India eyes $1 billion in banana exports in next five years

Subject : Geography

Section: Economic geography

Context:

With the successfully export of a trial shipment of fresh bananas to the Netherlands through sea route, India is now aiming at increasing the exports of this fruit to $1 billion in the next five years.

Key Facts:

India is world’s largest banana producer. Despite it, India’s global export share is just 1%, though the country accounts for 26.5% of the world’s production.

About Banana

Agro-climatic requirements:
- Banana, basically a tropical crop, grows well in a temperature range of 15ºC – 35ºC with relative humidity of 75-85%.
- Deep, rich loamy soil with pH between 6.5 – 7.5 is most preferred for banana cultivation.
- Saline solid, calcareous soils are not suitable for banana cultivation.
- There are some 12-15 varieties of bananas in India.
- Largely in the peninsular southern coastal region, namely in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Bengal, and in the Northeastern areas of the country such as Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
- The central and northern regions – Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Punjab also grow the plant but neither in such variety nor in numbers.
- India produces about 29 million tonne of banana every year, and next is China with 11 million.
Nutritive value
- Bananas have 10-20 mg of calcium, 36 mg of sodium, 34 mg of magnesium and 30-50 mg of phosphorous per 100 g of edible material.
- All these make bananas highly nutritious.
Its peel is of use as a ‘biochar,’ which is used both as a fertilizer and to generate electricity.
- Biochar is a charcoal-like substance that’s made by burning organic material from agricultural and forestry wastes (also called biomass) in a controlled process called pyrolysis.
- Pyrolysis is the heating of an organic material, such as biomass, in the absence of oxygen.