Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World

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.