Bananas!

BANANAS! We eat them, we sell them, we love them and quite a lot of them at that. Bananas
account for 99% of the banana expo market. Want some more fun facts? That adds up to roughly
130 bananas per person in the U.S and 150 bananas per person Canada! How is this an economic

problem? Bananas used to be a luxury fruit however because it got so popular the production

efficiencies got a lot cheaper and as a result, the banana was exposed to a deadly fungus! In case

you didn’t already know, there are more than 1,000 banana varieties in the world. The one that was

America’s first favorite is called the “Big Mike” or also widely known as the Gros Michel. To give you

a little bit of history, people started to eat bananas roughly around the 1900s where they were being

eaten by 15 million people. Not 10 years later that number rose to 40 million people!
Unfortunately, this banana strain was exposed to the fungus and eventually was no longer being

produced. Bananas were not originally native to Americans or northern America for that matter

because they typically took eighteen months to sprout and the winters here are harsh. Ships

couldn’t get bananas over to America fast enough from other countries because they would go bad

right up until steamships and railroads were invented. Once refrigerated trucks were invented (you

can thank the engineers for that one) it was a lot easier to import bananas from other countries.

Towards the 1950s this fungus was wiping out the Gros Michel banana we knew and loved so we

started importing a new banana called the Cavendish which is what we eat today. From an economic

standpoint, it’s interesting to look at the pricing of the bananas as well. Bananas are less than half the

price of apples and generate in 52 billion dollars of economic value. That's because what typically

happens is the more you mass produce something the less expensive it will be!

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 25, 2019 at 11:57 PM

    Interesting post, Rashelle! I knew that the majority of bananas produced for consumption belonged to the same strain (the Cavendish), but I didn't know that it had a predecessor in the Gros Michel. It's interesting how bananas are able to be mass produced because everyone is growing the same strain of fruit, and I wonder why we all decided to choose the Cavendish banana specifically. In fact, the reason why the Cavendish was picked was because it was resistant to the fungus that killed off the Gros Michel, but now with the fungus evolving to better attack numerous other strains, it's only a matter of time before the Cavendish is affected too.

    Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 26, 2019 at 6:30 AM

    I happen to actually hate bananas. I'm not sure why, I used to eat them, and then one day I got really disgusted by them and now I can barely smell them without gagging a little. Just a random fact about me and bananas, but it was really interesting to learn more about them. I had no idea how many types of bananas there were, I just thought it was banana. It's also interesting how cheap they are compared to other fruits.

    ReplyDelete

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