Banana (lat. Músa) is a genus of perennial herbaceous plants of the Banana family (Musaceae), from 2 to 9 m high, with a powerful root system, a stem protruding above the ground and 6-20 leaves.
Flowering occurs 8-10 months after the active growth of the plant. Fruits develop only from female flowers. The length of the fruit varies from 3 to 40 cm, the thickness is from 2 to 8 cm. The color of the peel can be yellow, green, red or even silvery. The flesh of the fruit is white, creamy, yellow or orange. In an immature state it is firm and sticky, but as it matures, it becomes soft and juicy. Up to 300 fruits with a total weight of 50-60 kg can be placed on one axis. Bananas have a biological phenomenon known as negative geotropism. During formation, the fruits are directed downward by gravity, however, as they grow under the influence of hormones, one or more axes begin to grow vertically upwards.
For the first time, the name Musa, which later became scientific, was assigned to a banana by the German naturalist Georg Rumph (1627-1702). There are two theories about where the word came from. According to the first theory the name was given in honor of Anthony Musa the court physician of the Roman emperor Octavian Augustus. According to the second theory, the name comes from the Arabic word “muz”, which the Arabs call bananas.
Musa plants naturally grow in the subtropics and tropics of Asia, Australia, the Pacific Islands, New Guinea and Malaysia. The center of the emergence of cultural forms of bananas is considered to be India and the Indochina peninsula. In many Latin American countries, the cultivation of food varieties of bananas is carried out on an industrial scale, and the export of the fruits of these plants is an important part of the economy of some tropical countries.
In many countries bananas are one of the main sources of nutrition. For example, only in Ecuador the annual consumption of this product is 73.8 kg per capita (for comparison, in Russia this figure is 7.29 kg).
According to the UN Food Organization for 2012, bananas are in twelfth place among cultivated crops in terms of the number of crops harvested, about 102 million tons of bananas are