Hurricane buffets
Dole earnings

Storm damage to Central America
banana crops will result
in a charge

From staff and wire reports

Dole Food Co. said today that the ravages of Hurricane Mitch on its banana plantations in Central America will cause it to take a fourth-quarter charge of $50 million to $70 million.

Dole gets 25 percent of its bananas from Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, where it has a total of 40,000 acres of banana lands, half of that owned by the company. The area has been damaged in varying degrees of severity, Dole said.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Dole had a profit of $23 million and that was an increase of more than 70 percent from the year-earlier quarter.

Dole last month announced that a plunge in banana prices, brought on by a worldwide oversupply, would give it a much lower third-quarter result than had been expected. At that time, before the Hurricane Mitch damage, Dole estimated that its full-year profit would be down 20 percent. Dole has not yet announced its third-quarter results.

The company said today it is too early to know what the Central America disaster will do to banana prices.

Meanwhile, the company said it is doing what it can to aid the region and has been feeding about 20,000 people a day for several days. The hurricane killed an estimated 7,000 people and left hundreds of thousands more homeless.

Westlake Village, Calif.-based Dole was started in Hawaii and still grows pineapple and papaya on 8,000 acres on Oahu, 6,000 of which are owned by the company.