Hi! So I took a class at my university this past semester called Geography of Commodities and one of the things we actually studied was the banana! Most of the information here is coming from a pair of books that I had to read a couple chapters out of. The first is Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, written by Dan Koeppel in 2008. The second is Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas that is a compilation of a several articles on bananas! I prefer the first one as it has a lot more of the relative info and would probably just compile all of the info in the second. :P

The banana has been around forever and is grown in the tropical regions near the equator. India produces about 20% of the world's total banana supply, but hardly exports any of it because it is a staple over there, as well as in many other Asian and African countries. (Source)

The banana tree that we think of is technically an herb and bananas tare just huge seeds! Although many breeds exist, the Cavendish banana is what you will find in most grocery stores (another common type is the plantain) and every single one of those Cavendish bananas you see there are all clones of the same plant. Once humans figured out they were edible, they realized they could create plantations by using what is known as the "corm" which you might consider to be the plant's roots that just breed itself and one corm begets another, then with human aid, we cut off and then replant the newly grown corm which will sprout another banana tree. That is how one makes a banana farm! However, this creates some issues as well with something called Panama Disease, which is a sort of blight that has the potential to kill every banana plant on the planet because they all come from the original corms that originated in Asia (probably Indonesia or Malaysia, but it is hard to tell).

Now, to your question about how the banana has influenced history! Well in 1885, the Boston Fruit Co. was started which turned into the United Fruit Co. 14 years later. United Fruit is arguably one of the single worst companies in the history of human kind. Over the next 70 years, they amassed an enormous amount of geopolitical influence in the Americas in which they owned tons of plantations bought from poor governments for cheap, thus was the beginning of the 'banana republic' (funny we have a store named after that...). The United Fruit Co. was very vertically integrated, meaning they controlled every step of the production process from when the corm was replanted to when it got to your neighborhood grocery store. They controlled the railroads and had a massive fleet of boats known as The Great White Fleet, which were refrigerated boats meant to carry bananas from Central and South America to the US. They were white because that helped to keep the boat and subsequently the bananas cool during the voyage.

Here is a good excerpt from that second book above that can help explain just how expanisive their operations were in the mid 1900s:

"The powerful banana company was involved in shaping domestic politics within producer nations incerasingly dependent on banana revenues. At the same time, the company played an important role in guiding U.S. diplomatic relations toward a region increasingly defined as vital to American interests. In 1954, United Fruit played a critical role in orchestrating and gaining U.S. support for the overthrow of Guatemala's president; in 1974 the company was again implicated, this time in bribing the president of Honduras."

In a lot of these reasons, they were referred to as "el pulpo" which translates to "octopus" in Spanish, because they literally had their hands in everything. On these banana republics, human rights violations, long hours, and no pay were common occurences as well.

Another good book that sort of discusses this is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is a work of fiction but is based on events that took place in 1928 in Columbia where some United Fruit plantation workers put together a strike to protest the unsafe working conditions. United Fruit then got the govenrment to intervene and send military to the town where several people were killed in the Banana Massacre. Worth looking into because Marquez is an amazing author.

United Fruit was eventually broken up due to anti-trust laws in the 1970s and was split into the companies we know today: Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte.

Bananas were also the center of the controversy over the Lome Convention which, when signed in 1975 by the British and several of their former colonies, where the English decided to cut prices of bananas from Jamaica to try and make up for all of their wrong doings during colonization. United Fruit complained to the US government in 1992 that this was unfair trade laws and got President Clinton to go to court with the British on United Fruit's behalf because they didn't like that they had competition.

We didn't go over much of what has happened since the breakdown of the Lome Convention, but the documentary/movie Life and Debt that briefly addresses the issues this caused for Jamaicans.

Welp, there you have it! Funny I know a lot about bananas, but I am allergic so I don't even eat them! If you have more questions, feel free to ask, I will do my best to answer it with sources! Mods - let me know if you need more sources, I may be able to dig something up :)

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If your response is primarily a link to wikipedia or a quote without context or a link to Amazon, it will be removed. Answers here should be both informative and comprehensive. Those things are neither. Don't just tell OP that the variety has changed from one to another. None of these make for an acceptable answer.

Thanks.

Tri-point did a great job covering a lot of the history of the banana. Here is an article discussing the current situation of the banana in greater detail. Essentially, this article summarizes how the disease tri-point mentioned, Panama disease, is a serious threat to our banana supply due to the lack of biodiversity. It could legitimately cripple the world's banana supply, which means starvation for some as the average banana consumption for people in Rwanda and Uganda, for example, is about 20x that of the average American. Here is another article detailing the risks of this virus. It is a very necessary lesson on what happens when our food supply systems lead to such dramatic decreases in biodiversity (I believe the cavendish banana makes up for almost 40% of the banana supply in the world now thanks to its ability to handle being shipped so well).