Who is Europe's Biggest Producer of Bananas?

Here at FFTO HQ, we have had questions about whether we can source locally grown bananas (unfortunately, bananas do not grow in England!) However, bananas are grown in Europe. And surprisingly, Europe's biggest producer of bananas is.....ICELAND.
Usually, bananas are grown in countries of the tropics - Africa, Latin America, Caribbean, Pacific etc. However, this cold country is also a major producer of bananas.

With average temperatures registering between 32 Fahrenheit in winter and a tepid 50 at the height of summer, Iceland’s climate seems most suitable for growing mold and frostbite.
 But Iceland’s secret to agricultural innovation lies beneath the surface — way beneath.

The island straddles the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the Eurasian and the North American tectonic plates meet. The plates are very slowly pulling apart, allowing heat from the Earth’s core to escape. More rarely, lava emerges, as was the case with the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, whose ash cloud caused chaos for travelers across the Northern Hemisphere. Less dramatically, this heat is escaping constantly through geysers, making hot springs a common feature on the southern part of the island.

Since the 1920s, Icelanders have been harnessing this geothermal energy to heat their homes. It’s a cheap and effective source of renewable energy, and in the 1940s, Iceland’s agricultural mavericks began looking at how this energy could be pushed further, to heat greenhouses growing vegetables, flowers and, in theory, bananas, which during World War II had become a rare and expensive commodity.

Iceland’s banana plantation sits atop a 5,000 year-old lava field some 27 miles east of Reykjavíc at the Agricultural University of Iceland in Hveragerði, though perhaps the title plantation is slightly grandiose. At around 11,000 square feet in size — less than a quarter the size of a football field — this single greenhouse holds all of Iceland’s banana plants.

Built in the late 1940s, this tropical glass greenhouse is virtually indistinguishable from the hundreds of others like it found all over the island. Water drips from the ceiling, and every few minutes, the blisteringly hot pipes that run through the middle of the plant-rows noisily clunk and groan.
It might not be a plantation, but hanging from an eight-foot plant marked bananajurt musa x paradisiacal are a dozen or so large, green bunches of bananas. The English translation beneath reads: “Edible banana.”

Bananas can grow in Iceland. So what’s stopping them from grabbing the title of banana capital?
“Banana plants can only bear fruit once, and it takes a year and half for them to reach maturity,” greenhouse manager Elias Óskarsson explains. “And they take an awful lot of work to maintain for such little yield.”

Despite the geothermal heat, growth that takes a few months in Africa or South America drags on for 18 months in Iceland. This is due to the sun’s Arctic schedule, which plunges the island into extended darkness in winter and almost perpetual sunshine in summer.

Banana Greenhouse at Hveragerði

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