Did you notice that too?
Recently, prices are only doing what they grow. It’s getting expensive to go to the store. Today everyone, without exception, felt it. The rise in prices for essential products is especially noticeable: potatoes, onions, cabbage, carrots and everything that, it would seem, cannot cost much. Meanwhile, bananas that are brought to Russia from abroad have suddenly become cheaper than domestic products. The latter fact causes bewilderment among the consumer. Why did it happen?
For clarification, we turned to the ex-senator, a member of the council on the agro-industrial complex and environmental management under the Federation Council, Sergei Lisovsky.
Former Senator, Member of the Council on Agroindustrial Complex and Environmental Management under the Federation Council
— It doesn’t take much effort to produce bananas. They grow in suitable and stable conditions in the right climate. In addition, banana palms bear fruit all year round, which eliminates the cost of special storage conditions: as a rule, bananas are picked green, and they ripen in the process of gassing in special chambers in warehouses in the Moscow region.
Note: gassing is a technology of controlled ripening using a special gas mixture of nitrogen (95%) and ethylene (5%), which is filled into a chamber with unripe bananas before being shipped to retail.
And since they are transported green, special conditions are not needed here either: they are transported in containers on large ships with a carrying capacity of 40-60 thousand tons. And the wholesale transportation of bananas from Ecuador is quite cheap today.
If we talk about the nutritional value of bananas, then it is insignificant in comparison with carrots: artificially ripened bananas, naturally, do not have time to accumulate useful substances that they could receive, ripening in natural conditions, like carrots. So we are, in fact, not eating a real banana, but its shell.
With carrots, everything is completely different, because it is a seasonal root crop, and it is more expensive in terms of production. First, in order to plant carrots, farmers must purchase seeds. And in order to sow a field, you first need special equipment for sowing, then for harvesting it. Even when growing carrots, the fields must be constantly treated with fertilizers and weeds must be destroyed. In addition, unlike bananas, carrots need special storage conditions, which causes a whole string of associated costs, and this, in turn, cannot but affect the cost of carrots. This is not even economics, but simple arithmetic, the expert explains.