Costa Rica Blogs - Newsfeeds

This year Costa Rica exported 102.1 million cases of banana, 13.5 million more than the 88.6 million it exported last year.  Each case weighs 18.14 kilos.

Jorge Sauma, Manager of CORBANA said the increase is due to 3 factors:

• Producers improved productivity from 2,155 cases per hectare in 2005 to 2,400 cases this year.
• The government implemented a plan to support farms that were failing, but were not considered as unable to produce. The $50 million plan was implemented with government funds, but paid back by the farmers from the exports.
• The climate this year was good for production

33,000 Costa Ricans are employed by the banana farms, and these export figures place it in second place, behind Intel, as Costa Ricas largest export industry.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 10:45 am and is filed under Business and Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.