History and Significance of Cavendish Banana Essay

The banana tree tree tree institute, or Musa acuminata, is 1 of the close to important fruiting plants on Earth. This plant belongs to the Musaceae family, also known as the banana family. The genus Musa refers to voluminous herbaceous f pooh-poohing plants with fruit that is usu in ally elongated and curved, with a yellow, purple, or red rind covering soft starchy fruit (Merriam-Webster). banana tree plants ar often mistaken for directs, because their false stem or pseudostem resembles a tree trunk. However, trees ar dicots with organized vascular bundles while banana plants atomic number 18 monocots, which corroborate 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 come along banana plant forms an inflorescence at the top of the pseudostem, a construction known as the banana instillion. Each banana heart usually develops bunches of banana fruits made up of tiers (calle d hands) with as umteen as 20 fruit to a tier. Cultivated bananas are aseptic 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 dally in the global economy, aliment security, and the everyday lives of quite a little around the world.Bananas originated in Southeast Asia, which is still the nerve centre of banana diversity in flavor, scent, texture, color, shape, and size. However, bananas were most likely domesticated startle in Papua New Guinea, where cultivation can be traced back to time between 5000 and 8000BC. Around 1000AD, the banana proceeds spread to Africa through Indo-Malaysian immigrants who settled 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 sell of Portuguese colonists.Shortly following the Civil War, North the State sns started eating bananas on a small and expensive scale. In the 1880s, banana consumption in the United States became a lot more widespread due to ad avant-gardecements in transportation and refrigeration (Koeppel). Today, Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined (Koeppel). This development of innovational transportation networks and storage materials allowed for the introduction of the earliest modern banana plantations fit(p) in Jamaica and otherwise regions in the Western Caribbean Zone and Central America (New Zealand Herald).This yellow fruit has played a big role in economies all over the world. Banana plants are currently being produced in over 107 different countries, primarily for their and less frequently for producing fiber, banana wine, and as ornamental plants. The 2011 study of production and exportation of bananas and plantains by the Food and coarse Organization found that worldwide, we produced a total crop of 145 jillion metric tonnes. Ind ia led the world by producing 20% of this, followed by Uganda, China, the Philippines, and Ecuador. However, the pencil lead exporters of bananas and plantains were Ecuador (which exported 5.2 million metric tonnes, making up 29% of worldwide banana and plantain exportation) followed by Costa Rica, Colombia, the Philippines, and Guatemala. Although plantains were included in this study, Ecuador did specify that 93% of its exportation statistic was made up of solely bananas (FAOSTAT).The delicious fruit is utilize frequently in the daily lives of people around the world. Bananas can be eaten raw or baked in both savory and novel dishes. Some popular examples are fruit salads, milkshakes, yogurts, pancakes, breads, and the famous banana split. Plantains are not distinguished from bananas in more or less parts of the world because they are very similar, but can be differentiated by their lower sugar and higher starch content. Plantains are usually used as a vegetable in African and West Indian cuisine. Bananas are cultivated on an extremely coarse scale in equatorial regions, so they remain a big staple in the diets of millions of people in Asian and African populations, and in other developing countries (Van Wyk).Since banana plants produce fruit all year, they present an invaluable fodder ascendent during the time of year between harvests known as the hunger time of year. This, combined with their exceptional nutritional valuean individual banana has an vitality yield of about 95-125 kcal and the ripe fruit comes equipped with a lifesize variety of essential vitamins and mineralsmakes them essential to food security worldwide (Anania, van Wyk). Price competition among supermarkets has reduced margins, leading to lower prices for growers.Chiquita, Del Monte, Dole, and Fyffes give way pretty of a monopoly over the banana plantation business, and their plantations are centralized in Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras. Many producers in these countries are wealthy land owners that have tried to raise their prices by marketing their bananas as fair apportion or Rainforest Alliance-certified (Wikipedia). The term banana republic has been used to take in countries like Costa Rica, Honduras, and skimmer because the banana trade has become the prevailing part of their economy. Banana producers have also played a large political role, including working with local elites and their rivalries to influence politics or play to the international interests of the United States, especially during the Cold War, to keep the political modality favorable to their interests (New Zealand Herald).Although banana production is a huge industry, the entire banana species is facing an increasingly serious problem. The most popular cultivar of bananas was Gros Michel for quite some time, but after an attack by a soil fungus called the Panama disease, this cultivar was almost completely wiped out. After a large amount of plain rese arch, scientists were able to produce the Cavendish cultivar, which has made up the majority of banana crops for the outgoing 40 years. However, the Cavendish banana is also in danger. The low-spirited Sigatoka fungus has begun to attack Cavendish banana plants all over the world. This once high-yielding crop has decreased in yield by 50-70% and the lifespan of banana plants has dropped from about 30 years to an average of only two (Alison). Researchers blame the vulnerability of the banana plants on the monogenetic cultivation, resulting from commercial motives. Plantation owners and farmers have been selectively breeding bananas since the origination of their cultivation 10,000 years ago, which is why the modern cultivar is seedless and sterile (Alison). This has resulted in banana crops with no genetic diversity, which leaves them helpless against environmental stresses, including disease and crop pests.Some experts predict that cultivation of the Cavendish banana will become unviable inside the next 10-20 years, so agricultural researchers are searching for an equivalent banana cultivar, but it has proven difficult because most of the cultivars used in other countries produce bananas that are more starchy and thus used in cooking instead of eaten raw as a sweet snack. oer time, genetic modification and selective breeding of bananas has transformed what we know as a banana from a small, seed-filled, starchy, wild banana to the huge-in-comparison Cavendish dessert banana (Figure 1). Because of this, various hybridization and genetic engineering programs are exploring the wild banana genomes in an attempt to produce a disease-resistant, mass-market banana (Wikipedia). Bananas represent a delicious and essential part of the worlds economy and food security, so hopefully the extensive agricultural research will contain off to create a new banana that is ready to shield off environmental pressures.Cavendish bananas are the most important cultivar in the wo rld, representing all of the exports in the statistical figures discussed earlier The Cavendish dessert banana that is eaten raw and is most common in the US is the one that is under attack by the Black Sigatoka fungus. why bananas instead of going through prompt.Figure 1 The common Cavendish dessert banana, left, is shown with the seed-filled wild variety (Mestel)BibliographyAlison, Robert. World Bananas are a Dying Breed. Globe and Mail. 19 July 2003. www.corpwatch.org Anania, Giovanni. How would a WTO agreement on bananas affect exporting and importing countries? July 2009, Issue Paper No.21, ICTSD Banana. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved 2013-01-04 Banana. Wikipedia, the discharge encyclopedia. http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/banana Big-business greed killing the banana Independent, via The New Zealand Herald, Saturday May 24, 2008, scalawag A19 FAOSTAT. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Van Wyk, Ben-Erik. Food Plants of the World, an Illustrate d Guide. October 2005. wood Press. Koeppel, Dan. Banana The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World (New York Hudson Street Press, 2008), pp. 5153 ISBN 0-452-29008-2 Koeppel, Dan. Yes We Will Have No Bananas. New York Times. 18 June 2008. Nelson, Ploetz & Kepler 2006, p.26Mestel, Rosie. Banana genome sequencing gives a boost to pest-plagued fruit. Los Angeles Times. 11 July 2012. http//articles.latimes.com