Bananas grown
on Big Island
going to Guam

By Rod Thompson
Big Island correspondent

HILO -- Big Island banana grower Richard Ha says he will send a 40-foot refrigerated container of bananas to Guam on June 24 -- the first shipment from the Big Island to leave the state since before World War II.

Ha said his Keaau Banana Plantation Inc. hopes to send a container a week to the buyer, Market Wholesale Distributors, opening a new market for his bananas which will otherwise be in oversupply this summer.

With 400 acres planted in bananas -- 150 in Keaau and 250 on the coast north of Hilo -- Ha has long been the largest banana grower in the state.

Recently, Aloha Farms, a grower on the north shore of Oahu, has been catching up. Aloha has nearly 400 acres and this year started exporting bananas to Kobe, Japan, said company head Dave Holzman.

Ha said the exports were made possible by a U.S. Department of Agriculture study done on the Big Island which determined that green, unripe bananas do not carry any of the four types of fruit flies found in Hawaii.

Federal permission for the exports was given in November.

The delay in Ha's exports until now was caused by the need to identify and prepare for the overseas market and to allow production, low during the early part of the year, to build up.

Ha will ship Williams bananas and the smaller but more intensely flavored apple bananas.

Guam currently receives Cavendish bananas, a close relative of the Williams, grown in Ecuador, Ha said.

Ha's customers in Guam hope his bananas will taste better.

"They expect bananas from Hawaii, being a shorter distance away, will be more mature and sweeter," he said.