Sustainable cropping systems for export dessert banana production have to meet the following requirements: low environmental impact, sufficient economic profitability and social and economic equity. Banana variety is a component of the cropping system which interacts with others such as plant arrangement in space and time and cultural practices. Performances of innovative cropping systems must be evaluated through a set of indicators taking into account the different components of sustainability (yield, production cost, pesticides and chemical fertilizer use, selling price, hardness of the work, equipment and technicity requirements). In FWI, the current banana cropping systems present a good profitability in the context of the UE market (POSEI) and a relative economic stability. However, the sustainability of these systems are threaten mainly i) by the detrimental effects of banana cropping on environmental ii) by hard working conditions in banana farm. Innovative cropping systems are needed. These systems must enable to i) decrease pesticide use, ii) maintain profitability (maintain yield and selling price) and iii) reduce hardness of work. We hypothesize that the knowledge of banana functional traits and of their management allow to design cropping systems that reach these objectives. Prototypes of sustainable cropping system are thus designed according to banana variety functional traits using Cavendish clones or new banana hybrids such as CIRAD 925. The sustainability of systems based on Cavendish clones can be improved through the selection of Cavendish cultivar with low harvest index (tolerance to sanitary deleafing, crop residues production for soil mulching), early follower sucker selection and the installation of cover-crop under banana canopy. Prototypes of cropping systems based on CIRAD 925 have been designed and are evaluated. The sustainability of these systems rely for a large part on a proper management of source-sink relation through adapted method