page_title: Banana
section_title: Growing and trading bananas
hierarchical_section_title: Banana / Growing and trading bananas
caption_attribution_description: Green and yellow bananas. These are from a cultivar of small, flavorful bananas favoured on Réunion Island. Petit marché, Saint-Denis, Réunion, France July 29, 2005
context_page_description: A banana is the common name for a type of fruit and also the name for the herbaceous plants that grow it. These plants belong to the genus Musa. They are native to the tropical region of southeast Asia.
  It is thought that bananas were grown for food for the first time in Papua New Guinea. Today, they are cultivated in tropical regions around the world. Most banana plants are grown for their fruits, which botanically are a type of berry. Some are grown as ornamental plants, or for their fibres.
  There are about 110 different species of banana. In popular culture and commerce, "banana" usually refers to the soft and sweet kind, also known as dessert bananas. Other kinds, or cultivars, of banana have a firmer, starchier fruit. Those are usually called plantains. Plantains are mostly used for cooking or fibre.
  Other than being used as food, beer can be made by fermenting the juice of certain cultivars in Africa, known as beer bananas. The ash of bananas can be used to make soap. In Asia, bananas are often planted to provide shade to plants that like shade, for example coffee, cocoa, nutmeg or black pepper. Because of this, banana plants can often be found in plantations of other crops.
context_section_description: Bananas are grown in at least 107 countries. The banana species growing in the wild have fruits with many hard, large seeds, but almost all bananas grown to be eaten have seedless fruits. Bananas are classified either as dessert bananas or as green cooking bananas. Almost all export bananas are of the dessert types. Only about ten to fifteen percent of all production is for export. Dessert bananas change their color and usually turn yellow, when they are ripe; plantains and bananas generally used for cooking stay green. Certain bananas have other colors when ripe.
  The countries that produce the most bananas include India, Brazil, China, Ecuador and the Philippines. The top five countries that exported bananas were Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Colombia and Guatemala. The United States, the European Union and Japan buy the most bananas. Bananas are among the most valuable agricultural export products; They provided about sixty percent of export earnings of Saint Lucia and about twelve percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the country, between 1994 and 1996.
caption: Green and yellow bananas in a market
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