“The leaves and fruits of my plants are full of ash,” banana farmer Hilario Batista tells on the phone from his home on La Palma. Although his banana plantations are not in the way of the boiling hot lava flow that reached the sea on Wednesday, he still sees a large part of his crop falling into the water. “The fruits are destroyed by the ash rain. I have already swept 30 kilos of ash from my roof.”
‘Impossible to go every day’
“We try to harvest as much as possible. But for safety reasons, we are not always allowed to go to the plantations. Yesterday another field was swallowed by the lava,” says Elisa Martínez of banana company Europlatano, which has fields in the area affected by the lava flow. .
Farmers whose plantations are still standing can often not take care of the bananas either. “Normally we go every day, but that is now impossible due to roadblocks,” says Martínez.
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Banana island
La Palma is known as La Isla Bonita, the beautiful island, but also as the banana island. Because after Tenerife, La Palma has the largest banana plantation area of all the Canary Islands. Half of the economy on the island therefore runs on this ‘yellow gold’, and thirty percent of the jobs are linked to the sector.
The consequences of the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano hit banana cultivation hard: 1200 of the almost 3000 hectares of banana plantations on La Palma have been affected, says the Canary Association of Banana Producers Asprocan, which estimates the preliminary damage at 72 million euros.
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Volcano ash destroys banana
“If the volcano continues to spew and the lava flow widens, or if a branch develops, the damage will only increase. Every day counts,” said Manuel Redondo, spokesperson for the Canary agricultural and livestock association Coag.
A real plague is now the jet-black volcanic ash on the banana plants, because according to Redondo you can’t just wash it off. “The fruit is very fragile. If the ash gets in, the fruit often breaks when cleaning. You can see that when the banana ripens. The ash acts as a kind of knife.”
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Call in Spain
According to Redondo, the lava flow runs through one of the most important banana areas of La Palma. The bananas are usually kept in plastic greenhouses. If these – and the pesticides stored there – catch fire, toxic clouds can form.
Most of the Canary bananas are sold on the Spanish mainland. An action has been launched on social media to encourage Spaniards to buy Canary bananas in order to support the affected farmers on La Palma.
Spain has declared La Palma a disaster area and is now allocating more than 10 million euros to assist the islanders. Six thousand of them have been evacuated and more than eight hundred houses have been destroyed as a result of the volcanic eruption.
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