The Top Banana (Completed )

About the Film

Even though there are over 1000 types of banana in the world, the commercial industry grows only one: the Cavendish, currently the world’s Top Banana. Such a ‘monoculture’ system: fields and fields of identical plants all lined up in a row, keeps the infrastructure simple and provides an economy of scale that allows us to have cheap, plentiful bananas, year round. But it is biological madness. 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 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 - once a pest mutates to get around the defenses of one Cavendish, it will quickly have them all, from one plantation to the next.

So the poor banana is blighted by everything from microscopic worms to bacterial boils, but worst of all are the fungi. Fungi love a hot humid climate, just like bananas, and they mutate with devilish speed. Across the world’s banana plantations, infection by one fungus in particular, the dreaded Black Sigatoka, has reached pandemic proportions. It blackens the plants’ leaves, and rots their fruit. It is possible to keep the fungus at bay, at least temporarily, through intensive application of chemicals, and therefore bananas have become the most heavily sprayed food crop in the world. About a third of the cost of producing a banana is being spent on chemical weapons, which are freely deployed, making bananas one of the most environmentally destructive foods we grow. If that’s not enough, all this spraying creates a bio-chemical arms race, as the fungi mutate to resist the chemicals and get around the defenses of the poor old banana. By placing our short-term interests first, letting greed be our masters, and provoking nature until she struck back we now find ourselves trapped in an unsustainable spiral of chemical dependence and environmental destruction.

And it’s not just our sweet treat that’s at stake. Our bananas represent a small portion of those grown around the world (about 13%), and the other types of banana are essential to the survival of millions of people. Bananas are the 4th most important food crop in the world. And now, our reckless behaviour is threatening everyone’s bananas. A new mutation, Panama race-4, a chemically resistant form of the disease that wiped out the former Top Banana of the commercial trade, the Gros Michel, has appeared in the Far East. Race-4 is currently ‘contained’ in a quarantine zone, but most agree that it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to the major commercial plantations of Latin America and the subsistence plants of Africa and India. When this happens, if nothing has changed about the way we produce bananas, it will lead to epic crop failures and mass starvation.

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 film’s 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.