Banana growers from private sectors in Mindanao are more determined to address various crucial issues confronting the banana industry that may possibly jeopardize the performance of the entirety of the banana industry in the country.
With this, Phil Export President, Ferdinand Marañon has renewed his invitation for multi-national banana growers to participate in banana conference this October 12-13 at SMX Center at SM Lanang Premier. The conference aimed, once and for all, to harmonize the suggestions and proposed mechanisms to address the challenges on security, peace and order, market competition, tariff problems and as well as the perennial banana diseases.
“This is the real issue we need to address… investments of the multi-national companies would probably forfeit, if this continues,” Marañon said at Wednesday’s Kapehan sa Dabaw at SM Ecoland.
Phil Export Executive Director Maria Corazon Loreto seconded Marañon’s statement, saying that this matter is truly alarming as over 2 million workers were displaced because of the burning of operational equipment in banana plantations.
“The resulting effect of the lawless actions, affects the production of the bananas, most especially in terms of supply, it became low.” She said.
Optimistic for a solution, Loreto said that Department of National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana will be one of the confirmed resource speakers, so as to give investors assurance to continue in investing and expand in the city, especially now that the market for the Philippine Quality cavendish banana for export has high demands.
Loreto said that this initiative is long overdue, and will deliberately be done this year because of the clamor of the banana growers as a result of the banana congress last year.
Aside from this, the performance of the industry is also affected by various factors which will be addressed by several experts, specializing on marketing, financing support, managing banana diseases and others.
Loreto said that the output of the conference shall aim to propose a unified coping mechanism and provide policy direction for the whole banana industry.
