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Food Production at a Local Scale

Banana Production in the Philippines

STUDYING AGRICULTURE AT THE LOCAL SCALE

Local scale studies are very important in understanding the geography of any productive activity and banana-growing is no exception. There are four major reasons.

• Studying production units directs attention to decision-making on particular farms or plantations and how local characteristics of agricultural areas interact with forces for change arising at scales such as national and global.



• People experience impacts of global and national change in particular places. These impacts are shaped by local characteristics of agricultural areas. Important features in banana-producing regions include: links between banana-growing and other local industries; characteristics of the banana farmers or plantation workers, for example in those places containing large numbers of immigrant workers; the local availability or absence of alternative job opportunities for workers on banana plantations; and the severity of local environmental impact of banana-growing.



• Local impacts of agricultural change, especially in industries like banana exporting dominated by large agribusiness firms, have had major political importance in recent years. In the banana industry, this is partly because governments have had such a major involvement in permitting and supporting production, but also because governments have a responsibility to address local economic and social dislocation which has commonly accompanied agricultural change since 1980.



• Studies of production units such as farms provide good opportunities for field study. There is really no substitute for visiting a farm to gain some understanding about its relationships with local human and biophysical environments and, if possible, to look inside the production unit and talk to farmers about how they operate. It would be useful to visit a farm in a banana-growing area of New South Wales, for example, or undertake a comparative study of banana production in Australia where the economic, social and political environment is so different from that in the world's major exporters. Yet visiting any farm to which you have access would be a useful field study of relationships between farming and its surrounding human and biophysical environments.

Some of the most important things to find out about agricultural production units are:

1. the history of the farm/plantation, biophysical conditions and location factors which caused it to emerge on this site
2. ownership, decision-making and control within the farm, and how these relate to national and global changes
3. the changing nature of the production process including inputs and outputs, technologies used and transport systems developed
4. linkages between the farm or plantation and other activities at local, national and global scales
5. conditions of life for farmers and their families
6. the impact of government policies on production at the farm/plantation and patterns of change
7. social and environmental impacts of changes within the farm or plantation on its local community
8. the future of this production unit

These issues are now illustrated with reference to banana-growing for export in the Southeastern Mindanao region of the Philippines. The farm chosen for study is called  Lapanday and is close to Davao City, one of the largest cities in Mindanao.

Regions on the Philippines