Facts in «The Same Banana»
Every factual line of the voice-over and every fact on screen, with its source and the wording it rests on.
| Claim in the film | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|
| "Almost every banana you buy is the same banana." | Wikipedia, "Cavendish banana" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana): Cavendish cultivars make up "the vast majority of bananas entering international trade", "around 99% of banana exports to developed countries". | Measured by world production, Cavendish is "just under half" (FAO, below). The line speaks of bananas bought in shops, that is, traded bananas. |
| "Not just the same kind. The same plant, copied." / "The Cavendish has no seeds. Each one grows from a piece of another." | Wikipedia, "Cavendish banana": "propagated via identical clones"; "having no seeds and reproducing only through cloning". | The specks ringed in the cross-section are the undeveloped ovules a seedless banana keeps; the film calls the fruit seedless, as the source does. Plants are shown growing from a sucker of the plant before them (vegetative propagation, simplified). |
| Gros Michel (大麥克) was the banana of the previous generations; in the 1950s a soil fungus tore through its farms | Wikipedia, "Gros Michel banana" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana): "until the 1950s, the main variety grown"; Panama disease (Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense) "wiped out vast tracts of Gros Michel plantations in Central America" in the 1950s. | On-screen label: PANAMA DISEASE 巴拿馬病. |
| "So the trade switched to the Cavendish, which resisted it." | Wikipedia, "Gros Michel banana": by the 1960s exporters were unable to keep trading such a susceptible cultivar and started growing resistant cultivars of the Cavendish subgroup. | |
| "Now a new strain, Tropical Race 4, kills the Cavendish as well." | FAO, Bananas — commodity in focus (https://www.fao.org/markets-and-trade/commodities-overview/bananas-tropical-fruits/bananas/en): TR4 affects Cavendish and has no cure; Wikipedia, "Cavendish banana": "With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel". | Chinese label: 熱帶 4 號小種 (Fusarium wilt Tropical Race 4). |
| "In 2019, it reached Colombia." | FreshFruitPortal, 8 August 2019 (https://www.freshfruitportal.com/news/2019/08/08/tr4-confirmed-in-colombia-as-country-declares-national-emergency/); Portal Frutícola, 8 August 2019: Colombia's ICA confirmed Fusarium TR4 on farms in La Guajira and the country declared a national emergency. | The film does not say it was the first case in Latin America. |
| "Yet over 1,000 kinds of banana grow on Earth." | FAO, Bananas — commodity in focus: "More than 1 000 varieties of bananas exist in the world." | |
| The varied bananas in the last wall | Illustrative colourways after real types (red bananas, the blue-green Blue Java, pink bananas, plantains, small finger bananas, striped variegated plants). | Not a botanical catalogue; no tile stands for a named cultivar. |
Chinese names used: Cavendish 香芽蕉, Gros Michel 大麥克, Panama disease 巴拿馬病, Tropical Race 4 熱帶 4 號小種 (subtitles: 熱帶 4 號).