No Escape for Banana Farmers

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he hurricane season is always filled with talk about the main ingredient of our national dish, which ripens into a yellow delight for European supermarket shelves, mostly because the banana tree is one of the flimsiest crops, and at the same time its fruit is possibly our largest export product. I suppose most readers already know the problem. The hurricane season is, for any banana farmer, simply an inevitability!

Last week’s tropical storm Kirk brought wind that some described as far scarier than the damaging rainfall of recent storms. Kirk inflicted damage on up to 80% of the island’s banana and plantain crops, according to the Ministry of Agriculture’s rapid assessment. The crops were uprooted, snapped and toppled by the wind. It’s something all the banana farmers should be used to, but it’s no easy thing handling increasing zero-income spells of about six to nine months each.

Although he loves being self-employed and enjoys the beauty of working with nature, John (not his real
name) is always far from prepared for what he describes as “the sadness” that comes after storms and hurricanes. “For the six months it takes to replant and grow banana trees, I still have to pay my workers. I also have to wait another three months before I can harvest and make an income,” he said, “but you cannot protect the trees from wind. There’s no way to defend nature from itself.” The latter, spoken usually in creole, is a line I heard countless times over the past weekend.

John and 266 core farmers out of 327 total members sell to the National Fair Trade Organisation an average of sixty boxes of bananas per five acres of farming land. A box of fruit for international export is worth US$9.20 but with nothing to sell for the time in between a storm and a farmer’s next harvest day, the farm essentially operates at a loss. Of course, the Ministry of Agriculture provides fertilizers, assists with drainage and, in dark times like the hurricane season, governments promise other subsidies. But according to John, sometimes the promises go unfulfilled.

“Last year they said they would give fertilizer and help us replant,” he said. “They never did it and another hurricane season is here. It’s the only way the government can really help. In the past they’d give a cycle of fertilizer and oil and send people to help with the work to lessen the cost while we were not making money. It helped a little. But if it has to be worth anything I think they should give three cycles of fertilizer and oil and help to chop the trees and replant.” 

Meanwhile, John awaits word from the government or the Taiwanese-funded Banana Productivity Improvement Project. Farmers also have the option of acquiring crop insurance. However, despite
that the damage was worse than some previous hurricane seasons, some farmers still cannot make insurance claims. “They said the wind speed was too low,” John lamented, “They give it for 70 mph and Kirk was 50 mph, they say.”

And as for a farmers’ pension scheme, John says: “So many years government after government talk about it but no one has ever done it. We need one now more than ever.” For members of the NFTO, harvest days must coincide with the days the vessel is set to leave for the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for some angry farmers, Thursday and Friday are the designated days, so they missed their final full paycheck for 2018 by a few hours. John argued: “I have 100 boxes in my shed and they could have let us harvest early on Thursday.”

However, NFTO says otherwise: “Usually on harvest days farmers come to sell from about 4 p.m. and the receiving staff would knock off around midnight to one o’clock in the morning when the storm was at its worst. We also had to consider that the bananas had to be refrigerated and, if there was no electricity, the fruit would spoil while in the container.”

A disconsolate John responds: “Well, now we have nothing to sell!” There seems to be no way to escape the temporary bankruptcy. For farmers like John, they cannot use the fallen crop, even if it looks fine. There are specifications for the time period the fruit should be picked and they must be green and blemish-free. Any farmer attempting to sell fallen fruit or defy any of the fifty other specifications would be suspended. Neither would they be allowed to sell to the less strict regional market; nor to the banana-saturated local market. Everyone wants to sell his last batch of fruit.

Banana farmers who had younger, shorter trees were hoping and praying they would weather the storm. But many, like John, were not so lucky. And we still have two more hurricane months ahead of us. “These storms better all come now if they coming,” said a desperate John. “It’s like they’re getting worse. I don’t even know if I should do this anymore. I’m getting too old for it.”