India grows them. Ecuador ships them.
Welcome to Mapped — one dataset turned into one map, every week. This week: who actually grows the world’s bananas.
The world grew about 139 million tonnes of bananas in 2024. India grew 37.6 million of them — more than China, Indonesia and Ecuador put together.
Almost none of them get on a boat.
Remix this map → Opens this exact map in the editor, data included. Change the numbers, the palette, the country. It’s your copy.
What you’re looking at
India grows one banana in four — 27% of world production, and almost twice what China (11.8 million tonnes) and Indonesia (9.3 million) grow together. It exported 760,000 tonnes in 2024. That is about 2% of its own harvest; the other 98% is eaten in India.
Ecuador is fourth on this map and still fills the boat. It grew 7.6 million tonnes and shipped just under 6 million — roughly four in five — which makes it, comfortably, the world’s largest exporter. The country people picture when they picture bananas is not the country that grows the most. It’s the country that packs them.
Most bananas never leave home. World exports came to 19.7 million tonnes against 139 million grown: about one banana in seven crosses a border. The other six are sold down the road.
Africa is the part of the map people forget. Nigeria grew 6.9 million tonnes — more than the Philippines. Add Angola, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya and those five alone grow 19.9 million tonnes, more than the entire world export trade. They simply don’t feed the North Atlantic supermarket.
And the United States grows 3,561 tonnes. It imports 4.2 million — over a thousand times what it harvests.
The banana in a London or Ohio grocery is a specialist crop: Cavendish, one clone, boxed, chilled, timed to ripen in a warehouse. The banana most people on earth eat is a different object — local and cooking varieties sold at the market and thrown in the pot. The brightest blocks on this map — India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Angola — are countries you will never see on a fruit sticker, and FAO counts plantains as a separate crop entirely, so they aren’t even on here.
The takeaway
The banana map is not the export map. One country grows a quarter of the world’s bananas and ships almost none of them.
Make this map yourself
The whole map is one maproll URL:
https://api.maproll.io/map.svg?scope=world
&data=IN:37.61,CN:11.76,ID:9.26,EC:7.59,BR:7.05,NG:6.91,US:0.0036...
&theme=dark&classification=custom&breaks=0.01,0.1,0.5,2,5,12,40
&legendNoData=None%20recorded
&legendTitle=million%20tonnes
With a spread this lopsided — 37.6 million tonnes at the top, a few tonnes at the bottom — the default equal-count bands hide the story, so this one sets its own breaks. legendNoData gives the blank countries their own swatch, so “grows none” can’t be mistaken for “lowest band”. Remix this map → or start from scratch.
Sources: production from FAOSTAT, Crops and livestock products, item “Bananas”, 2024 (via Our World in Data). Trade from FAO’s Banana Market Review 2024: world exports 19.7 Mt, Ecuador just below 6 Mt, India 760 000 t, US net imports 4.2 Mt. FAOSTAT counts plantains and cooking bananas as a separate item, so they are excluded here; a few 2024 country rows are still FAO estimates, and countries with no recorded banana harvest carry the legend’s “None recorded” shade rather than a value. Next week on Mapped: subscribe below to get it first.