Latest Banana Growing Nation: Iceland
Greenhouse bananas in Iceland; photo reproduced under Wikimedia Commons license. Original here.
Bananas normally need to grow under tropical conditions: even in the U.S., a commercial crop isn't viable, because California and Florida aren't quite hot enough for large-scale production. One might think that Iceland - where the mean daily temperature over a year is about seven degrees Celsius (44 Fahrenheit) - would hardly qualify. But the North Atlantic island nation has a banana trump-card: huge stores of geothermal energy beneath its volcanic landscape. That means greenhouses, and - in an effort to become the world's first full-carbon neutral nation - the Icelandic government has decided that it is going to try to stop importing bananas from Latin America, and grow its entire supply indoors.
So far, the effort is mostly symbolic, despite some (false) reports that the country is now exporting the fruit. In 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, Iceland imported 4.7 million tones of bananas (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; link will download PDF file.) With only 1,000 square meters currently devoted to at-home production, boatload after boatload would still be needed to satisfy the nation's exceptionally hunger for the fruit. Iceland is the Western hemisphere's number one per capita banana consuming nation: the average Icelander eats 30 pounds of the fruit per year (in the developed world, only New Zealanders like bananas better, with each Kiwi eating 44 pounds per annum. The U.S. falls into fourth place, at 27 pounds, just edged out by Slovenia, which has a one pound - or four banana - advantage.)
Still, the effort is a noble one - though I find it a little odd that Iceland's internal production appears to be limited to Cavendish, the standard supermarket fruit (that's what the variety pictured above appears to be, as well as the ones in the image linked here, though I could be wrong, and welcome corrections.) With so many other amazing and more delicious kinds of banana - and with hothouse production eliminating the usual problems with those varieties (presence of disease; distance shipping; fragility; variable weather conditions) - it would seem that Iceland's small crop could also be a gourmet crop. Isn't that what the world's hungriest banana consumers (almost) deserve?
