Banana production under Integrated Pest Management and organic criteria: the Canary Islands case study  explores the advances made by growers in the islands, which together represent Europe’s largest banana producing region.

The importance of bananas to the islands, situated off the north-western coast of Africa, is underlined in the leaflet’s opening paragraph: banana production has structured the agricultural landscape of the islands and supports the economy.

With most growers operating smallholdings of less than one hectare, they have developed profound knowledge of crop management in subtropical conditions and have successfully adopted systems of controlled production to meet the challenges of increasingly restrictive European Community legislation designed to protect the environment, food safety and human health.

The leaflet explores how growers, members of the ASPROCAN growers’ association, have combined a mixture of new techniques and traditional methods to meet these challenges, which has included signing up to a range of certification schemes such as AENOR and GLOBALGAP, Integrated Production and Ecological Production.

The authors from the Instituto Canario de Investigaciones Agrarias (ICIA) and ASPROCAN have identified some key steps to producing bananas in a more sustainable way. These include:

• Inputs of organic matter
• Use of banana vitroplantlets
• Soil mulching with plant residues
• New plantation spacing
• Selective removal of leaves and floral remnants
• Cropping under greenhouse conditions
• Releasing natural enemies and conserving native auxiliary fauna
• Using pitfall traps with attractants
• Spraying with alternatives to synthetic pesticides

Banana production under Integrated Pest Management and organic criteria: the Canary Islands case study  is the fifth leaflet in the From Science to Field series devoted to banana production. The banana leaflets, which first went online in January, have already proved popular worldwide, with downloads being made across Central and Southern America, Asia and Australasia, in addition to Europe.

Other banana leaflets available

The need to find safer, more environmentally friendly, ways of producing bananas is spelled out in the first leaflet in the series, Challenging short and mid-term strategies to reduce the use of pesticides in banana production . It identifies both the scale of the banana sector (59 million tonnes of dessert bananas were produced worldwide in 2007) and the heavy pesticide use that this can sometimes entail (more than 70kg of active ingredient per hectare per year in Belize, for example).

Guide Number 2, Mycosphaerella foliar diseases of bananas: towards an integrated protection , examines in detail Black Leaf Streak Disease (BLSD, caused by Mycosphaerella fijiensis ) and Sigatoka Disease (SD, caused by M. musicola ), which, it says, are the main parasitic problem for export bananas. They cause both yield loss, through damage to the foliage, but more importantly for banana producers, they cause bananas to ripen prematurely and render them unfit for export.

Guide Number 3, Integrated Pest Management of black weevil in banana cropping systems , examines Cosmopolites sordidus  (Coleoptera: curculionidae), the black weevil which is a major pest of banana for both export farms and for smallholders in developing countries. It suggests a range of IPM strategies including the introduction of new cropping practices, such as fallows, and the use of pheromone-pitfall traps.

Guide Number 4, Integrated management of banana nematodes: Lessons from a case study in the French West Indies , examines steps taken to control these tiny worms whose proliferation not only disrupts water and nutrient uptake and delays growth, but may cause banana plants to topple over.

Cover	Title	Download (pdf)
	Guide Number 1: Challenging short and mid-term strategies to reduce the use of pesticides in banana production	Banana Case Study Guide Number 1 [pdf - 51446 kB]
	Guide Number 2: Mycosphaerella  foliar diseases of bananas: towards an integrated protection	Banana Case Study Guide Number 2 [pdf - 51403 kB]
	Guide Number 3: Integrated Pest Management of black weevil in banana cropping systems	Banana Case Study Guide Number 3 [pdf - 61899 kB]
	Guide Number 4: Integrated management of banana nematodes: Lessons from a case study in the French West Indies	Banana Case Study Guide Number 4 [pdf - 56975 kB]
	Guide Number 5: Banana production under Integrated Pest Management and organic criteria: the Canary Islands case study	Banana Case Study Guide Number 5 [pdf - 45953 kB]

If you found this article interesting, you may want to consult:

• Bananas: new ways of growing our favourite fruit
• For details of all ENDURE’s publications, click here.