banana

The banana plant grows as a series of suckers from a rhizome. Each stem gradually droops downwards and produces at its tip the male flowers, which are sterile. The female flowers, which produce the edible fruit without fertilization, are found further along the stem. After a stem has produced a crop of fruit, it dies and is replaced by a new stem from a bud further along the rhizome. A banana plant may live for over 60 years.

Bananas are parthenocarps, the edible banana is the fruit of a sterile hybrid. The banana plant grows as a series of suckers from a rhizome. Each stem gradually droops downwards and produces at its tip the male flowers, which are sterile. The female flowers, which produce the edible fruit without fertilization, are found further along the stem. After a stem has produced a crop of fruit, it dies and is replaced by a new stem from a bud further along the rhizome. Their seedless fruit is eaten by their bat pollinators, as well as by many other animals. A banana plant may live for over 60 years.

Bananas ripening in the sun, Jamaica. Bananas were first imported to Jamaica from the Canary Islands by the Spanish. The industry flourished from the late 19th century until the 1930s, when the crops were struck by banana blight, which all but destroyed the Jamaican economy.

A truck laden with bananas near Havana, Cuba. So great is the demand for bananas in Western countries – and so great a revenue-earner has the banana become – that during the late 1990s a trade war almost broke out between the USA and various European states, each calling upon the others to abandon protectionist policies favouring selected suppliers.

Bananas grown for export, such as these ones in the Seychelles, are cut when still green and ripened during the voyage. Although it resembles a tree, the banana is in fact a giant perennial herb. Cultivated bananas are grown in all the tropical regions of the world. They produce a higher crop yield per acre than potatoes.

Rainforest clearance and banana trees, Dominica. The destruction of rainforest for timber and fuel, its clearance for agricultural land, and the effects of extractive industries, cause soil erosion, drought, and the destruction of wildlife and their habitats.

Rainforest clearance and banana trees. During the period 1990–95, the process of deforestation in South America alone resulted in the loss of 24 million ha/59 million acres of tropical rainforest.

Banana trees under forest, Dominica. Bananas are Dominica's chief export, and banana packaging is an important industry.

Any of several treelike tropical plants which grow up to 8 m/25 ft high. The edible banana is the fruit of a sterile hybrid form. (Genus Musa, family Musaceae.)

The curved yellow fruits of the commercial banana, arranged in clusters known as ‘hands’, form cylindrical masses of a hundred or more fruits.

They are picked and exported green and ripened aboard refrigerated ships. The plant is destroyed after cropping. The plantain, a larger, coarser hybrid variety that is used green as a cooked vegetable, is a dietary staple in many countries. In the wild, bananas depend on bats for pollination.