Page 82 - 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
• Actual Mean Monthly Temperature (Spatial resolution: – 5 kilometer (km) – 2.5 arc-min); and
• Actual Mean Monthly Precipitation (Spatial resolution: – 5 kilometer (km) – 2.5 arc-min)
These data sets can be found in the portal, WorldClim (Hijmans et al., 2005). Areas not suitable for banana production were defined as areas
with three or more months, with temperatures below 13oC or with one
or more months with temperature higher than 35oC (see Table 9 for key temperature parametres for banana growth). All areas that are not likely to be suitable for banana, due to the low or high temperature were excluded from the analysis. The global suitable areas were classified into Tropical and Subtropical banana production areas. For Ecuador, only tropical production areas were discovered, which were classified into categories of temperature, precipitation and dry months (Table 10). Actual banana growing areas for Ecuador were obtained from http://www.crop-mapper.org/banana/.
This overlay of current banana production areas on the agroclimatic map
(Figure 17) shows that banana production is located in four principal zones with temperatures greater than 24°C and dry seasons that last longer than 3 months, although annual rainfall varies from <900mm to >2500mm. The monthly distribution of precipitation follows the same pattern for the banana growing areas, with highly seasonal rainfall. Five to six dry months with little rainfall, from June to November, are followed by six to seven wet months. A period of low temperatures occurs
in July and August, while temperatures are several degrees higher the remaining months of the year. Other production is found to the North, where the dry season
is shorter, and to the East which has slightly lower temperatures. Six points were selected to represent the distribution of the banana growing areas in the important agroclimatic zones (Figure 17, Table 11). These are also sites with weather stations which are proposed to facilitate analysis, using historical weather records.
Figure 16
250000 200000 150000 100000
50000 0
Source: AEBE, 2014
Banana production areas of Ecuador, by province
Hectres
Los Rios
El Oro
Guayas
Loja
Esmeraldas Manabí
Cotopaxi
Cañar
Otros
Total
66
Provinces
2004 2008 2010 2012