AU: Price hike gesture helps banana farmers

It took just two days for the price of bananas to jump in supermarkets after Cyclone Yasi hit, but the early price rise is the result of a gesture from the major chains to help farmers recover. Coles and Woolworths have back-paid farmers for bananas picked before the cyclone in anticipation of crop damage. Banana Growers chief executive Jonathan Eccles says it is a positive move on behalf of the supermarket chains. "What both supermarkets have done - the fruit that's already in their warehouses - they have backdated payments to the growers at well above what was the normal price they were paying," he said. "So as an example, $16 to $18 was probably just the going rate pre-cyclone, and now they're paying $50 to $60 a box back to the grower for that fruit that was already in their warehouse."
Mr Eccles says consumers are now paying close to $6 per kilo for bananas in store. "The mark-up at the retail level is not as high as it normally would be... so [supermarkets] are wearing some of that," he said. The gesture from the supermarket giants is a small bit of good news for banana farmers, but in the far north Queensland disaster zone growers are simply getting on with the backbreaking task of cleaning up. Cleaning a cyclone-devastated banana farm is not an easy job; Cyclone Yasi's 295kph winds broke the trees like toothpicks. On Cameron Flegler's farm near Tully, just six trees were left standing. "Six trees. We've got names for all of them. One's called Sharon," he said.
Mr Flegler says now he and the backpackers he employs to work on his farm are going row by row with cane knives cutting up fallen trees and salvaging any bunches of bananas that were not smashed when they hit the ground. "It's hard work. It's out in the sun, so if you've got no nourishment you're going to collapse fairly quickly," he said. "There's a lot of sunburnt banana bunches out there, a lot that are smashed. We'll sort through them and wash them and put them in the cold room."But Mr Flegler says he doubts he will be able to recover much. "I'll get all the fruit that's on the deck. That'll be finished by the end of the week," he said. "I think it'll just be a very low income year."