Guillermo Chavez Gomez, the manager of Michoacan's Banana Product System Committee, said that producers needed to be more integrated and that they needed to work on an alternative, such as selling their fruit through a specialized office, to market their fruit at a better price.
He said that producers were currently incurring losses at the local level, as the production of bananas costs about 2.50 pesos per kilo and vendors were only paying producers .80 to 1.30 pesos per kilo. These are then going on sale for an average of 18.90 pesos per kilo in retail stores to the final consumers.
In this regard, he said, the fruit's export price is much better than the local price because producers received more than 4 pesos per kilogram; however, only 10 percent of the 600 producers of bananas in Michoacan export their products.
He added that the state had 6,000 hectares devoted to bananas that produced an estimated 240,000 tons of fruit per year, and that the highest production period took place between September and December, when producers harvested about 100 banana clusters per hectare.
Source: mimorelia.com