Producer country file. The banana in the French West Indies[Fiche pays producteur. La banane aux Antilles françaises]

The number two European banana production zone behind the Canaries, the French West Indies (Guadeloupe and Martinique) face numerous challenges, including frequent climate vagaries, high production costs and increasingly restrictive phytosanitary regulations. Despite these growing constraints, and production below the 200 000-tonnes mark for the past three years, the FWI industry is holding up, and undergoing a profound transformation. On the one hand, the productive fabric has been able to adapt, and very quickly at that, to the principles and techniques of agroecology in a tropical environment, to cope with changes to the European regulatory framework in terms of pesticide use. On the other hand, and thanks to a downstream strategy focused on differentiation and sustainability, the industry has been able to harness consumer demand for healthy produce of French origin. Thanks to this, the banana grown in the FWI, which is recognised as a world laboratory for good social and environmental practices for this crop, is now firmly established on the Mainland French market.