A: Hi Andrew, Thank you for your enquiry about the Tenerife farmers and the crops they grow. You are quite right that the white fields are crops that are being grown there under polythene, in fact what you can see from your Tenerife bound aeroplane is the Tenerife Banana Plantations.

The Banana (Dwarf Cavendish) is the most widely grown produce in Tenerife. The island has over 4200 hs under production, they produce around 150,000 metric tonnes of Bananas a year with 90% of the production going to the Spanish  domestic market, in 2000 that equated to over 90million euros in trade.

The second most widely grown crop is the Tomato. The Tenerife tomato market was valued at around 70million euros in 2000.

Whilst Farming is very beneficial to the Tenerife economy, it only represents around 10% of the islands GDP however this figure is probably more of a reflection of the high value of the tourist trade to Tenerife than the low value of farming.

So the next time your coming into land at the Reina Sofia Airport in southern Tenerife, take a look out of the window and see from the air the extent of the Tenerife Banana Plantations.