Belgium, where bananas thrive and monkeys go crazy

However tempting, this post is not about the political Spielerei in Belgium that, by now, cannot interest no one any longer but the odd political scientist [in Dutch] or rating agent. (For those of you who have just tuned in, Belgium has been without a newly elected government for over 400 days now…) Instead, I want to share with you the most surprising discovery I made today: ranked by value, Belgium is the world's second largest exporter of bananas. Wohow, slow down, say that again? Belgium? Exporting bananas?



Seriously, I'm not making this up. The FAO does. Ok, admittedly, by export quantity, Belgium only comes in sixth, after Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Colombia and Guatemala. But still… Belgium? July has just been named the 'saddest' month of July in the past thirty years because the sun had taken so much time off for holidays.


A quick search on the wonderful world of the web revealed that a Belgian company called Leon Van Parijs is the European distribution hub for Alvaro Noboa, a 'great bad man' from Ecuador. And where else would they be headquartered but in Antwerp [in Dutch]? This family business has been importing and redistributing (tropical) fruits since the early 20th century and is currently the sole centre to spread the Bonita love all over Europe.


All of a sudden, I remembered that the WTO has a plethora of rules of origin to determine where a product comes from. The EU will most certainly also have its own set of regulations to top that. So, no doubt Leon Van Parijs mastered the art of ripening the Ecuadorian bananas in Belgium before redistributing them, therefore turning them 'Belgian'. Selling them ten times more expensive than their original export price, then, squares the circle [in Dutch].


Lest we would start worrying about the implications on the farmers in Ecuador of these profit driven multinational enterprises, I'll leave you with another fun fact of the day to make you go bananas. India tops by far and large the rankings of banana producing countries with over 27% of total world production, yet manages to export only 30,402 of the 26,996,600 tons it produces. Watch your step, then, next time you're in India: that makes for 224,380,316,312 peels to slip on!