Banana - Tropical and Subtropical Fruits: Postharvest Physiology, Processing and Packaging - page 131

8
Banana

Luis A. Bello-Perez, Edith Agama-Acevedo, Olivier Gibert and Dominique Dufour

INTRODUCTION
Banana is the fourth major fruit crop in the world. Banana
is a general term used for a number of species or hybrids in
the genus Musa of the family Musaceae. Most of the edible
seedless bananas belong to the species M. acuminata Colla
( M. cavendishii Lamb. ex Paxt., M. chinensis Sweet, M.
nana Auth. NOT Lour., M. zebrina Van Houtee ex Planch.)
or to the hybrid M. × paradisiaca L. ( M. × sapientum
L.; M. acumianta × M. balbisiana Colla) (Morton, 1987).
Edible bananas originated in the Indo-Malaysian region
stretching to northern Australia. They were known only by
hearsay in the Mediterranean region in the third century
BC and are believed to have been first carried to Europe in
the tenth century AD. The banana types found in cultiva-
tion in the Pacific have been traced to eastern Indonesia,
from which place they spread to the Marquesas and Hawaii
(Morton, 1987).

Philippines, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. The major banana-
importing countries are the United States, Germany, Bel-
gium, Japan, and the Russian Federation (FAO, 2011). The
leading producing country of plantain subgroup cooking
bananas is Colombia, while western and central African
continent remains the area with the largest plantain produc-
tion. The main producers are Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast,
and Cameroon. Other cooking bananas are mainly produced
in Uganda, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Rwanda.

CONSUMPTION TRENDS
Dessert bananas are mostly eaten raw at a fully ripe stage
of maturity (Gibert et al., 2009). Cooking bananas to be
consumed at different stages of maturity are mostly cooked;
consumers often prefer one variety to the others, depending
on cooking mode and consumption pattern. The literature
lacks information on the textural behavior during Musa
thermal processing and also on hot textural characteristics
linked to consumer perception of texture. Even after being
cooked or fried, the pulp's overall mechanical strength is
noted to be lower in bananas than in plantains and to be
related to their starch content (Gilbert et al., 2010).
As a major staple fruit, banana represents the eighth top
starchy source in the world, and its per capita consump-
tion is estimated at about 0.5 kg/day in Latin America and
even more than 1 kg/day in eastern Africa. Bananas are
highly nutritious and a rich source of fiber and a number
of vitamins and minerals (Table 8.2) (Arvanitoyannis and
Mavromatis, 2009). In addition to being a major source of
carbohydrates for over 500 million inhabitants of tropical
countries (Aurore et al., 2009), banana is also of major

WORLD PRODUCTION AND TRADE
As a major tropical fruit, banana is cultivated in over
130 countries throughout the tropical and subtropical
regions on five continents. World and regional banana pro-
duction is shown in Fig. 8.1; world production more than
doubled, from 46.31 in 1990 to 102.11 million metric tons
in 2010. During the same time period, banana production in
India increased by 446% to 31.90 million metric tons, which
represented 31.2% of the total world crop (FAO, 2011).
Table 8.1 shows top ten banana-producing, -exporting, and
-importing countries in 2010. The main producers of dessert
bananas are India, China, the Philippines, Ecuador, and
Brazil, while the main exporters are Ecuador, Colombia, the