Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World

A Guide to Those "Baby" Bananas - and What They Prove

Huggable, lovable - but not the kind of baby banana that I'm talking about.

Though the vast majority of bananas we buy - statistically, all - are of the endangered Cavendish variety, there's a good chance you've seen something else, these days and if you're a banana-type (or have become one), you might have wondered: what are those little bananas?

Both Chiquita and Dole offer versions of the half-sized fruit, with Chiquita selling them under the "Minis" brand, and Dole offering them as "Baby" bananas.

In the "big" banana world, there's absolutely no difference between what Chiquita, Dole (or any other commercial banana importer) sells: everything is Cavendish. Action surrounds small-time fruit. For the first time in over a century, the two biggest banana companies are slugging it out for a market niche with different varieties.

The Chiquita "Mini" is a breed called Pisang Mas, originally from Malaysia, but now - like all bananas imported to the U.S. - grown in Latin America.

Dole actually sells three different varieties under the Baby band name - Orito, Lady Finger, and Manzano.

The fruit are tough to find, since they're in various stages of test-marketing, as well as subject to seasonal variation. They also cost about three times as much as their ordinary counterparts. But they're worth seeking out, and not just because they prove - possibly for the first time to the average American consumer - that there's something beyond the generic banana. Though the four types share some characteristics (beyond size), they're also quite different from each other.

I've put together a guide to the four varieties, but one caveat: no great banana arrives easily. Dole doesn't distinguish between the three types it offers - they're all labelled the same - so side-by-side taste tests are going to be tough. But persevere. The results will be worth it (and ignore the for-kids marketing that the banana giants have attached to the product. Sure, they are great after school, as Chiquita's says. But this isn't baby food.)

Oh, and one more thing, and you MUST do this, or else your adventure in little bananas will surely fail: LITTLE BANANAS TASTE HORRIBLE UNTIL THEY'RE RIPE - AND RIPE, FOR LITTLE BANANAS, IS NOT YELLOW! You need to let the fruit turn brown or else it will not be sweet or soft enough. This will go against every banana extinct you have been trained to adhere to. Trust me.

CHIQUITA'S PISANG MAS (BRAND NAME: MINI)

• Super sweet - but only when very ripe. This is a fruit that is awesome when "peaking," but the peak can be hard to catch. When not peaking, not so good.
• Thin-skinned, so it bruises easily.
• IDENTIFYING: Easy. The only one Chiquita sells.

DOLE'S BABY (TYPE II - ORITO):

Orito Banana, from Ecuador's Goldenforce.

• Possibly the sweetest of the four varieties - making it (when ripe - see above) one of the best bananas for smoothies.
• Grown almost exclusively in Ecuador, where labor laws are weak, making this a very high-margin, high-political cost fruit.
• Identification: Chubby. If the country of origin is Ecuador, almost definitely Orito.

DOLE BABY (TYPE II - LADY FINGER):

Ladyfinger, meet Cavendish. Photo: Australian Tropical Fruits Portal

• Similar peaking/ripening characteristics as Pisang Mas.
• Doesn't easily turn brown when cut, making it perfect for fruit salads.
• Susceptible to Panama Disease Race One, the malady that killed the first worldwide commercial banana crop - and which still exists today.
• Closer to a mini-Cavendish in appearance. Slender(ish.) Super popular in Australia, so if you've got an Aussie in tow ask him or her for identification help.

DOLE BABY (TYPE III - MANZANO/APPLE):

The chubby Manzano, or "apple" banana. Photo: Thrifty Foods

• Falls into the "apple" banana category - giving it a unique, tangy-sweet taste. Much less bland than our Cavendish, but some banana marketers have traditionally believed that consumers would reject such a different-flavored fruit.
• Definitely the most "gourmet" banana of the bunch.
• Small ripeness/sweetness issue. Can be eaten a little bit less brown if you like the tart flavor, but you must wait beyond brown - until the skin is black - for the highest sugar content (which will give you a fabulous, multi-dimensional bite.)
• Difficult to grow in wet, lowland conditions
  
• Easier to find than others - sold under many brand names (or none at all) in Latin markets, where it is often a Mexican import.
• Identification tips: Significantly fatter, chunkier than Cavendish and probably the other little bananas, as well.

Once you've tried a couple, it's worth thinking a bit about what this all means in a world where the single fruit that we generally eat is threatened with practical extinction. The arrival of these alternate bananas in our markets shows that variety is possible, and that the commercial banana companies are willing to experiment with it (even with the for-kids-only marketing tilt.)

Despite this, the banana companies are likely very hesitant to move the fruit into any testing beyond these niches. The reason is that - according to conventional industry wisdom - there's simply too much "wrong" with the pint-sized fruit. The main arguments against mainstreaming mini-bananas include:

• Ripening. All of these fruit must be quite dark to taste good. The banana companies are (rightly?) afraid that the typical consumer is so well conditioned toward seeing a golden banana as perfect that wider acceptance would simply never occur.
• Production. The varieties in question can't be grown as broadly, geographically speaking, as Cavendish. There probably isn't enough land in Latin America to make any one of these varieties anything near to a market share winner.
• Shipping: These are thin-skinned fruit. Today's banana supply chain is so industrialized that the little fruit don't fit into it, requiring costly "custom" handling all along the way. For an industry built on turning an exotic tropical fruit into a commodity as cheap and ubiquitous as a fast-food burger, the idea of reinventing itself to handle more complex products may feel both financially and culturally risky.
• Marketing. People buy bananas by the bunch. Would the price/weight equation shift with a smaller banana as our main choice, or even as a more prominent alternate? The banana has been America's favorite fruit - by far - since the 1920s. Changing the very size, shape, and price of that fruit into something completely new would be a terrifying prospect for the banana companies, which introduced the fruit to us, struggled to make it our favorite, and have fought - often spilling blood - to keep it exactly the same ever since.

Despite all this, change has to come.

All of these arguments are based on a single premise: that the banana we eat today will last forever. It won't. It might not even last a decade.

The truth is that, as a living organism, all bananas have strengths, and all bananas have weaknesses. The biggest weakness the world's banana crop has today, though, has nothing to do with the fruit itself: it has to do with the human folly of relying on a single variety to feed millions.

The half-sized varieties from Chiquita and Dole are not, I'm told, doing all that well at the market. Some of Dole's farms in Ecuador that were devoted to the Orito fruit are reported to have closed. But the proof of concept - getting the fruit from there to here, figuring out how to market and sell it - has been accomplished, and despite my frequent criticism of the banana companies, there's credit deserved for that.

The experiment, however, needs to be seen as more than just marketing. The biological common sense - and necessity - of breaking the Cavendish monoculture needs to be acknowledged, as well. It is in combining salesmanship with this common sense that will lead the industry away from the dead end it is now rapidly heading toward. The "Mini" and "Baby" fruit provide a blueprint - even, focused as it is on children, it appears to have been written in crayon.

Banana Science

No Cups or Glasses Necessary...

This is a demonstrator project created by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa. I love the idea, because it really does capture what a banana skin is. The colors, shape, and texture are perfect.

Here's Fukasawa's design for a strawberry juice box:

Here's a second version, with a similar design. This one is actually on the market in Japan, I'm told, which is why it is less clean: the package needed information on it.

Less clean, but still lovely compared to some of our stateside juice packaging horrors:

and:

You get the idea.

Thanks for the tip, Dimitri (again!)

Banana Price Watch: 7-Eleven, Los Angeles

Interesting strategy at my favorite local convenience store, on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Rosemont In the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles (just steps from Dodger Stadium.)

Instead of the typical branded, presented-in-a-box fruit Chiquita is selling in many U.S. convenience stores, the fruit here is bought at local supermarkets and sold in an ordinary basket. At the current price - 69 cents per banana - the store manager told me customers purchased a respectable fifty or so a day. Still, he thought he could do better, and was about to add a twofer, with a pair of bananas going for a buck. 

The DIY approach nets the local shop a considerable profit over Chiquita's all-in-one strategy, which involves a national distribution network of refrigerated product, each fruit with a sticker on it, to of about 13,000 convenience stores. Chiquita's suggested retail price for its product is 75 to 99 cents. The benefit, it says, is that that the controlled supplyand special packaging allows the fruit to arrive at the stores perfectly ripe - eliminating the need for store managers to spend time waiting for the green bananas typically found on supermarket shelves to ripen. The downside is profit margins: Chiquita charges C-stores about forty cents per fruit. My 7-Eleven manager can buy bananas at the Trader Joe's down the street for half that. 

Analysis: though it is certainly more profitable for convenience stores to adopt the DIY approach, most local mini-marts probably won't do so - meaning that the Chiquita method will likely be more successful. Whatever else the company does wrong or right, this is a visionary and important (though as-yet unproven) strategy, because it demonstrates the banana's changing - and critical - role in the American diet: as the best, most affordable stand-in for the mountains of junk food that have created a massive juvenile health crisis.

Mobile Blogging from here.

(And about that link in that first paragraph - I'm from Brooklyn.) 

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Latest Banana Growing Nation: Iceland

Greenhouse bananas in Iceland; photo reproduced under Wikimedia Commons license. Original here.

Bananas normally need to grow under tropical conditions: even in the U.S., a commercial crop isn't viable, because California and Florida aren't quite hot enough for large-scale production. One might think that Iceland - where the mean daily temperature over a year is about seven degrees Celsius (44 Fahrenheit) - would hardly qualify. But the North Atlantic island nation has a banana trump-card: huge stores of geothermal energy beneath its volcanic landscape. That means greenhouses, and - in an effort to become the world's first full-carbon neutral nation - the Icelandic government has decided that it is going to try to stop importing bananas from Latin America, and grow its entire supply indoors.

So far, the effort is mostly symbolic, despite some (false) reports that the country is now exporting the fruit. In 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, Iceland imported 4.7 million tones of bananas (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; link will download PDF file.) With only 1,000 square meters currently devoted to at-home production, boatload after boatload would still be needed to satisfy the nation's exceptionally hunger for the fruit. Iceland is the Western hemisphere's number one per capita banana consuming nation: the average Icelander eats 30 pounds of the fruit per year (in the developed world, only New Zealanders like bananas better, with each Kiwi eating 44 pounds per annum. The U.S. falls into fourth place, at 27 pounds, just edged out by Slovenia, which has a one pound - or four banana - advantage.)

Still, the effort is a noble one - though I find it a little odd that Iceland's internal production appears to be limited to Cavendish, the standard supermarket fruit (that's what the variety pictured above appears to be, as well as the ones in the image linked here, though I could be wrong, and welcome corrections.) With so many other amazing and more delicious kinds of banana - and with hothouse production eliminating the usual problems with those varieties (presence of disease; distance shipping; fragility; variable weather conditions) - it would seem that Iceland's small crop could also be a gourmet crop. Isn't that what the world's hungriest banana consumers (almost) deserve?

Chiquita's Pricey Belgian Airport Fruit - The Banana's Future as a Snack Food?

That's two bucks a pop. And they're selling.

An interesting Chiquita experiment at Belgium's Brussels National airport - appropriate, since the transportation hub is just a fifteen-minute, one-stop train ride from the global banana bank at the Catholic University of Leuven, where over 1,400 varieties of the fruit are preserved for scientific experimentation and against future ecosystem loss (if only the banana companies would contribute a bit to the funding of the bank!)

At the top is the "Chiquita Banana on the Go" product. This is a somewhat different take on the single-sale banana than the not-quite-successful convenience store version (below.) Note the bar code and the per-fruit branding - the fruit we see at our U.S. 7Eleven stores is sometimes sold in banana-logo cartons, but aren't individually labeled. Also interesting: the Belgian airport bananas sat right next to bowls of apples and oranges, which weren't branded. After more than a century, the banana is pretty much the only fruit that takes to this kind of labeling.

Note the bar codes: perfect for the banana as a "packaged good," rather than a plain-old item of produce. Packaged goods, of course, cost more.

Analysis: does the branding make a difference in this retail venue? The fascinating thing here is that Chiquita is using its brand-name for the opposite purpose in the airport than it does in supermarkets. Sold at grocery stores, the banana is a commodity - cheaper than apples and oranges. The logo serves as a gentle incentive toward consumer choice: "pick me," it says, "over other bananas," even though they're all the same. But in the airport, Chiquita is positioning its fruit as a luxury good - something with more value than the plainly-presented competition. Does it work? The worker at the café told me that the bananas still sold at twice the rate of the apples and oranges, despite - in this case - also costing twice as much (and that's a lot: €1.50 is about two bucks these days - enough to buy four pounds, or up to 12 bananas, in some parts of the U.S.!)

Final point: This reflects the changing role of the fruit in our culture. Less and less is it competing with other produce - and more and more with snacks like candy and chips. That's a good thing in terms of public health - and probably for the banana companies, too, which, if the transformation continues, will ultimately be able to charge a lot more for fruit sold by the piece, rather than by the pound. Still, at this point, it seems the Euros are more willing to swallow the banana as a snack-food substitute than we in the U.S...

Convenience Store Banana Report: Fail!

Spending the week in the great north country of New Hampshire and saw this sign adorning the entrance to a convenience store. No bananas of any kind inside, though. "We sold 'em for 79 cents each, and you could buy a whole pound for that at the IGA down the street," the clerk told me. It had been months since a Chiquita delivery.

The competition from the Dunkin' Donuts - same price at the same location - couldn't have helped much.

Mobile Blogging from Colebrook, New Hampshire, U.S.A.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Photo of the Week

Finally back from Africa. Amazing bananas, amazing stories and photos. Exhausted. No blog entries, of course - but you'll see tons over the next few weeks. In the meantime, thanks to my buddy Rich Snodsmith - also a shirt of the month contributor - here's Trader Joe's holding banana prices down. Bravo - especially considering that wholesale banana prices have more than doubled in that five-year period! Can anyone say "loss leader?"

But wait - is that nineteen-cent banana really a bargain? Most other stores sell fruit by the pound. Generally, a supermarket fruit weighs a bit more than six ounces - you get about two and a half bananas per pound (sure, sometimes they're smaller, but I'm assuming bigger because at TJ's, you get to choose.) What about banana prices? These days, you're lucky to pay 59 cents for a pound of the fruit in most cities. Sixty-nine cents seems to be the average, and a dime more isn't unheard of.

Here's the math:

• At 59 cents for a pound, a single banana costs about 24 cents.
• Add ten cents to the bulk price, and you pay a bit less than 28 cents per fruit.
• Another dime at the scale, and a single banana sets you back almost 32 cents.

What about organics? They usually run about 99 cents a pound - yielding a whopping forty cents per banana.

The Trader Joe banana turns out to be the real deal - coming in at less than 50 cents per pound. They're probably the cheapest bananas in America.

Thanks, Rich!

Chiquita Acknowledges Panama Disease as Threat

Panama Disease-ravaged plantation in Asia (from Plant Health Progress.)

In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre - for the first time - publicly acknowledged the existence of Panama Disease (the incurable malady that wiped out the world's banana crop in the first half of the 20th century, and that has devastated much of Asia over the past two decades) - in relation to his company's mainstay product, though he downplayed the threat to the point of barely admitting it existed.

The story is headlined "New banana disease poses threat: How serious is open to debate." In it, Aguirre described the disease as "limited," and asserted that - when the disease arrives in Latin America - quarantine measures would "pre-empt and prepare" the advance and effects of the malady. I was interviewed for the story, and I disagreed, pointing out that such measures had failed most everywhere they've been tried in the past.

Chiquita CEO Fernando Aguirre, from the Cincinnati Enquirer. Photo by Steven M. Herppich.

I was glad to see that the reporter, James Pilcher, also contacted Randy Ploetz, the scientist who is probably the world's best authority on the fungus. Ploetz is less grim and more circumspect than I am (as well as a lot smarter than me), but he's still way down on the fencing-your-farm idea: international quarantines will not work," he said. "If it did get over to Latin America somehow, it is almost impossible to stop. When and if that will happen. No one can say for sure."

I'm quoted in the story as saying that the Cavendish banana is a "dead end." That's something I've come to believe even more since I wrote the book. None of us - not the CEO of the world's largest banana company; not a dedicated scientist; nor an author who has books to sell - knows when Panama Disease will hit. But what I suspect we all know is that the Cavendish is indeed a biological (and therefore, ultimately, a commercial) cul-de-sac. Breeding a new version of the banana we all eat is nearly impossible. It is totally sterile. It produces no seeds. (Each Cavendish is a genetic duplicate of the other. That's why each gets sick when the other does.) This makes it a poor candidate as a parent to any new banana, except if genetic engineering is used, a technique Chiquita and most consumers reject.

The answer is diversity: a robust banana aisle with four, five, or six different kinds of fruit. Those varieties are out there. The technology needed to deliver them to market - to keep them fresh and intact from the places they're grown to the places they're sold - would be considerable. But it be worth the investment. Right now, at my local Safeway, I can buy four kinds of peaches, five kinds of apples, four kinds of lettuce, and more. Why not bananas?

When Panama Disease struck and destroyed the earlier breed of banana that our grandparents ate, Chiquita executives claimed that they knew how to protect their fields from the disease. They spent years saying so. They were wrong. There has never been a technical solution to Panama Disease. In 1960, as the last plantations were succumbing to the old blight, Chiquita was on the verge of bankruptcy. It had spent decades denying that there was a problem. It then wasted more time trying to find an answer using a means that didn't work. It came close to destroying its franchise product. Chiquita can make the same mistake again. It has already taken willful steps down that path, and it doesn't even know it. Though Aguirre is right in saying that the danger has yet to arrive, the danger will arrive, and the solution Aguirre outlines absolutely will not work.

My key takeway from the Enquirer story: Chiquita acknowledges a problem on the horizon - and it has publicly embraced a strategy that cannot work.

As far as diversity is concerned, Aguirre said that the company has "been working for a number of years on different opportunities to grow different bananas."

OK, readers. I am warning you right now: RANT ALERT!!!!

I can't stand this kind of PR-speak. What the heck did the Chiquita CEO even say just there? I mean, these are bananas. Bananas! India, the Philippines, the South Pacific, and even Brazil offer dozens of wonderful banana types that might delight and intrigue American consumers. I've tasted them and they're freakin' AWESOME. They taste BETTER than ours. Haagen-Dazs to bucket vanilla better! Don't "work" for "a number of years" on "opportunities." Just grow some danged fruit and sell it to us! You're CHIQUITA! Your JOB is to sell us bananas!

JIMINY CRICKET!

OK, I'm feeling better now. The point is that there are plenty of ways to get Panama Disease mitigated before it gets here, and the first step is to not put all of our bananas in the Cavendish basket.

One more thing: for years before the Gros Michel - the old banana - went functionally extinct, Chiquita executives not only denied that there was a problem, but they also denied that the Cavendish was a solution. It was a competitor that came up with the proper techniques needed to grow and ship the Cavendish that made it a viable supermarket banana. That competitor was Dole, whose market share tripled and has barely declined since. A new competitor, with a new banana, may be waiting for Chiquita as this round of Panama Disease emerges - and this time around, Chiquita may not be so lucky as to be so unlucky.

Note: For context on this story, you might want to read the magazine article my book is based on, in the entry above.

Banana Prices in Supermarkets: Prices Still Rising

The series continues. August is a slow banana news month, and I'm still traveling, this time in New Hampshire (in the northeastern U.S.) Prices are generally lower here than in most of the country. Still, banana prices are high - and in one case, higher than I've ever seen them. The result? Chiquita's profits, up again. And these images:

This one above is from a supermarket in Colebrook, New Hampshire, a tiny town near the Canadian border. Note the regular price of 79 cents a pound. While that's what I pay normally in Los Angeles, the price is exceptionally high for a non-city grocery.

This one's from the Beans & Greens farm stand in Gilford, New Hampshire, August 18th. Record-setting!

Troubling Times for Supermarket Bananas

This sign was spotted at the QFC market in the Wallingford area of Seattle, on 45th St. Reader Mac reports that there were also some "gross" looking red bananas present.

Varietal Banana Coming to U.S. markets?

For 100 years, the big banana growers have said it couldn't be done: bring a better-tasting, non-commodity version of the fruit to the American shopper. The reasons? Bananas have to be cheap; they need to be grown in massive quantities; they need to be shipped and processed in ways that require least-common-denominator techniques that lead to a product that's good - but nowhere near as tasty as some local varieties or even a standard fruit (the breed we eat is called a Cavendish) eaten locally.

I recently spoke to a fruit importer named Jose Ubilla who hopes to change that. His family runs a small Nicaraguan banana plantation, and began importing fruit under the Coquimba brand name in mid-June (the fruit is being marketed as "The Gourmet Banana.") Though the fruit is of the same Cavendish variety that you'll find in supermarkets everywhere, Ubilla says that the fruit he's selling are bigger, better tasting, and will arrive at markets in better condition that standard supermarket fruit than the Chiquita, Dole, and Bonita bananas you're used to seeing. The reason? Shorter shipping times and better handling: the fruit is babied on the tree, with each bunch picked at its individual point of readiness, and then shipped in carefully monitored containers: "You can't do it this way if you're handling large quantities of fruit," says Ubilla.

The fruit is currently being sold at a few farmers markets in Florida, so - being in Los Angeles - I haven't had a chance to sample it. But Ubilla is working with a California distributor, as well, and promises me a taste - so stay tuned; I'll be updating with an on-the-spot report.

Comment: there's no doubt that a fresh Cavendish is better tasting (and has a less mushy texture) than a less fresh one, and shipping in small quantities with more care makes all the difference. I can't tell you how many letters I get asking how it is possible that the bananas folks have eaten in Central America can be the same variety as the one they get in supermarkets here. If the Coquimba fruit performs as promised, it should be closer to that straight-from-the-plantation experience.

The challenge Coquimba faces is marketing. Consumers are used to treating bananas as a commodity. Are they going to be willing to pay more for a banana that might not look all that different than the ones they're used to? I love Ubilla's idea of selling at farmers markets - a place bananas have usually been absent from.

But here's what I'd really love to see: Coquimba to succeed so much that it goes one step beyond Cavendish - and gets into different banana varieties entirely. With hundreds of delicious non-Cavendish banana types out there, why not approach the fruit the way apple producers did a decade ago when they introduced today's plethora of varieties to a market that featured only the bland red delicious and granny smith? Check out these articles (here and here) on the bananas of India. If only we could get a few of those into our stores!

Would you be willing to pay a little more for a fresher-from-the-tree, better-tasting banana? Add your comment below.

Chiquita is Motley Fool's "Worst Stock in the World"

At least for today - Monday, June 18. The reasons include the company's dismal forecast for the third quarter (a "significant loss," it told investors); the payments it was revealed to have made to Colombian terrorists; and worries about the Panama Disease fungus arriving in Latin America. The investment site specifically takes Chiquita to task for failing to diversify its banana offerings on supermarket shelves, noting that the disease-threatened Cavendish is "the only Banana that Chiquita sells." The conclusion? "Big Trouble."

Here's what Chiquita needs to do: figure out how to sell more bananas than the Cavendish. Figure out a way to make transporting and growing them much more environmentally friendly. And move toward fair trade principles, which I think are more important - at the moment - than organics.

More here.

Australia to tax bananas starting July 1

These are Australian things.

Australia's banana crop has been devastated by bad weather and Panama Disease. Now, the country is going to be imposing a AUS 1.7 cent-per-kilo (1.5 cents US) levy on the fruit. It will be applied at the wholesale level, then passed on to the consumer, starting July 1.

Nicky Singh, president of the Australian Banana Growers Council, said that revenues from the tax would raise $5 million AUS (4.7 million US) to fund "promotions, research and development, and plant health programs."

The imposition of a single-foodstuff tax is a big development, and another indication of how serious the problem of banana disease is. Australia, as I've noted before, is becoming a world epicenter for banana problems. 85% of the country's crop was destroyed by a cyclone in 2007, leaving the remaining fruit vulnerable to Panama Disease, which began to spread aggressively last year, despite a quarantine program designed to stop the malady.

News report on banana tax here.

Earlier Australia report here.

Gallery: Fair-Trade Plantation in Ecuador

Image: Guardian newspaper, UK

A good slideshow from the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper, featuring a plantation in Ecuador operated under the "Fair Trade" system, which guarantees workers a decent living wage and benefit. This is especially important in Ecuador, the world's largest banana exporting nation, which has weak labor laws. It is, however, hard to say exactly how much good banana workers derive from Fair Trade - such fruit has very low market share, and the actual benefits aren't clear (for example, in the gallery linked below, one of the positives is touted as labor-saving cable systems that make it easier to move bunches to packing areas, as opposed to carrying them manually. The reality is that most commercial plantations use cable systems - because they're more efficient, not out of altruism.)

The trick with banana fair trade is going to be figuring out how to make it work with a product that is, essentially, an ultra-cheap commodity. Fair-trade coffee is successful because people are willing to pay $14 a pound for it - you can match it up with high-quality beans and essentially offer a premium product at a higher price. Right now, the most successful fair trade bananas sold in the U.S. are offered as an ingredient in Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream; again, that's a product folks are willing to pay extra for. It remains to be seen whether Fair Trade bananas can be sold in large scale at the low prices most American consumers would probably demand. I hope the answer is yes.

CORRECTION: Fair Trade Chunky Monkey is - it seems - only offered in the UK version of the flavor (see this video, from the Brit B&J website; click on the "Ecuador" link at the bottom.) I've got a request in to the ice cream makers' U.S. spokespeople for clarification.

Watch the Guardian slide show here.

The bananas from the plantation pictured in the Guardian essay are marketed in the US under the OKE brand name. Find out more about them - including where to buy them - here

Help Flooded Ecuadorian Banana Farmers

Images from Oke's Flickr photostream.

To assist washed-out Ecuadorean banana farmers, fair-trade importer Oke is taking donations to buy a Bobcat earth-mover. It's a worthy cause. Read about it here.

More on fair trade, Ecuador's floods, and rising banana prices here, here, here, and especially here.

Bring fairness to the fruit

Harriet Lamb's new book, "Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles: How We Took on the Corporate Giants to Change the World", is out in the U.K. I'm awaiting a review copy, but an excerpt was printed on the NewConsumer magazine website. Fairtrade is a system that seeks to ensure that the folks who produce the foods we eat are well compensated for it; work in safe environments; and have an element of ownership over those products. Bananas were one of the first items Fairtrade advocates worked on in the early part of this decade, which makes sense, because bananas are highly visible at market, and banana workers have been particularly ill treated since the industry was founded in the 19th century.

U.S. consumers don't see much Fairtrade product - you'll find beans produced under that banner at Starbucks, but very little else,especially at your average chain grocery - and globally, bananas with the certification don't make much of a statistical dent in overall sales: less than one-tenth of one percent of the 13 million metric tons of the fruit produced every year for export are certified by Fairtrade Labeling Organization (it is also important to point out that Fairtrade bananas are not necessarily organic, and that farming conventional bananas - no matter who receives the profits - requires applications of often-toxic chemicals.)

But, as the book notes, Fairtrade's impact has also been symbolic, and the idea is spreading. One advocate put it this way:

"Don’t look only at sales volumes and market shares, look at the issues on the agenda, look at what the public are asking and what companies are debating. When we go into negotiating rooms with companies now, even if they’re not yet doing Fairtrade, they all have to do something on social and environmental issues."

What place does Fairtrade have in the global effort to save the banana? If one of the answers involves making more kinds of banana available to consumers - building a market in so-called "varietal" fruit, which would likely command a premium price - that could dovetail nicely with the economic development ideals of Fairtrade.

Learn more about Fairtrade.

Part one: Philippines...love, flavor, bananas, and war

The "La Ba" banana variety: "Big, aromatic, and deliciously sweet," according to the "Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers of Vietnam" website.

The most delicious bananas in the world - arguably - come from the Philippines. One, the "La Ba" banana, is native to Lam Dong province, where it is grown across a scant 100 hectares (about 250 acres) of cultivated land. In a story that originally appeared in the Thanhniem News , farmers reported that selling La Ba (described as "treasured for their large size, beautiful shape, and excellent taste") could fetch as much as eight times more than other crops grown across similar expanses of land.

Part two: Philippines...love, flavor, bananas, and war

Read Part One

A plantation building burns in the Compostela Valley, Philippines. Photo from Fresh Plaza.

Meanwhile, in the Compostela Valley on the Philippine island of Mindanao - Cavendish is grown there - 150 uniformed, armed members of the New People's Army revolutionary group ransacked a pair of banana plantations, destroying hundreds of acres of fruit, and killing one plantation official.

Is this how Panama Disease will arrive in Latin America?

Photo from Peace Corps online

So far, the banana-growing nations of South and Central America - which supply all of our fruit - have escaped the ravages of Panama Disease, the incurable blight that threatens the world's banana crop. As I say in my book, most scientists believe that the fungus will arrive in our hemisphere; the debate is over when. Panama Disease is soil-borne: it has spread through much of Asia in dirt, water, tools, and vehicles. The malady can leap oceans; it was first seen in Malaysia in the early 1990s. It has moved south, thousands of miles, from island to island and over water, and is now spreading rapidly throughout Australia (see this entry and this one.)

Now, officials in the Philippines - a nation where Panama Disease is a huge problem - say that their nation is going to start exporting bananas to the U.S. This will be the first time American consumers have been offered Pacific bananas, and there's reason to be concerned. On December 25, Philippine agriculture secretary Arthur Yap announced that, following the completion of a pest risk analysis, the U.S. had agreed to allow about 10 million tons of Cavendish bananas from Philippine plantations.

This could mean trouble for Latin America's as-yet-to-be afflicted banana crop.

"Membrane-wrapped" bananas, branded with their breed name

My Dad sent this one in; it comes from Andy the Hobo Traveler's blog. Andy discovered the single-serve fruits at a 7-11 in Manilla; each banana costs about a quarter. "I can purchase one banana without them getting angry," Andy writes. "I am single, not married, to buy bananas even in the market is annoying, they do not like me to rip off two or three, and one is totally a great way to get them annoyed."

Single bananas for single buyers isn't all that new, but marketing them like candy bars is. Chiquita has just begun doing it in the U.S. We've got plenty of them at convenience stores here in Los Angeles, priced at about 75 cents.

"Ugandan Idol" finalist to pick up banana peels

Uganda is the world's most banana-eating nation. Many people there rely on the fruit for eighty percent of their caloric needs. The average Ugandan eats about 500 pounds of the fruit per year, and in some villages, consumption is double that (by comparison, the average U.S. citizen eats 25 pounds of bananas annually.)

One problem with so many bananas: what to do with the peels? Allowing them to rot away is both unsanitary and a logistical nightmare, considering the vast quantities of banana skins Ugandans discard.

A contestant on a game show airing on the nation's NTV network had a better idea: use the peels as a source of renewable energy. The proposal came on a television series called "Show Me The Money," where young Ugandans present their ideas for environmentally-sustainable entrepreneurial projects to a panel of three judges. The program - like "American Idol," but without the strangely magnetic idiocy of contestants singing "Over the Rainbow" to Paula Abdul - whittles the competitors down to a group of finalists. The banana proposal has made it to the top 15. Next week, it will face off against proposals to build an architectural model shop in Kampala, and another that would deliver anti-malarial drugs in the form of herbal teas.

The show will air three times weekly until December 5, when a winner will be declared and awarded a prize of 50,000,000 Ugandan shillings, or about USD $30,000. Runners-up will receive 15,000,000 shillings each.

The network continues to air "Malcolm in the Middle."

Image: village bananas, from the "I've left Copenhagen for Uganda" blog.

Australia was once thought to be protected from the deadliest banana disease. It wasn't.

PANAMA DISEASE - the malady that threatens much of the world's banana crop, and whose advance is the subject of my book - see this fact sheet put out by the Austrailian government, or read this (detailed) article on the fungal blight - was thought to be well-managed, if not stopped cold, in northwest Australia, one of the world's primary commercial banana growing regions. Quarantine measures put in place by local banana growers and agricultural officials were thought to have been both effective - and a model for stopping the disease.

But Panama Disease is impossible to stop once it jumps whatever barriers are erected against it, no matter how strong or well-thought out. That nightmare scenario is now occuring.