History and Significance of Cavendish Banana

Bananas The banana plant, or Musa acuminata, is one of the most important fruiting plants on Earth. This plant belongs to the Musaceae family, also known as the “banana family”. The genus Musa refers to “large herbaceous flowering plants” with fruit that is usually elongated and curved, with a yellow, purple, or red rind covering soft starchy fruit (Merriam-Webster). Banana plants are often mistaken for trees, because their “false stem” or pseudostem resembles a tree trunk. However, trees are dicots with organized vascular bundles while banana plants are monocots, which have scattered vascular bundles. The average cultivated banana plant stands at 16 feet tall, although they may range from 10 to 23 feet (Nelson 26). A mature banana plant forms an inflorescence at the top of the pseudostem, a structure known as the “banana heart”. Each banana heart usually develops bunches of banana fruits made up of tiers (called “hands”) with as many as 20 fruit to a tier. “Cultivated bananas are sterile and develop the typical seedless fruits without the need for pollination” (Van Wyk). Bananas are one of the most important fruits because of the role they play in the global economy, food security, and the everyday lives of people around the world. Bananas originated in Southeast Asia, which is still the center of banana diversity in flavor, scent, texture, color, shape, and size. However, bananas were most likely domesticated first in Papua New Guinea, where cultivation can be traced back to times between 5000 and 8000BC. Around 1000AD, the banana crop spread to Africa through Indo-Malaysian immigrants who colonized Madagascar, and also to the Pacific region (Van Wyk). In the 15th and 16th centuries, banana plantations began to sprout up in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and western Africa under the care of Portuguese colonists. Shortly following the Civil War, North Americans started eating bananas on a small and expensive scale. In the 1880s, banana consumption in the

Bibliography: Big-business greed killing the banana – Independent, via The New Zealand Herald, Saturday May 24, 2008, Page A19 “FAOSTAT”