Women carrying bananas in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region of Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Julio Godoy
ROME, Jul 14 2013 (IPS)

FAO is currently supporting two seemingly contradictory projects in Caribbean countries: while one seeks to promote organic production, the other involves the use of chemical fungicides to fight black sigatoka, the worst enemy of this key food crop.

The project aimed at assisting organic banana growers is being carried out by FAO (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) in the Dominican Republic, “because the country is a small producer on a global scale, and is thus well-suited to meeting the highly specialised demands of this market,” said Kaison Chang, an economist, trade specialist, and secretary of the FAO Intergovernmental Group on Bananas and Tropical Fruits.

“As small producers, the Dominicans cannot compete with the big producers, like the Ecuadorians, whose production costs per unit are considerably lower,” Chang told Tierramérica*.

This is why banana farmers in the Dominican Republic need to increase their yields and improve their crop management techniques, in order to maximise their comparative advantages.

As part of the project, FAO distributed some 900,000 protective sheets to around 780 banana farmers in the Dominican Republic.

The sheets are placed around the banana bunches while they are maturing, and can help reduce the number of bananas unsuitable for export by 40 to 50 percent.

The Dominican Republic exports almost all of its organic banana production to Europe, and especially Germany. In 2012, organic banana sales totalled 300,000 tons.

The share of organic bananas within the country’s total banana exports rose from 32 to 58 percent between 1999 and 2007.

Bananas are the world’s most exported fresh fruit, both in volume and value. They are primarily exported from developing countries to industrialised countries, which account for almost 90 percent of imports.

Bananas are an essential source of income and employment for hundreds of thousands of households in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and West Africa, according to the World Banana Forum.

However, agrochemical-intensive production on large-scale plantations, distortions along the value chain and declining producer prices have given rise to environmental and social challenges. Meeting these challenges requires the involvement of all stakeholders in the banana sector worldwide, which is what led to the creation of the Forum.

One of these environmental challenges is the disease known as black sigatoka.

In June, FAO organised an intensive training workshop for technicians from Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines aimed at “promoting the effective use of fungicides to control and eradicate” the disease.

Black sigatoka is caused by a fungus (Mycosphaerella fijiensis Morelet) and considered the most devastating of banana diseases. It is harmful to most species and varieties of bananas and plantains. It attacks the plant’s leaves, affecting photosynthesis and thereby reducing yields.

“Black sigatoka causes losses of up to 57 in the weight of the fruit and provokes premature ripening,” said Humberto Gómez, a specialist in technical innovation to boost productivity and competitiveness at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) in Trinidad and Tobago.

The disease was first recorded in 1963 in Fiji, where a similar fungal disease, yellow sigatoka, was initially detected in 1912. In Central America, it appeared in 1972 in Honduras, and subsequently spread to other countries. According to FAO, banana and plantain exports from St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Guyana have fallen by 90 to 100 percent as a result of black sigatoka.

Gómez described the current situation in the Caribbean as “disastrous”. “It is an emergency,” he told Tierramérica.

To confront the black sigatoka outbreak, the technicians attending the FAO workshop “were trained to assess the disease’s reaction to specific ingredients of fungicides, in order to develop more effective treatment plans,” he added.

He recognised, however, that the use of fungicides is counterproductive, because the fungus is highly adaptable and can build up resistance to the combination of available fungicide chemical products. Moreover, the Caribbean’s high humidity and rainfall provide an ideal breeding ground for the disease.

A successful campaign against black sigatoka requires continuous monitoring of soil moisture, better irrigation and drainage, improving plant nutrition through the use of fertilisers, reducing the density of plantations by spacing trees farther apart, and quick removal of affected leaves, according to technical specialists.

“But for now, conventional banana producers in the Caribbean are satisfied with their models of production, using chemicals,” said Chang, who did not take part in the workshop.

“Organic production is very demanding and makes it impossible to use the majority of chemical products traditionally used to control diseases,” he added. “As a result, the costs of organic banana production are very high, which reduces profits for the plantations.”

Another method, proposed by Gilberto Manzo-Sánchez, a professor and researcher at the University of Colima, Mexico, involves the development of natural products from microorganisms that can be used as a preventive measure by boosting resistance to the disease.

“This way we could reduce the use of fungicides, saving up to 50 percent of their cost while helping to protect the environment,” Manzo-Sánchez told Tierramérica.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Irrigated fields in Argentina. Credit:Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

With its abundant natural resources, productive capacity and rising investment, Latin America looks set to become of the main suppliers to meet the growing, diverse and increasingly sophisticated global demand for food.

The challenge is to seize the opportunity, without neglecting the needs of a region where there are still 66 million indigents – 11.4 percent of the population – according to the latest figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Although the international market continues to face difficulties posed by price volatility, speculation and competition for land by biofuels, experts who spoke to IPS were convinced that the region could successfully overcome the challenges.

Rice, grains, oilseeds, fruit, dairy products, meat, cooking oil, wine – it is all produced and exported in large volumes by Latin America, especially in the southern part of the continent, overcoming drought, flooding and other climate change-related meteorological events.

Gino Buzzetti, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) representative in Argentina, told IPS that for now there is no global food crisis, like the one in 2007-2008.

But, he said, there is “concern about the medium term” because not only is the population growing, but incomes are rising and demand is becoming more sophisticated. “It’s no longer just about producing rice; we’ll have to produce more meat, which requires greater investment,” he said.

“The potential land for meeting the growing demand is in the temperate tropics, but Africa has neither the development nor the technology, which Latin America, on the other hand, does have, especially in the Southern Cone,” he said.

Buzzetti pointed out that Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay produce one billion tons a year of grains on 72 million hectares, which represents 10 percent of the world’s agricultural land.

These countries account for 47 percent of the world’s soy production and 28 percent of maize exports, for example.

The region is also a leading global producer of meat: 21 percent of the world’s beef and 17 percent of chicken are produced by these Southern Cone countries, and the area’s meat exports represent a full one-third of global meat exports, the IICA official said.

And whereas Argentina was the undisputed regional leader in beef production a few decades ago, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay now surpass this country in volume of production.

According to agricultural engineer Fernando Vilella, misguided policies like export controls aimed at lowering domestic prices led to a drastic reduction in Argentina’s cattle herd in recent years, while chicken production grew and the soy frontier expanded.

But with greater investment and a shift to more feed lots, beef production could rise again, said Vilella, head of the agribusiness and food department in the University of Buenos Aires engineering department.

In fact, it has already begun to recover, he noted. He said Argentina should follow the example of neighbouring Uruguay, which regulates domestic prices of certain cuts of beef for the internal market while exporting the rest at international prices.

With respect to the outlook for the future, Vilella told IPS that by 2030, Asia could be producing 75 to 82 percent of its own food, sub-Saharan Africa only 15 percent, and North Africa and the Middle East 85 percent.

“The remaining demand will have to be met by South America, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ukraine, which will have to feed a market of some three billion people,” he said.

“The role of Argentina and Brazil will be very important,” he said. The biggest challenge will be to boost productivity per hectare, because there is very little room for expansion of the world’s arable land, the expert said.

Vilella said production by direct seeding or zero tillage, which is widely used in soy cultivation in Argentina, is key, because is it the most efficient method, “as long as it is done on the best land” to avoid environmental deterioration.

With respect to competition from biofuels, Buzzetti said conflict occurs when food crops are diverted to the energy market, like what is happening in the United States with maize used to produce ethanol.

“Production has to shift towards second-generation biofuels, which use non-food biomass,” he said.

But besides the practical challenges, Buzzetti said the ethical problem of hunger in a world where more than enough food is produced has to be discussed, and measures of international consensus are needed to address the issue.

“At Rio+20 (2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development), the need to move towards an economic model that ensures better distribution of income was discussed, and the issue was taken up again at the G20 summit (of industrialised and emerging powers) and in World Bank appeals,” he said.

“We have to come up with a capitalist development model that provides for better distribution of income and food, to make the global system more sustainable and balanced,” he said.

To achieve this, there are recommendations that focus on reducing volatility of prices, which have been on the rise in recent years, and to curb financial speculation in food markets – but these processes take time, he said.

The sources consulted concurred that it is inconceivable that there are countries in the region where hunger is still a problem. Some, like Mexico and countries in Central America and the Caribbean, depend on food imports.

“Between 1999 and 2009, the number of net food importer countries in the region grew from 11 to 16,” Antonio Hill, a Colombian expert in agriculture and climate change with Oxfam, told IPS.

Hill said Latin America has a greater responsibility as a food producer because while it must increase productivity, at the same time it must “reduce levels of inequality, food insecurity and the ecological footprint.”

The most sensible thing “would be to increase productivity, expanding support for family agriculture, especially for rural women, to ensure greater availability of food for the poor,” he said.