Just 13% of the entire world's crop of banana ends up as on the dessert plate of the Western world.

An astounding 85 million tonnes of bananas are eaten locally in the 120 countries of the tropics and subtropics where bananas are grown mainly on small scale farms.

India, alone, produces more than the total number of bananas in world trade (16 million metric tonnes compared to around 12.5 million metric tonnes).

Many different banana varieties exist in diverse shapes and forms, which may be cooked, eaten raw or fermented into a nutritious beer.

Take a banana tour around the tropics and you will find somewhere between 500 and 1000 different banana varieties being grown, consumed and used.

Some 400 million people depend on the banana as an essential staple in their diet. However in recent decades, whilst production of crops such as wheat and rice has been soaring to new peaks, productivity of this smallholder crop has been decreasing as new epidemics of banana diseases have taken hold.

The International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP) works with a large number of partner organisations to focus research and development on the smallholder crop. Hundreds of collaborative projects in research, breeding, conservation and development are under way. Read more about them at WWW.INIBAP.ORG

Information kindly provided by INIBAP.
International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain.