Philippines fresh produce export calendar

The Philippines is the banana origin the Latin American pages on this calendar do not describe. It is the largest exporter in Asia, almost all of it Cavendish grown in Mindanao — Davao del Norte, Bukidnon and Davao de Oro — and almost none of it sold into Europe. The buyers are in Japan, South Korea, China and Hong Kong, and the lane is days rather than weeks: Davao to Yokohama or to Hong Kong is a short hop next to the Atlantic crossings everything else here is planned around.

That length changes what a shipment is. Fruit arrives with most of its life still in front of it, so the commercial risk sits in the contract rather than in the voyage — Japanese volume in particular is bought on annual agreements, which means the price a season was budgeted at was fixed long before the box was loaded. Neither crop has a season. Bananas and pineapples ship against standing programmes every week of the year, and what actually moves is volume: the wet months thin it, a typhoon crossing Mindanao removes weeks of it, and Panama disease TR4 has taken plantations out of production for good rather than for a season.