Worldwide, an estimated 100 billion bananas are consumed each year. That weighs as much as 34 Empire State Buildings. And with a market value of around $140 billion, it's not only one of the world's most popular fruits, it's also a gigantic economic and political force.
With a demand that high and a market that large, you'd think that it would be like the apple, where you could just walk into a grocery store fully stocked with a wide range to choose from. Seriously, how many spin offs of the Honeycrisp apple are we going to make? But no, despite the fact that there are over 1000 different varieties, grown one banana reigns supreme: The Cavendish.
Accounting for about half of the world's annual production, this fruit is powerful enough to influence entire countries and take over the world. Scientists believe that the world's first cultivated bananas came from New Guinea as far back as 10,000 years ago, making it one of the world's first domesticated fruits. From there, it spread through Southeast Asia, India and Africa, eventually reaching Europe in 327 B.
C. , after Alexander the Great became enamored by the exotic banana. Beginning as a novelty in Europe and later the United States, it wasn't until the late 1800s when bananas truly became mainstream.
And this was thanks to two cultural events that really thrust the fruit onto the main stage. The first was in 1872, when Jules Verne referenced the banana in his book Around the World in 80 days, describing the fruit as, quote, healthy, as bread and as succulent as cream. The second was in 1876, when the banana made a big American splash at the World's Fair in Philadelphia.
They were delicious, nutritious, relatively affordable and available all year round. They were the perfect fruit for Americans, and in the eyes of capitalism, they were the perfect commodity. As demand for the banana grew, American fruit companies sought to grow their own bananas in a practice known as vertical integration.
Vertical integration is when one company takes ownership of two or more stages in the production process. So instead of fruit companies purchasing bananas from independent farmers to resell in American markets, they wanted to grow their own bananas on their own plantations. Essentially cutting out farmers.
This meant they needed land, and the tactics these companies employed in order to secure that land were vicious. In Central American countries including Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala and Panama, banana lobbyists from companies like United Fruit, now known as Chiquita, bribed government officials and invested in coups, placing their allies in power in exchange for land. Once land was secured, they cleared out rainforests to make room for banana plantations, and in an even more aggressive step toward full vertical integration, these companies built their own railroads and ports to transport bananas.
They even went as far as establishing entire towns in order to house the people who would work on these plantations. These companies basically wanted to make sure that they owned the entire means of production, and in doing so, they changed the economics, politics and even the landscape of these countries in an extremely negative way. In 1901, the term Banana Republic was coined as a sociopolitical term to describe a country that had become destabilized by economic and political exploitation.
In 1928, working conditions got so bad that in Colombia, workers at United Fruit Unionized and went on strike demanding fair wages. A six day workweek, an eight hour workday, and a written contract that guaranteed those rights. The United Fruit Company didn't want to compromise the profits they were making through exploiting workers.
So they, along with the United States government, put pressure on the Colombian government to do something about it. And on December sixth, 1928, the Colombian army turned against their own citizens, killing banana workers as well as bystanders. This would later be known as the banana massacre.
In order to mass distribute bananas across the globe, companies needed a variety that had a high yield and could withstand being shipped long distances without refrigeration. Two bananas fit the bill: The Cavendish and the Gros Michel. Though both were available, the Gros Michel dominated the market and thus became the preferred banana across central American plantations.
But there was a major flaw in this corporate scheme to streamline production. You see, wild bananas are chock full of seeds, like an unsettling amount of seeds. If you have trypophobia, don't look at this picture.
Anyway, to make bananas more appealing they were bred to have fewer seeds to the point where they are virtually unnoticeable, and in the case of both the Cavendish and the Gros Michel, sterile. Because the seeds are sterile in these varieties, every plant is actually a clone. The problem here is that if a disease gets introduced to a banana field because all of the trees are biologically identical, it won't just impact one tree, it'll impact all of them.
And that is what happened in the 1950s when the Gros Michel, a. k. a.
Big Mike, fell to the plight of Panama disease. Within just a few years, Panama disease infected plantations across Central America, spreading quickly thanks to the interconnected railway system and shipping infrastructure those large banana companies had built. The Cavendish, however, was immune to this particular strain of fungus, so companies shifted to growing it almost exclusively.
The Cavendish banana accounts for just under half of the world's annual production of bananas, which comes out to about 50 million metric tons. But leave it to Big Banana to repeat the same mistakes, because here we are not even 100 years later and we're having the same issue with the Cavendish as we did with the Gros Michel. And with the same fungus too.
This means the world's most widely consumed banana now faces extinction if we don't intervene. Farmers and scientists understand that biodiversity is important for a multitude of reasons. If, like bananas, a fungus kills one variety, you can shift production to a variety that is resistant to that fungus.
You can also crossbreed varieties to make an even more resilient crop for later harvests. Thus, when a problem arises, farmers can easily adapt and still meet consumer demand. But corporations don't think like farmers.
Large scale farming doesn't really take nature into account. Or people for that matter, but, that's a story for another day. While scientists get all of that figured out, here are three more interesting bananas that I would like to consider for global domination.
First up, the red banana. They're a bit smaller than your average Cavendish, but they're sweeter and have a more intense banana flavor. Then there's the Manzano Banana.
Or more commonly known as the apple banana, because they've got a hint of apple flavor. And then the rarest banana in the world, the Blue Java. They're a beautiful blue banana that tastes like vanilla and has a creamy consistency, earning them the nickname the ice cream banana.
The fact that we haven't focused all of our banana resources on an ice cream banana really proves how flawed capitalism is Anyway, what banana would you like to see take over the world? Let us know in the comments!
