Rolando Torrentino's worries keep growing by the day. Banana production in his plantation has slowed down drastically. Panama disease, which infects the banana tree and can spread easily, has impacted his produce.
Now he says he cannot even afford to pay his workers. It's really hard for us to recover. When we plant, it takes at least 10 months before we can get to harvest. So the recovery would be like starting all over again.
Almost half of his plantation has already been destroyed. He says the disease first started with one tree and then spread quickly, leaving the soil severely damaged as well. The Philippines is one of the world's top producers of bananas. Banana plantations here cover more than 50,000 hectares of farmland in the region of Mindanao.
The Panama disease has mostly affected small-time growers here, who are now deep in debt, unable to pay back their loans. The banana industry is one of the country's top revenue earners. It is also ranked the second among the top international producers of bananas after Ecuador. But producers here are having problems meeting the growing demand abroad for higher quality bananas. And producers say what they now need is support.
What the government can do to help especially the Department of Agriculture is to teach these growers how to respond to standard operating procedures on how to really cut the disease out. Why have you not given us advice, training or materials to make the growers aware of how to control it? The government said they have, but it never reached us. We should have been given those directly because we are the owners.
The land Torrentino's family had for generations is now barely usable. Almost every week, a hectare gets infested. And with it, he says, his dreams for a better life gets wiped out. Jamala Alindogan, Al Jazeera, Compostela Valley, Southern Philippines.