According to the Banana Market Review and Statistics released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Philippines has won back its ranking. FAO data for 2011 indicate that exports from Asia showed a recovery following sharp declines in exports between 2006 and 2010. The bulk of the exports coming from the Asian region surged 25.6 percent in 2011 and 27.1 percent in 2012, according to the report.
As a result, the export volume reached 2.82 million metric tons, well above the previous record of 2.4 million metric tons in 2006.
“This is a very remarkable recovery for the Asian region, most especially the Philippines,” says Dr. Fazil Dusunceli, FAO agriculture officer who visited banana plantations in the southern Philippine province of Davao del Norte.
As the world’s second largest banana exporter next to Ecuador, the Philippines showed significant growth rates in both 2011 and 2012, with the country topping the height of its export performance in 2012 with 2.6 million metric tons of fresh bananas exported to the world’s markets.
According to Dusunceli, this is equivalent to a whopping 93.9 percent of all banana exports coming from Asia alone.
Ecuador, still the world’s largest banana exporter,had lower output as flooding from hurricanes damaged vast areas of all its banana plantations. Its shipments of bananas went down as much as 410,000 metric tons or about 5.6 percent of its 2011 exports, according to the FAO report.
While banana exports from South America declined, Mexico and Central America boosted their combined export volumes by 22 percent with the neighboring Dominican Republic mostly leading the export shipments in the Caribbean.
Banana export shipments from Africa on the other hand, which makes up only 3.9 percent of global banana shipments, grew surprisingly by 2.4 percent in 2012 from total exports hitting 649,000 metric tons.
