CSR yields results for Costa Rica

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CSR commitments yield results for Costa Rica

Steady productivity increases have enabled Costa Rica’s banana industry to retain its competitive edge while maintaining high social and environmental standards.

by Maura Maxwell

@maurafruitnet

ABOVE—Jorge Sauma says Costa Rica is playing a key role in the global fi ght against Panama disease TR4 As a staple of grocery baskets the world over, the banana has benefited from strong demand during the Covid crisis. Thanks it its low cost, high nutritional value and safe, individual “packaging”, it is in many ways the ideal pandemic food.

For Costa Rica, this translated into record exports of US$1.139bn last year, an increase of 8.6 per cent on 2019. Jorge Sauma, boss of national banana corporation Corbana, says the results are all the more remarkable given the contraction in both the country’s and the global economy last year.

Nevertheless, he points out that the sector faces serious challenges going forward. In the short term, low temperatures and excess rainfall have reduced the country’s exportable volume in the fi rst few months of 2021, with shipments down 5 per cent in the fi rst quarter compared with the year-earlier period. (Sauma expects production to return to normal levels in the second quarter, although he acknowledges that “nothing is a certainty when it comes to the climate”.)

He notes that the loss of production in Honduras and Guatemala due to hurricanes Eta and Iota last year has resulted in Costa Rica diverting greater volumes to the US market so far this year. The US took 35 per cent of Costa Rica’s total shipment volume in 2020, making it the second biggest market behind the European Union which absorbed 43 per cent of shipments.

Costa Rica’s banana acreage has remained fairly stable over the past decade and currently stands at just below 43,500ha. During that time, improved effi ciency on farms has delivered steady increases in productivity.

“Thanks to continuous investments in scientifi c research and eff orts to improve sustainability over the past 30 years we are today able to achieve an average per-hectare yield of 3,020 boxes, equivalent to 54.8 tonnes per year,” Sauma explains. “Given that our wages are higher than in other regional producing countries, we simply wouldn’t be able to compete with other suppliers if it weren’t for our productivity.”

Maintaining its competitiveness without eroding its current high social and environmental standards poses an ongoing challenge for Costa Rica, but the biggest challenge facing the sector going forward is to prevent the entry of Fusarium wilt TR4, which has now been detected in three Latin American countries.

Since July 2020, Costa Rica has been under a national phytosanitary emergency, enabling it to take preventative measures to protect the banana industry and safeguard the 140,000 direct and indirect jobs that it generates.

Sauma acknowledges, however, that controlling TR4 is a global endeavour that requires cooperation between diff erent countries. “As a member of the FAO World Banana Forum and the Global Alliance against TR4, which is coordinated by the InterAmerican Institute for Agricultural Cooperation, Corbana is playing an important role in the fi ght against TR4,” he says. _