32 cents a kilo: why the Canary banana sells below what it costs to grow

The number — and the series behind it

The figure comes from the weekly price statistics of the Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación: €0.325 a kilo in week 35, rounded to 32 cents. Before that came week 33 at €0.33 and week 34 at €0.35. What matters is what the number is not: it applies to first-grade fruit ex-loading, and lower grades fetch less. And it is a weekly value — the crop is harvested all year round, and the fruit cannot wait.

What a kilo costs — and what is on the shelf

Through the summer the eldiario.es reports put production costs at €0.70 to 0.80 a kilo; since early September they say €0.80 to 0.90 — the same range used by the farm organisation Palca. No explanation for the shift appears anywhere. On the lower range the August price covers 41 per cent of costs, on the higher one 36.

The retail price cannot be set cleanly beside it, and that is not carelessness: the ministry's Observatorio de la Cadena Alimentaria has not measured the consumer price since 2019. Only reference points are solid — Asprocan gave an average of €2.80 a kilo for 2025, and the report by Justicia Alimentaria set €0.83 at the grower against €2.11 in the shops for 2023. Whether the shelf fell in step during 2026 cannot be shown from public data.

What POSEI pays — and what it cannot do

The aid is called POSEI, the EU programme for the outermost regions. For the Canary banana it provides €141.1 million a year, paid from the FEAGA fund and administered by the Consejería de Agricultura of the Gobierno de Canarias. It is paid in two instalments between 1 December 2026 and 30 June 2027.

The arithmetic is what decides it. At most 420,000 tonnes are eligible, on a reference of 11,200 hectares, plus a supplement of €1,200 a hectare for open-air cultivation, capped at 7,600 hectares. Budget divided by the ceiling gives about 33.6 cents a kilo; eldiario.es cites €0.3359 as the maximum unit amount and €0.32 as the rate in force this summer.

From which follows the thing that is invisible from the shelf: POSEI is a capped envelope, not a price guarantee. It does not rise when the market falls, and if more is harvested than the ceiling, the amount per kilo goes down. It also arrives late. A price collapse in August is not something it can cushion.

Which causes are named — and by whom

Asprocan, the association of producer organisations, names three, according to eldiario.es: demand that collapsed over the summer weeks, oversupply, and competition from imported banana. Its commercial committee decided in early August expressly not to take special measures and forecast a recovery from week 37; its president, José Carlos Rendón, argues a market-liberal line.

On the third point there are hard numbers. According to the Dirección General de Aduanas, 241,582 tonnes of imported banana reached the Spanish market in the first half of 2026, 14.5 per cent more than a year earlier, against 178,689 tonnes of plátano. The 2025 Canary harvest, at 374.6 million kilos, was the second lowest in 25 years — so the loss of share was not caused by growing more. The sector's counter-measure is the pica: fruit is never shipped but given to food banks, sold to Morocco, fed to animals or composted — which tightens supply and at the same time keeps the kilos in the production history from which future reference quantities are calculated.

What is demanded, what is answered

On 7 September the farm organisation Palca called for the resignation of the leadership of Asprocan and of the six producer organisations. Its president, Amable del Corral, said they had "warned publicly two months ago", and demanded that the Consejería enforce Decreto 48/2018 on the recognition of producer organisations and disclose how prices are formed along the chain. No reply from Asprocan is reported.

The administrations answer at a different level. On 9 September COAG and its general secretary Andrés Góngora called for a POSEI of its own, adequately financed, in the EU budget framework for 2028–2034; agriculture minister Narvay Quintero demands "a separate, differentiated and sufficient financial allocation". On 4 March 2026 the Commission approved the POSEI changes requested by the Canaries — sweet potato, pineapple, pig farming, Tajogaite aid extended to 2027. The banana envelope was not among them.