First thanks for the replys
What I am interested in is which plant or plants would contribute the most to food security, and that's too open of a question to be of much use.
FHIA has a process to turn a single corm into multiple plants, I don't remember now if one corm would give you six plants after 18 months, or thirty plants after 18 months, I had not thought about it until recently and no longer remember the details, but they had some process of rapid multiplication. There is an Israeli company that has a plant on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula that works in conjunction with FHIA , producing banana and other tropical plants via in vitro. So in theory, you could ship bananas grown in vitro any place in the world, once they get there, grow them out, and then using the FHIA process you could turn 2000 or 20000 plants - whatever quantity you want to start with - into 5 or 10 or 30 times that number. Of course doing that would quickly lead to problems associated with monocropping such as disease tolerance, etc. But thinking along those lines, if you wanted every family in a village to receive and grow six banana plants for their own use, speaking of smallholder subsistence farmers here, what would be some good varieties to start looking at.
IIRC the FHIA-25 is used mostly just as a beer banana in Uganda, and has never gained a wide acceptance there and never took off in Honduras either. Initially I was very interested in the FHIA-25 as it had so much going for it (disease resistant , dwarf so more resistant to wind damage, long life in the green state, and so forth), until I got feedback on the I remember the FHIA-21 looked very good, as did the FHIA-17. I think the FHIA-17 was at the time more interesting because it was acceptable both as a cooking banana and as a desert banana, so it could be used either way, depending upon cultural preferences. Of the plantains the FHIA-21 was at that time the one I was most interested in. Bananas were a side issue, and I never fully followed up on things unfortunately.
Well, I suppose likely I need to do some more background research and then come back with some more specific questions. I will certainly take a look at the Pacific Plantain.
When I got back from Honduras the last time, I had a folder with a picture of a FHIA-25 from a test garden on it, and a couple of people who could not remember my name called me "Bananaguy" because of the picture, so I typed it in and .....