The importance of this fruit for world nutrition
But now quickly to the market before the bananas are too ripe. (Foto: Swissinfo.ch)
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Almost all of us like to eat bananas, at least once in a while. But what do we know about them? For example, who knows in which country most of the bananas are being produced. Maybe it is
1) India?
2) Brazil?
3) or Ecuador?
Believe it or not, 1 is actually correct. For a long time, actually, as the following diagram shows. It shows the share of the 4 main banana producing countries in the total production in the world.
The „curves“ for the East Asian countries go steeply upwards, for the South American countries downwards. However, this does not mean that Brazil and Ecuador have cut their production, but that their share of world production is decreasing.
How did banana production develop worldwide? The graph below shows that production has increased more than fivefold since 1961, but has slowed significantly more recently.
The following maps show the geographical distribution of banana production at the country level.
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A comparison of the maps from 1961 and 2017 shows the shift in the focus of banana production from South America to Asia, with India having long been one of the world market leaders and China only recently.
Does that mean that people in India also eat a lot of bananas? How much is produced per capita? The following map shows banana production from a different perspective, namely in kilograms per capita.
The picture here is similar to that of Map 2, but with some striking differences. For example, it is noticeable that Primus India only belongs to the average from this point of view, while China even only has below-average rates. India and China are world market leaders only because of their huge populations.
Probably none of us have ever eaten an Indian banana. The reason is simple: it is practically not exported, but is used almost exclusively for domestic food. And we wouldn’t like them at all, because they are mostly plantains that are not edible raw. Only when the peel is completely black you can eat it raw. By the way, the bananas we usually eat are called „dessert bananas“. Look up Wikipedia for details.
When cooked, the plantains don’t taste sweet either, more like a floury potato. And that’s what it’s about: Plantains play a very similar role to potatoes and have roughly the same caloric value. However, they are not the Indian / Chinese variant of the potato, but both countries have also discovered the potato, have also become by far the world’s leading potato producers, with even more potatoes being consumed than plantains.
The banana has an important advantage over the potato: it takes up less space to grow. In India, the yield per hectare for bananas is 34.4 tonnes and for potatoes 20.5 tonnes. In other words: For one kilo of banana you only need 0.29 square meters, for a kilo of potatoes, roughly speaking, almost twice as much, namely 0.49 square meters (own calculations, initial data: AtlasBig)
By the way, what is astonishing is that the neighboring country to India, Bangladesh, has taken a completely different path. Virtually no plantains or potatoes are grown there. The country focuses almost exclusively on rice cultivation (see the article by Maria Mies https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-86226-458-2_11.pdf ).
This monoculture has dramatic consequences. Christof Krackhardt writes:
“The almost exclusive cultivation of rice in Bangladesh has alleviated hunger and undernourishment, but has led to widespread malnutrition. There are hardly any vegetables or fruit trees on the agricultural land. Mainly children suffer from chronic malnutrition. The term “stunting” describes the symptoms caused by taking in too little nutritional energy, protein and trace elements. The children are very susceptible to infectious diseases, are slow to grow in length, learn to walk and speak later, and brain development is severely impaired.„
Https://www.foto-organico.com/deutsch/galerie/reis-bangladesh/
Return to map 3 (per capita production of bananas). The countries that have an extremely high per capita production are the exporters of dessert bananas. They produce significantly more than their own population would normally consume. As expected, the four leading export countries in 2017 were of course all South American countries: Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia. But recently the Philippines have also discovered this market for themselves and almost tripled their production and thus moved up to second place (source: Statista).
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As far as one can conclude from the available sparse data, the South American exporting countries produce almost exclusively for export, whereas in the two leading exporting countries of Asia (Philippines and Laos) around 20 to 30 percent are not exported, i.e. are probably available to the local population.
However, two European countries also play an important role in banana exports. No, it is not Spain or Italy that actually produce most of the bananas in Europe, but don’t export as many. Belgium and Holland are in 6th and 7th place on the list of exporting countries, but their production volume is so small that they do not stand out in maps 2 and 3 either because of their small share in world production or because of the extent of their per capita production.
The Belgian and Dutch bananas are of course grown in greenhouses. And they are not grown on normal soil, but on coconut peat or rock wool. This is to prevent the fruits from being attacked by aggressive fungi that destroy a considerable proportion of the banana harvest year after year.
Prof Kema from Wageningen University (Netherlands):
„The banana plants grow very well on coconut peat and rockwool substrate, where only a nutrient solution is applied. The advantage of substrate cultivation is that the nutrients can be better tailored to the needs of the plant. In addition, you prevent losses, possibly around 30% Leakage. The Dutch banana does not need disease control, which makes cultivation more sustainable than in traditional growing areas“.
https://www.yumda.de/news/1158851/erste-geerntete-niederlaendische-bananen.html
The two questions that remain: what proportion of the agricultural land is devoted to banana cultivation and how efficient the cultivation, i.e. the yield per hectare, is. Map 4 shows the extent of the usable area:
We can see that even with the market leaders India and China, banana cultivation takes up little space. In contrast, it is significantly higher in countries with high per capita production, especially in the exporting countries, and fluctuates between 2 and 5 percent. It is only higher than 5 percent in Papua New Guinea and in Rwanda and Burundi, two African dwarf states with extremely high population densities and correspondingly small agricultural areas.
Map 5 shows the efficiency of cultivation, the different hectare yields in the banana-producing countries:
Of course we find very high yields in the banana exporting countries of South America, where attempts have apparently been made to optimize production under the pressure of the market. But this has also been successful in other countries (e.g. in southern Europe). In contrast, there are only above-average quotas in China and India, and only below-average in the exporting country Philippines, which could change soon.
So if production is to be increased, there is still room for improvement, both by improving yields per hectare to the level of today’s most efficient countries (best practice) and by expanding the cultivation areas. If the nutritional issue presents us with new challenges as the world population grows, it could well be that the little-known plantain is suddenly on everyone’s lips.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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