São Paulo – They assure that they are the ones when it comes to good banana. The sweet, flavourful type. So much so that they intend to increase domestic production in order to gain foreign market space later. They are the Ribeira Valley Banana Growers Association (Abavar), based in the interior of the state of São Paulo. In 2010, for instance, the goal is to end the year with a harvest of 1.1 million tonne. The figure will not be even higher only due to the floods in São Paulo early this year.
"Other Brazilian states, such as Minas Gerais, may even have better-looking, darker yellow bananas, but no one has them as sweet as we do," says the executive secretary of the Abavar, Giancarlo Felipe da Silva. The organization has 400 associates, out of a total of 1,800 growers in the region. The main cities in the Ribeira Valley include Registro, Juquiá and Miracatu.
According to Silva, exporting is a means of selling the product, especially during periods in which there is a surplus of banana in Brazil, between the months of November and February, in which domestic production peaks. "During the season, trees are loaded with fruit and the price drops," he explains.
Within this context, Arab countries are potential clients. "Presently, we do not export much, only one of our associates ships fruit to foreign countries," says Silva. "But we are intent on changing that, and we know that the Arab countries give our product its due value. They can appreciate a careful, pesticide-free production," he claims.
For such, the path is to invest in farming improvement. "We already have two growers who supply us the so-called traced banana, whose package bears a code with which it is possible to view, on the Internet, everything that was used on the crop, how production took place, what company packed the fruit," explains the executive secretary of the Abavar.
This change in the mentality of banana entrepreneurs, with greater investment in growing technology, is being encouraged by the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (Sebrae) in the region, which since mid-last year is offering banana farmers new management tools.
"They are more prone to adopting different techniques, such as harvesting the fruit the best way, protecting it after the harvest, not tying the product with a rope to the top of a truck," explains Roberto Nunes Pupo, manager of the Sebrae–SP at the Ribeira Valley. "Appearance has an effect on sales. It can make or break domestic and foreign sales," he claims.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
