The FAO states that volume of banana imports rather than volume of exports is the best barometer of the growth of the banana industry. This is because export and import data rarely match. Since most importing countries have very sophisticated customs, the trend is to see how banana importing has grown to get a good grasp of the growth of the market. Banana imports have clearly had an incredible rate of growth in the past few decades. In the 1980s alone world imports rose by a 28%, "though per capita increases were only about half that due to the increase in population" (Roche 69). Still, that is a very good growth rate, one that continued into the 1990s, as evidenced by the table.