Bananas and Food Security - Bioversity International

760 Les productions bananières / Bananas and food security – Session 4
• as an indication of the attention and the investment farmers make in bananas and
plantains, we have compared the use of fertilisers in bananas and plantains and in
other crops.
The relative importance of the planting of bananas and
plantains in the whole farm
To calculate the relative importance of the planting of bananas and plantains on the
whole farm we divided the area with bananas and plantains by the total cropped area. A
value of 1 means that the farmer produces only bananas and plantains. A value of 0.10
means that he produces those crops on 10% of his cultivated area.
We found that 58.1% of the visited farmers have less than 10% of their land planted
with bananas and plantains. 87.6% have less than 40%. These crops have a greater importance
for farmers of class 1 and 3 than in the other classes (Table 2).
Table 2. Relative importance of bananas and plantains on the farms
(Percentage of farmers growing the crop).
Fraction planted class 1 class 2 class 3 class 4 class 5 all
with banana/
plantain
classes
0,05 18.8 22.4 28.6 60.0 0 27.5
0,10 28.1 42.9 21.4 20.0 0 30.6
0,20 28.1 5.7 14.3 6.7 50.0 15.3
0,30-0,40 12.5 17.1 14.3 13.3 0 14.2
0,40-1 6.2 5.8 21.3 0 0 7.0
1 6.3 5.7 0 0 50.0 5.1
Relative importance of other crops
More than 46% of the farmers grew maize on 40-100% of their land (Table 3). The other
food crops are less important. More than 24% of the farmers grew rice on 40-100% of
their land. Only 11 to 12% grew such an area of sorghum or beans. Cassava was grown
even less.
By comparison, cash crops have relatively greater importance on the farms. Most
farmers with soybean cultivated it on 40-100% of their land. More than 34% of the farmers
cultivated a similar area with sesame.
Maize can have a value higher than 1 in the table, because farmers can produce more
than one crop per year.
The relative importance of bananas and plantains
in the incomes of the farmers
We also determined the relative importance of bananas and plantains in the incomes of
the farmers. For each farmer we calculated the cash value of the production of each
crop and of the total production of all the crops. That part of the production that the