Page 108 - Ecuador's Banana Sector under Climate Change

ecuador’s banana sector under climate change: an economic and biophysical assessment to promote a sustainable and climate-compatible strategy
3. Current grower approaches to banana management under extreme and moderate weather variability
On a daily basis, banana growers experience the effects of weather on production. Crop management, under the conditions of variability described in earlier sections, challenges grower capacity to organize production inputs in a timely fashion
and to maintain yield, quality and profitability. A future which includes changes in average climatic conditions and, potentially, an increase in weather variability will further challenge grower management capacity. To gain insight into the views and experience of growers in September 2013, five focal groups were organized under the title, “Banana Growing under Climate Change and Weather Variability – How Do We Better Prepare Ourselves?” These groups were convened in collaboration with INIAP through the major grower organizations in production zones in four of the major banana growing areas of Ecuador to gain insight into grower perceptions and strategies about climate change.
3.1 Documenting grower strategies
Five groups were convened along the transect from North to South (Figure 17). In El Carmen to the far North, the Federación Nacional de Productores de Plátano del Ecuador (FENAPROPE) convened plantain growers from the principal zone
for this crop. These small-scale growers produce without irrigation and with low levels of off-farm inputs in a region highly favourable to plantain production. The other zones farther to the South produce conventional and organic bananas with irrigation, high levels of off-farm nutrients and chemical and organic inputs for pest and disease management. In Table 17, the most common responses about management strategies from the growers are highlighted and the percentage of participants, who indicate it as a main activity, are within parentheses. Each group offered their view about climatic variability during recent decades (Table 18). The views were quite different from group to group. Two groups felt that each year
is different, while another group viewed variability as occasional. Two groups expressed that there was little variability in climatic conditions.
In response to a question about the type of weather in the recent past which disturbed yields and management practices, growers identified factors which were common across all zones: early or delayed start or finish of rainy season; increase or decrease in expected rains in the rainy season; and higher or lower temperatures and sunlight during July and August. Other factors were specific to certain zones: floods, landslides, volcanic ash, and shortage of irrigation water from rivers which depend on rainfall (Table 19).
Each group traced out the normal seasonal pattern of temperature and rainfall fluctuation, locating events of variability in each season. The two seasons represent highly contrasting conditions with quite different levels of production (Table 20). The decrease in boxes of fruit/month may reach 30-50 percent during the period of cold and low light. Even though growers identified a clear annual pattern for weather, the beginning and end of the rains marks an important source of variation (Table 21). The rainfall amount also varies (as was also seen in the analysis of historical records). The period most mentioned as a source of
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