Australians can expect banana shortages and price hikes as the cleanup begins in flood-ravaged north Queensland, which grows almost 94% of Australia’s banana crop, growers say.
But the good news, for consumers at least, is that any banana dramas playing out on supermarket shelves over coming days will be linked to transport disruption, rather than widespread crop destruction – meaning the price and availability of one of the country’s favourite fruits should soon return to normal.
Sugar prices should remain largely unaffected, even though 95% of the country’s sugar cane crop is in Queensland – and much of that in the state’s north.
But as sunshine pierces the gloom that has engulfed the tropical north, water levels begin to recede and the cleanup begins, many growers will be grappling with the fallout of some of the worst flooding in living memory for some time yet.
The Australian Banana Growers’ Council deputy chair, Stephen Lowe, said that only a small percentage of flooded farms’ banana trees would be destroyed by the inundation, but that a far larger proportion would have waterlogged roots.
“It takes a good four to five months before the root system recovers, so those plants will be … not at peak performance, and you’ll get a reduction in crop in those areas,” he said.
Lowe grows Cavendish bananas on about 154 hectares (380 acres) in the Tully River valley, an area he said saw the river “bordering on flash flooding” – which he described as “pretty rare” for the Tully – and had areas go under that hadn’t seen inundation in “probably the last 40 years”.
Lowe’s own farm, he said, had “copped a flogging”.
“Ten acres are completely destroyed,” he said.
“About another 100 [acres] has had water that has gone up into the bunches so that you get silt up in them – and they are unmarketable. I processed 12 one-tonne pallets of fruit this week … I would normally do 50. So I’ll be down by that much until well into March.”
But while he and other Tully farmers will be dealing with scoured-out roads and waterlogged paddocks for weeks, Lowe said the banana industry’s northern heartland had expanded and now spread from about Lakeland, 150km north of Cairns, to Kennedy, south of Tully.
“We have such a diverse growing area now,” he said. “Probably the flooding has affected a quarter of that, at the most”.
But with the Bruce Highway that connects those areas to the populated south cut, Lowe said the distribution centres that freight bananas to the rest of the country “would be empty”.
“And fruit, when it arrives, still has to be ripened,” he said. “That takes a minimum of four days.
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“So, yes, there will be minimum fruit on the shelves, the price probably will go up – however I don’t think that will be long term.”
Lowe said that once the transport starts flowing again – “probably by the end of next week or maybe into the week after” – things should “settle down”.
The Canegrowers chief executive, Dan Galligan, also said it would take days to begin to assess the scale and extent of crop losses.
He said the two largest sugar growing areas in the country, the Herbert and Burdekin catchments – which account for about one-third of the country’s sugar production – would be flood damaged.
But 80% of the sugar produced in Australia is exported, and much of Australia’s domestic supply is grown between Mackay and northern New South Wales, which was largely out of the flood zone.
For those growers who had seen “large slabs” of young crop washed away or established cane drowned, however, the recovery could take up to two years, Galligan warned.
As well as damage to rail gauges and infrastructure the industry relies upon, he said, many growers has also endured a couple of “pretty mentally damaging” weeks.
Sugar cane, he said, is a hardy crop and many farms designed to have machinery and houses sit above flood water. But days without power, running fuel to generators, being cut off from the outside world and the incessant sound of driving rain have been emotionally difficult.
“Ten days of rain, 200mm of rain every day – that shakes you up,” Galligan said. “It’s rattled people”.