A farmer cuts down a banana plant, at her farm, in Kiwenda village, Busukuma, Wakiso District, Uganda, Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023. The decapitated banana plant is almost useless, an inconvenience to the farmer who must then uproot it and lay its dismembered parts as mulch. A Ugandan company is buying banana stems in a business that turns fiber into attractive handicrafts. The idea is innovative as well as sustainable in this East African country thats literally a banana republic.
In Uganda, eating bananas is in many ways embedded in local customs and tradition; for many a meal is incomplete without a serving of matooke, the local word for the starchy boiled mush made from banana cultivars harvested and cooked raw. John Baptist Okello, TEXFAD’s business manager, told The Associated Press that the business made sense in a country where farmers “are struggling a lot” with millions of tons of banana-related waste. The company, which collaborates with seven different farmers' groups in western Uganda, pays $2.70 for a kilogram of dried fiber.
That number is only a small fraction of what’s available in a country where more than a million hectares are planted with bananas. Banana production has been rising steadily over the years, growing from 6.5 metric tons in 2018 to 8.3 metric tons in 2019, according to figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.