Bananas have joined the ranks of dairy, meat and wheat products among foodstuffs whose prices are set to surge because of the sharp rise in fuel costs. Chiquita, one of the world’s biggest banana groups, said yesterday that the price of Britain’s most popular fruit had risen 36 per cent last month against the same period a year ago.

The company also said that it expected prices to continue to rise throughout the rest of the year, lifted by mounting fuel and fertiliser costs and adverse weather conditions in Central America.

To add to the gloom, Chiquita said that it had raised its forecast for the total cost of increased fuel and fertiliser by $200 million (£101.8 million) over the past four weeks. It expects additional costs of $265 million over the year as a whole. Shares in Chiquita yesterday fell by 28.63 per cent to $16.65.

Pedro Arias, an economist for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that world banana prices would increase sharply by the end of the year. He said: “Weather-wise, it has been drier than usual and we expect production to come down a bit. Fuel is impacting prices because of the cost of transportation . . . but the next big issue is the hurricane season, which started at the beginning of June.

“[Banana] prices have already risen to the same level as 2005, when we suffered an appalling hurricane season, which disrupted supplies. But we have been lucky over the past few years, so we are expecting a bad hurricane season this time round.”

Bananas are so integral to the British diet that the Office for National Statistics includes the fruit in the country’s inflationary basket of goods to help to calculate the cost of living. Britain imports the bulk of its bananas from the Windward Islands, Latin America and from a handful of plantations in West Africa.

The European Union is the world’s largest importer of bananas after the United States. According to the most recent UN figures, the EU imported 3.4 million tonnes in 2005. In April, Fyffes, the banana group, said that the cost of the fruit would continue to rise this year, because of increases in the price of fuel.

Asda, the supermarket group, said yesterday that it was trying to absorb raw material price rises and had cut the price of bananas in recent weeks.

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