The president of the National Banana Federation (Fenabe), Franklin Torres, assures that according to the records of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, he has signed contracts with two export companies and that from this union “what we are promoting is to sign contracts fairly for both parties, in which the price paid is the minimum support price ( PMS) and that there are no illegal discounts, as is the case with most contracts offered to the banana production sector”.

He says this in response to the Minister of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, Eduardo Izaguirre, who stated in an interview for this newspaper that there are people who are interested in continuing informality and that “leaders who have accepted that formalization is the solution, among them the president of Fenabe, Franklin Torres, are on in the end he did not sign the contract and preferred to encourage the producers not to sign them”.

Minister of Agriculture: With the contract, we send couperos made of bananas by flight

Torres comments that the ministry should be an ally of the sector “because obviously we are in a situation of commercial imbalance with the commercial sector and in some other way MAG should be the arbiter that balances that balance”.

“We actually campaigned not to sign those contracts that were offered to us in recent years, and they are obviously terrible. The base price of the contract is not 6.50 dollars, the price is 6.10 – 6 dollars and they do not respect the default price, so MAG must somehow intervene,” says the representative of Fenabe.

And he adds that “they promoted paying a fair price, there is no reason in the world for them to pay those prices here in Ecuador, to give us an external commercial reason to say ‘you know I have to pay that price’, there is no, simply the ambition of some exporters to put money in their pockets,” said Torres.

For this leader, the formalization of the banana business means fair contracts for the purchase and sale of bananas for both parties, “it means a new computerized control with guarantees that allow legal and fair trade, not what we have now when the sector is not a managed banana formalizer. In addition , this means transparency in marketing, according to MAG records, there are more contracted hectares than fruit in the total production in the country. The state portfolio announces 7 million contracts, but all producers know that there are more than 3 million boxes without contracts from independent producers”.

This means that “75 percent of the fruit of the independent producer leaves without a contract and it is the fault of the Ministry, they must correct it, not Fenabe, not the exporters”.

And he assures that if this state department were to say at this moment that not a single box goes without a contract, everyone would be obliged to sign them, exporters and producers: “It is the Ministry’s fault that it has not done it for four months, it did not force it, we from the beginning they told him to do it, unfortunately it didn’t happen”.

https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/economia/ministro-de-agricultura-con-el-contrato-a-los-cuperos-del-banano-les-mandamos-a-volar-nota/

However, he points out that they do not want to clash with the minister, “we do not want to accuse him of anything, because we are not real people. We need the export sector, we need the Ministry of Agriculture, we are the basic base of the banana production chain, without producers the work ends, we just ask for some justice, some parity and help for both sides to progress.”

Izaguirre also mentioned in the interview that “we did not come to fight, but to work.”