The Film
The Top Banana is a fast paced, funny, and entertaining feature documentary about the world’s most important fruit – the banana. At its narrative core is a real world factual drama: the gripping story of our favourite fruit fighting for survival against deadly diseases, freaky fungi, and toxic chemicals. Surrounding the bananas’ dilemmas, we are presented with some uncomfortable questions about the way we feed the world, and the way we treat the planet. How can we feed the world in a sustainable, humane, and environmentally friendly way? Can organic farming feed the world? Is GM a viable option? The answers aren’t obvious or easy, but finding them starts with understanding the problems and the possible avenues to explore. The Top Banana is here to help you understand the true scope of the issue, not shying away from the science or the economics, and not accepting any easy answers.
To do this we must tell a complicated tale.One which takes us to a number of countries around the world, meeting characters from a wide variety of banana-related walks of life: the Ecuadorian crop sprayer pilot, the Ugandan GM scientist, the Belgian keeper of the UN banana collection, the Indian conservationists fighting to protect the habitat of the last wild bananas, the Honduran breeders, the organic farmers, and more. The human characters are loveable, quirky, and even at times heroic, but it is not their story which leads; it is that of the banana and his struggle for survival. To tell the banana’s story we must dip into the plant sciences, genetics, economics, history, and even the future. So interviews and animation, archive and images, newly composed songs and funny voices wrap around the observational footage to spin a story of science and human folly, of banana pitfalls and ecological disaster.
And at the heart is the banana; simple, funny, loveable… and a genetic mutant. Due to it’s relatively unique biology, the banana is sterile and seedless and has to be reproduced in a process which is essentially cloning– and this makes all the bananas in a commercial field virtually genetically identical. This shallow gene pool leaves them vulnerable to freaky fungi and devastating diseases. Compound this problem by growing exactly the same variety, extensively, all around the world, and you’ve got a disaster just waiting to happen. Currently, the only thing that can keep the fungi at bay is the intensive application of weapons grade chemicals; making bananas the most heavily sprayed food crop in the world, with all the ensuing costs to the environment and the health of banana workers. This alone is reason to find another way forward, but there is yet another twist of the knife. This heavy application of chemicals leads to an arms race with the fungi, and the fungi are winning, mutating to resist the chemicals and get around the defences of the poor old banana.
Some places we will go and things we will see:
In Ecuador, the biggest banana exporter, we’ll witness firsthand the devastating effects of mass industrial banana production. We meet one of the pilots who flies daily over the plantations spraying a mixture of toxic chemicals. In one of the most beautiful and diverse countries in the world, we see the environmental cost of current production methods - soil degradation, pollution of water supplies, deforestation, destruction of ecosystems - and extreme health problems of the workers.
The most obvious answer to these environmental concerns is to go organic. So we visit an organic banana farmer in Ecuador, who, after witnessing the devastation caused by the chemicals has changed his methods from industrial farming to using organic principles. Organic production of bananas isn’t an easy option, as the fungi are hard to keep away without all the chemicals. But it is possible – the organic farmer no longer uses pesticides, but grows his bananas in alliance with nature. We see that although the yields are lower, the prices at market are higher which makes it potentially viable. For years it was thought that this kind of production was not possible in the heavily infested plantations of Ecuador, and scientists are conducting studies on his farm to ascertain what is working and how it might be exported to other farms. However, organic bananas are still a niche market, less than 3% worldwide, so it’s not clear how many customers will be prepared to pay the premium price.
We travel to Uganda, where they consume the largest amount of bananas per capita in the world. The Ugandans are totally dependent on the banana for their food supply, eating it with every meal of the day. Visiting a banana plantation we see the problems that the farmers are currently dealing with. This virulent disease is attacking their banana plants, and they need a solution – fast. In Uganda scientists are currently trying to develop a GM banana, which would potentially provide them with a banana that is both resistant to this fungus as well as more nutritious. The issue of GM is a heated and complex one, but one that cannot be ignored.
We’ll also go to India, home to the widest variety of wild bananas. The seeds of these plants hold the remaining natural biodiversity of the banana plant, but they are disappearing fast due to mass deforestation. We need to protect these rare varieties of banana, and their genes, if we want to have any hope of breeding new, disease resistant varieties by natural means.
