industry. The United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) provided the same support to the coconut sector. We do not have an equivalent for banana producers.

From the Arroyo years to the present, several bills seeking to establish a banana research institute have been filed. They all languished in the legislative mill because they were not tagged priority measures.

Nor has the banana industry been recognized among the priority sectors in the Philippine Export Development Plan, 2015-2017 despite the actual export numbers posted. The banana industry was generally left to fend for itself at home and in the international trading space.

The Philippine Banana Growers and Exporters Association (PBGEA) is hopeful the neglect of an important agricultural exporting sector will now end. They are seeking President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s support for the industry’s inclusion in the export development plan and the establishment of a research agency to support banana producers.

The main objective of the research institute is to help the farmers develop more disease resistant varieties of the crop. These varieties will reduce the vulnerability of our banana varieties to pestilence and heavy reliance on insecticides that will cause the crop to fail the phytochemical requirements of our export markets.

At present, all the research and development needs of the banana industry are undertaken by the growers themselves. According to Dr. Maria Emilia Rita G. Fabregar, who chairs the technical committee of PBGEA, the growers have set up a three-hectare experimental site to compare the resilience of various banana varieties to new diseases.

The existing facility is obviously not enough to support the search for better varieties that will help us not only defend our existing markets but also expand our export reach in highly competitive conditions. The least government can do for an agro-industry that returns so much to our domestic economy is to provide for a better-equipped research facility.

Remember the ‘nata de coco’? When international demand grew for this distinctly Filipino product, other countries established research facilities to improve both quality and shelf life of the delicacy. Meanwhile, without government support, our own ‘nata de coco’ producers remained a backyard industry.

Soon enough, with an inconsistent product, spotty sanitary standards and inferior packaging, our ‘nata de coco’ producers lost out in the international market. A potentially strong export product that could help our coconut industry to survive was quashed by the superior marketing and production techniques of foreign competitors. Filipino exporters could not compete in the global market with a traditional Filipino product.

This mistake rooted in government neglect should not happen again.

Disease

Until the fifties, banana growers in Latin America (the so-called “banana republics”) relied on a variety called Gros Michel to supply the North American and European markets. This used to be the only banana variety consumed in the US from the 1800s to post World War II period.

Through the fifties, however, the cultivar was afflicted by a fungal pathogen called Fusarium oxysporum – nicknamed the “Panama disease.” The blight wiped out the plantations and inflicted tremendous costs on the economies dependent on fruit exports, reflecting eventually in social upheavals in Latin America in the succeeding years. Gros Michel ceased to be a viable commercially grown variety, to be replaced by the more disease resistant Cavendish cultivars.

Our banana exports rely heavily on Cavendish varieties. The fungal pathogen, already resistant to known fungicides, continued to mutate and evolve. A new strain of the Panama disease (called TR4) now threatens even the widely cultivated Cavendish varieties.

Should an ebola-like epidemic break out, it could wipe out the supply of Cavendish bananas and probably put an end to exporting plantations. That prospect is dire, to say the least, for our billion-dollar banana exporting industry.

We need not wait for the new strains of the Panama disease to hit our plantations full force. This early, we should develop the technologies to combat a blight that could threaten to reduce our plantations to wasteland.

This is why we need government support for establishing a fully capable research facility for the banana industry. Evolving more disease-resistant banana varieties cannot happen overnight. It requires long experimentations in a cutting edge research laboratory, not the ramshackle “experimental” plots of land the growers rely on at present to meet the challenge.

The Noynoy Aquino administration, or at least the ineptly-run agriculture department, never grasped the urgency of the problem. This is why none of the bills proposing the establishment of a banana research facility was considered a priority piece of legislation by this outgoing administration.

When in Chulalongkorn University, I usually eat at the cafeteria of a high-rise edifice called the Tapioca Center. It is a full-fledged research facility looking at all the ways to improve a crop Thailand exports to the European Union.

We should have one to look after our banana exports.