Bananas are the world’s most consumed fruit – and the fourth most important food crop globally, after wheat, rice and maize. About 80% of bananas grown globally are for local consumption, and more than 400 million people rely on the fruit for 15% to 27% of their daily calories.
And the climate crisis is threatening the future of the world’s most popular fruit, as almost two-thirds of banana-growing areas in Latin America and the Caribbean may no longer be suitable for growing the fruit by 2080, new research has found.
Rising temperatures, extreme weather and climate-related pests are pummeling banana-growing countries such as Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia, reducing yields and devastating rural communities across the region, according to Christian Aid’s new report, Going Bananas: How Climate Change Threatens the World’s Favourite Fruit.
Climate change threatens the viability of commercial (monoculture) banana production, not the continued existence of banana plants. While some areas (such as parts of the Caribbean as this article mentions) will become too dry for part of the year to sustain banana plants without irrigation (which costs money), there will still be plenty of subsistence farmers growing bananas and plantains in the equatorial rainforest regions. The spread of Fusarium is mainly a threat to monoculture production, where it would spread rapidly throughout the plantations. For diverse food forests, it’s less of an issue. Extreme weather like hurricanes… kind of makes one question the choice to live in such a place to begin with.
I don’t know if anyone here has ever tried to kill a banana plant, but it isn’t so easy. Some farmers who want to switch from bananas to another crop actually sell their land and move elsewhere rather than attempt to remove their banana plants. Banana will remain a reliable staple crop throughout much of the world. For the regions experiencing climate change severe enough to be detrimental to banana production, there are plenty of other things to worry about.
