The long road to a sustainable banana trade

Abstract

Societal Impact Statement: Bananas are the world's most popular dessert fruit and a staple starch crop for millions in low- and middle-income countries. The banana export trade that supplies North America, Europe, and other wealthy nations has a history fraught with exploitation and conflict. The price of cheap bananas has been environmental degradation, violence, and poverty. Only recently have efforts to address the power imbalances in this trade been made. Voluntary certification schemes aim to address multiple sustainability issues, while research into biological control, accelerated plant breeding, and efficient irrigation will help prepare the industry for emerging threats from pests, diseases, and climate change. Summary: Bananas are the world's favorite dessert fruit, a staple starch crop for millions, and an important source of income for producers across the tropics and subtropics. Bananas evolved and diversified as giant perennial herbs of open habitats within the humid forests of Southeast Asia and West Oceania and were domesticated around 7000 years BP through a series of hybridization events. This review considers the journey from rainforest riversides to intensively managed monoculture plantations, focussing on the Cavendish banana that comprises nearly the entire global export trade. Climate change increasingly threatens economic sustainability in several major producer regions, requiring responses such as efficient irrigation systems to maintain productivity and water security. Pests and diseases are spreading globally and have severe direct impacts on production as well as indirect impacts via harm to ecological and human health caused by pesticides. New pest and disease management methods employing biological controls and enhancing soil health and new plant breeding techniques must be developed and implemented. The banana production and trade system has been characterized by power imbalances between international firms that own plantations and supply the market and the local agricultural workers who cultivate and harvest the fruit. Voluntary certification schemes have been developed to address the numerous environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues faced by the industry. There are indications, from research on biological disease control to new deals on wages and benefits for banana workers, that change is slowly coming to the global banana trade.