2018 Costa Rica

The seven-member team assembled in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, in late February before heading to EARTH University, via the Braulio Carrillo National Park. The group interviewed a Professor about biosecurity, met students studying soil nematodes and root health, and the person who ran the campus agroforestry plot, who explained the practice of integrated farming. The team interviewed an organic banana baby food producer and a PhD student working on banana agriculture.

Back in San Jose there was an encounter with the coordinator of Asociación ANAI, a non-profit conservation and sustainability organisation, before seeing a Swedish Masters student working on banana farming in indigenous communities. The team then set off to meet a farm owner in Finca Pasiflora in Mercedes, where they were given a tour. The area was beautiful and inhabited with various butterflies and birds, and the farm grew over 50 different varieties of banana, sweet potato and papaya as well as rearing pigs, chickens and paca (a large kind of rodent).

They then travelled to a farmer’s market in San Isidro before proceeding to Hone Creek in the Talmanca region. Here they met an indigenous farmer and interim leader of APPTA, a small producers association, and were given a tour the cacao processing plant, an agroforestry plot and interviewed a banana vinegar producer. This plot focused on an alternative way of producing bananas by growing crops of different height on the same plot of land, so that the overall vegetation structure has more resemblance to a forest. This plot had bananas and cacao growing together, a system commonly used by smaller scale producers and plots also commonly include native tree species.

It was then a visit to an indigenous community of farmers, the Bri-Bri, who also use different plants for medicines, where the team were able to film the process of banana collection by Trobanex, a banana transport company, who bring together the bananas grown in remote communities, and sell them on to larger buyers. The harvested bananas are initially transported to the road by horseback, before being loaded onto an old school bus, and then ferried across the river on the canoe taxi. There followed a visit to Cahuita National Park, a lowland swamp forest, where the group saw a sloth, monkeys, birds, snakes and a caiman.