Boom time for Philippine banana plantations

Crop dusters skim like dragonflies above the low green canopy of the banana plantantions stretching as far as the eye can see on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

The intrepid landowners of the coastal plains and low lying hills around the Davao Gulf are cashing in on a surge in demand for fresh fruit in the Middle East, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea.

While the vast majority of the country's farmers produce rice on small lots, barely producing enough to survive, big land owners like Antonio Floirendo supply a growing global market with bananas and pineapples.

"That's been one of our problems, we can't produce enough rice. Rice farmers, they come to us wanting to sell land," said the 92-year-old, silver-haired former car salesman.

The country's biggest banana producer is in the process of building a horseracing track outside his 400-hectare (988-acre) thoroughbred stud farm on the Marapangi hills above Davao city.

"You cannot blame them, that's (banana and pineapple farming) where the money is," he told AFP.

Free from typhoons and blessed with rich sandy-loam soil and year-round rainfall, Mindanao, twice the size of Belgium, accounts for a third of the country's agricultural output and 60 percent of its farm exports.

Residents are flush with cash as mining, agriculture and other industries pick up, said John Sison, a senior manager at the Hijo Resources farm in nearby Tagum city.

"There are no food lines here," said Tagum mayor Rey Uy. "But some rice farmers are shifting to bananas."

Although rice is the Philippines' main crop, less than a third of the country's farm land is suitable for growing the staple, according to the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute.

Unlike much of the country, where rice farmers hand tend tiny plots that rely on seasonal rainfall with little or no credit access for purchasing fertiliser and other inputs, the half-million hectares planted to bananas and some 50,000 hectares for pineapple are worlds apart in terms of scale and use of mechanisation.

But developing a hectare of bananas for planting costs half a million pesos (about 12,000 dollars) and entails a 10-year wait to recoup the investment apart from heavy use of fertiliser and fungicides.

The local planters, some of them backed by Japanese trading houses such as Sumitomo, are contract growers for huge Western multinationals. A few operate their own ports and the industry employs on average 1.3 workers per hectare of farmland.

"Markets are opening up and everybody is expanding," said Floirendo's son, also named Antonio. "We need maybe close to a thousand hectares just to cover the additional demand."

His company is also planting an extra 1,500 hectares of pineapple in the Bukidnon plateau, where he said large areas of sugar cane farms are being replanted with bananas.

He said there are "hundreds of thousands of hectares" of irrigated farm land on Mindanao that are optimal for bananas, but there are political as well as cultural constraints since most are in the mainly Muslim western side, which is torn by a separatist rebellion.

Communist rebels also pose an ever-present threat. They destroyed a refrigerated container truck in mid-April, and stole more than 100 firearms in a raid on the Davao Penal Colony last year.

The Philippines earlier this month banned the use of farmland for real estate.

There was no ban on shifting from rice to other crops, but the big planters want to be politically correct. "We can't move because of that," the younger Floirendo said.

In the early 1990s, the Hijo farm shrank by half to 760 hectares through land reform as the government moved to break apart the big farms to solve widespread landlessness that it blamed for the poverty of farm workers who make up a fifth of the country's labour force.

The company sued to compel the government to pay market rates for the expropriated land, but had to wait 10 years to win a court order.

The farm now has a mere 200 workers, and 300 hectares of what was left was redeveloped for tourism. The owners' 88-year-old colonial house fronting a 4.5-kilometre (2.8-mile) beachfront was transformed into a bed-and-breakfast hotel. Another 75 hectares went to export-oriented light industry.

But the Floreindos' 7,000-plus hectare farm, a joint venture with the government's Bureau of Corrections, was untouched.

Some 1,200 low-security inmates at the Davao prison do voluntary, non-sensitive farm work alongside thousands of ordinary workers. The prisoners' families are paid stipends equivalent to the minimum wage, and the government a guaranteed 28 million pesos (668,000 dollars) annually.

"Land reform failed," the younger Floirendo said. "After they got the land, the beneficiaries turned around and either sold it or leased it back to somebody else until they lost their capital."

A 2007 study by GTZ, an arm of the German Ministry of Development Cooperation, conducted in April 2006 in conjunction with the Philippine government's Department of Agrarian Reform, agrees.

"At the macro level, the social and economic conditions in the rural communities are not any better than they were 10 years ago," said the study, called Scenarios and Options for Future Development.

Sison, the Hijo manager, said Mindanao "will still be the breadbasket of the Philippines. There is still a lot of farm land to develop".

However, conversion, for the owners, was "the best way to move forward".

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