Bamboo is one of the most prolific plants on the planet and is widely known nowadays as Green Gold. The number of species of Bamboo totals almost 1,500 worldwide, while only about 100 of those species are used for commercial purposes. It’s common to believe that bamboo only grows in Asian countries where pandas live, but, in reality, bamboo can grow in almost any region of the world.
The continents that grow the most bamboo across the world are Asia, Australia, North America, South America, and Africa. While most bamboo is grown in Asia, especially Southeast Asia, that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in other regions. It shouldn’t be so strange to realize that bamboo grows quite abundantly in non-Asian countries, but it was a surprise that none is grown in Europe. I wasn’t too surprised about none being in Antarctica though.
In North America, there used to be enormous areas of the Southeast United States completely covered in bamboo. As a matter of fact, over 5 million acres in the Southeast United States were taken over by swaths of bamboo until local farmers removed them to make way for local cash crops. Even though bamboo can be used as a source of food and building material, the other crops must have been more useful.
In Southeast Asia, bamboo has for centuries been a staple material used throughout their civilization. It was discovered that it was more common to build houses, household items, bamboo clothes, and general infrastructure with bamboo as opposed to stone or brick due to the mass abundance of the material.
To this day, Southeast Asia has the largest amount of bamboo growth and readily uses it to produce retail products. As a matter of fact, the likeliness that any bamboo products you purchased were manufactured in Southeast Asia, in particular China, is very high.
Bamboo is also heavily present in Japan and has been used for centuries in the same way that other Asian countries used it. One amazing fact about bamboo in Japan is that it was the only plant to have survived the atomic bombings in Hiroshima back in 1945.
The destruction of all living things was expansive, but the local bamboo was able to resist the atomic blast. While the bamboo has since been removed from the area due to safety reasons, you can still find remnants of the actual plants in Japanese museums.
However, China remains the world leader in terms of growing and trading bamboo. With an industry valued at 39 billion dollars in 2018, China is indisputably the world’s largest producer of bamboo. However, it is far from the only country that profits from native bamboo according to reports, a large number of countries that trade in these products include India, Indonesia, Vietnam, the USA, the Philippines, Thailand, and many more.
China is the largest producer of Bamboo in the world and India comes second in the world. In China and India, many people in villages construct their houses with Bamboo. Though construction using Bamboo has reduced in recent years one can still see houses like this in Rural areas.
Top Bamboo Importing Countries: The largest importing Bamboo nations in the world are the USA, Turkey, Netherlands, Bangladesh, and China. These nations combinedly import 73 percent of the total Bamboo imports carried worldwide.
