Page 110 - 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
• plant genetics: grower applied clonal selection to identify plant types suited to the particular conditions of the Ecuadorian coastal plain;
• plant population (buffering): feasibility of sucker management to offset seasonality of productions,
• plant population (recovery): practices useful to recover production after debilitating extreme events, such as floods, extreme cold and severe droughts; and
• field agro-ecosystem (buffering): practices to build root health for efficient use of nutrients and water.
Research, using a socio-ecological perspective, could also address opportunities for local and regional landscape approaches. In addition, it could include approaches to building social capital to identify practices which ensure protection of key production areas from extreme events (Table 15), build buffering capacity in watershed management and develop scenarios for efficient and low- cost recovery of production and marketing potential.
4. Review of disruptive effects of moderate and extreme climate events on Ecuador’s banana trade
To establish whether climate change has the potential to disrupt global banana markets, a desk study was conducted, linking annual declines in volumes of bananas exported to possible causal factors. Data on volumes exported were taken from FAOSTAT for the period 1961-2011 and graphed. Based on the graph, six major declines were identified (1965, 1973-1976, 1983, 1993, 1998, and 2010) (Figure 32). For each of the declines, secondary information was compiled from web sites of international trade organizations and national public and private institutes. The causes were classified by type of event: political, economic, climatic and others.
A similar analysis was conducted for Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines. Price fluctuations for a box of bananas in the EU and United States markets for the period 1992-2009 were also identified and the causes, based on secondary sources, were classified as above. Only the results for Ecuador are presented here.
As can be seen in Figure 17, in 1965 banana exports fell by 13 percent due
to a decline in the international price of bananas caused by an increase in supply, mainly due to MNCs having established themselves in Central America and tripling production, as well as expanding operations to the Philippines. This displaced the Ecuadorian banana from Asian markets. Furthermore, the introduction of Cavendish plantations in Central America caused a loss of comparative advantage to Ecuador. Another factor that influenced the decline in exports in 1965 was the disappearance from the Ecuadorian market of corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), and the decline since 1965 of the Compañía Frutera Sudamericana market share, due to the crisis that started that year, until its complete disappearance in 1981 (Montalvo, 2008; Corporación Editora Nacional, 1987).
94