Coplaca is one of the Organisations of Producers worst affected by the volcanic eruption
Over 3,000 banana farmers from different islands belong to this Organisation. In La Palma alone it has around 2,000 members. Hundreds of these farmers saw how, over a few days, the lava buried the plantations that they had cared for all their lives.
The disaster quickly took hold during the first month of eruption. Two of the Organisation’s packaging plants were located at the ‘ground zero’ and soon became inoperative due to the lava flow: Covalle and Volcán de San Juan. In the two warehouses, around 15 million kilos were processed.
Last year, 140 million kilos of bananas passed through Coplaca, the main shareholder of Eurobanan Canarias, of which 125 were sold on the Iberian mainland and 15 of them supplied the islands.
Therefore, Eurobanan Canarias incorporates all the links of the chain, from production and reception to the ripening of bananas. But it also markets around one hundred references of other fruit, such as mangos, kiwis, papayas, etc, the final profit from which is returned to the Coplaca farmers through the company Coplaca Inversiones.
Javier Palenzuela, General Manager of Coplaca and Chairman of the Eurobanan Canarias Group, qualifies that “we have always been aware, as a cooperative, of our social role with the Canary Island farmers and, for this reason, in our business organisation, we ensure that we generate additional income, from other products, for the farmers.”
Regarding the different role of aid, the executive stresses that “the important point for the sector is to not lose the ‘historical’ aids. The administration must respect this point because it´s esential for our future production”
Eurobanan Canarias has centres and ripening rooms all over the Iberian mainland: Seville, Jerez, Alicante, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Coruña, Tenerife, Gran Canary, Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Bilbao, Oporto and Lisbon.
Coplaca is the largest Organisation of Banana Producers in the EU, both in terms of its marketed volume and of its number of producer members.
