BBC Claims ‘Climate Change’ Causing Banana Price Increases

Bananas are set to get more expensive as climate change hits a much-loved fruit, one of the world’s top experts from the industry tells BBC News.

Pascal Liu, senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, says climate impacts pose an “enormous threat” to supply, compounding the impacts of fast-spreading diseases.

Which diseases are these? We are not told.

In its natural yellow wrapper, the nutritious and tasty banana is the world’s most exported fruit.

The UK alone imports around 5 billion bananas ever year, with around 90 percent sold through the major supermarkets.

If this is the case, why bother to sensationalise it like this?

But while banana supplies can cope with short-term weather events like this, experts are concerned about the growing threats from a warming world, and from the diseases that are spreading in its wake.

“I think climate change is really an enormous threat to the banana sector,” said Mr Liu of the World Banana Forum, a UN umbrella group that brings together industry stakeholders including retailers, producer countries, exporters and research institutions.

Just because you ‘think’ the weather is affecting banana production Mr Liu, that does not make it a fact.

Notice also the World Banana Forum is an agency of the UN, whose main role these days seems to be to make people afraid of the weather.

A simple internet search revealed this chart from Our World In Data, which shows banana production from 1961 to 2021. Can you see a drop in banana production there?

Ah, now they tell us of a disease.

“So, this type of phenomenon will disseminate the disease much faster than if you had more normal weather patterns.”

Producers are also facing pressures from rising costs of fertilisers, energy and transport as well as problems in finding enough workers.

Taken together with the impacts of climate change on supply, prices in the UK and elsewhere are likely to go up – and stay up.

“There will be some price increases, indeed,” said Mr Liu. “If there’s not a major increase in supply, I project that banana prices will remain relatively high in the coming years.”

Among the issues that the banana industry will discuss at its gathering in Rome is the critical question of sustainability.

Consumers are increasingly looking to buy bananas and other commodities that are produced in a sustainable way.

For banana growers this means not only making their means of production greener, but also paying independent examiners to certify that their fruit are sustainable.

“These regulations are a good thing in a way because they help producers seize the opportunity of making their production systems more sustainable,” said Mr Liu.

“But of course, they also come with costs for producers because they require more control and monitoring systems on the part of the producers and the traders. And these costs have to trickle down to the final consumers.”