scotslad
14th October 2018, 19:31
It's bananas
Irish based Fyffes is a E700m business empire...
...and apparently imports the entire harvest/output from the country of Belize.
Had the planned merger with fyffes and chiquita gone through, that would
have meant that only 4 companies in the world owned/dominated the entire
global banana market.
Bananas are now the world's No.4 dietary staple after rice, wheat and corn.
India apparently now produces more bananas than any other country, closely followed by China and the Phillipines.
With over 80bn tonnes of bananas being exported annually around the world, it's no wonder it's the world's #1 exported fruit and in 1954 prices rose so high it was referred to as "green gold".
This is an interesting read too (albeit a more current one must exist) - http://www.fao.org/docrep/019/i3627e/i3627e.pdf
especially the stats tables about the production capacity & exports of different countries and more interesting - when you discover where in the world some of these crops are actually grown.
For example, The Canary Islands is the source of all of Spain's 371,000 ton production.
France? You guessed it - a Guadeloupe et Martinique dans le Caribbean.
Portugal's 18,000 tons from Madeira & São Miguel
And who'd have known....
Bananas were famously once grown in Scotland, at the hydroponicum in Achiltibuie. A cluster of 10-20 bananas is called a hand, and each banana - a finger.
Aye, and if you've got the distribution...
In 2015, a UK supermarket employee discovered 5 bags of class A drugs when unpacking a box of South American Bananas with estimated street value of £1m.
In September 2018, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice received a donation of 45 boxes of bananas that were already ripe and needed to be eaten quickly. Packed between layers of bananas in the shipment were 540 bricks of cocaine, worth around $18 million on the street.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/23/us/cocaine-donated-bananas-tdcj-trnd/index.html
Where there's a market, there's always a supplier, distribution and the opportunity for the criminal fraternity. ;)
Irish based Fyffes is a E700m business empire...
...and apparently imports the entire harvest/output from the country of Belize.
Had the planned merger with fyffes and chiquita gone through, that would
have meant that only 4 companies in the world owned/dominated the entire
global banana market.
Bananas are now the world's No.4 dietary staple after rice, wheat and corn.
India apparently now produces more bananas than any other country, closely followed by China and the Phillipines.
With over 80bn tonnes of bananas being exported annually around the world, it's no wonder it's the world's #1 exported fruit and in 1954 prices rose so high it was referred to as "green gold".
This is an interesting read too (albeit a more current one must exist) - http://www.fao.org/docrep/019/i3627e/i3627e.pdf
especially the stats tables about the production capacity & exports of different countries and more interesting - when you discover where in the world some of these crops are actually grown.
For example, The Canary Islands is the source of all of Spain's 371,000 ton production.
France? You guessed it - a Guadeloupe et Martinique dans le Caribbean.
Portugal's 18,000 tons from Madeira & São Miguel
And who'd have known....
Bananas were famously once grown in Scotland, at the hydroponicum in Achiltibuie. A cluster of 10-20 bananas is called a hand, and each banana - a finger.
Aye, and if you've got the distribution...
In 2015, a UK supermarket employee discovered 5 bags of class A drugs when unpacking a box of South American Bananas with estimated street value of £1m.
In September 2018, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice received a donation of 45 boxes of bananas that were already ripe and needed to be eaten quickly. Packed between layers of bananas in the shipment were 540 bricks of cocaine, worth around $18 million on the street.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/23/us/cocaine-donated-bananas-tdcj-trnd/index.html
Where there's a market, there's always a supplier, distribution and the opportunity for the criminal fraternity. ;)