Bananas and Food Security - Bioversity International

762 Les productions bananières / Bananas and food security – Session 4
Use of fertiliser in bananas and plantains and in other crops
As an indirect indicator of the importance of bananas and plantains we compared the
use of fertiliser in bananas and plantains and in other crops. 93% of the farmers fertilise
their crops and 65% fertilise their bananas and plantains less than the other crops. This
means that 30% of farmers have insufficient money to buy additional fertiliser to apply to
their bananas and plantains and therefore prefer to fertilise other crops. Some farmers
do not fertilise bananas and plantains because they think that those crops produce well
enough without fertilising.
Reasons to produce bananas and plantains
To know why farmers produce bananas and plantains, we calculated the importance of
home consumption in the total production of bananas and plantains. We also calculated
the relative importance of home consumption in the total production. Finally the two
were compared.
Importance of home consumption in the production
of bananas and plantains
To determine the relative importance of home consumption in the production of bananas
and plantains, we calculated the proportion of the production kept for home
consumption in the total production of bananas and plantains. Many farmers we visited
could not remember how many bananas and plantains they produced, sold, or ate. We
asked these to estimate the importance of home consumption.
Approximately 50% of the farmers produce more bananas and plantains for home
consumption than for sale (Table 5). 20% of them sell and reserve for home consumption
an equal amount of their production. Seventeen percent produce more for sale than for
home consumption and only 16% produce exclusively for the market. Home consumption
of the bananas and plantains produced is more important for the farmers of classes 1
and 4. More than 55% of the farmers of class 1 and 63% of the farmers of class 4 produce
bananas and plantains exclusively for home consumption. The big farmers grow only for
the market, as do 10% of the farmers of class 2 and 4 and 24.1% of the farmers of class 1.
In class 3 there were no farmers who produced only for sale.
Table 5. Importance of the home consumption (%) in the production of bananas
and plantains.
class 1 class 2 class 3 class 4 class 5 all classes
Exclusively home consumption 55.2 33 27.3 63.6 0 43.4
Home consumption > sales 0.0 10 9.1 0.0 0 4.8
Home consumption = sales 20.7 20 27.3 9.1 0 19.3
Home consumption < sales 0.0 26 36.4 18.2 0 16.9
Exclusively sold 24.1 10 0.0 9.1 100 15.7