Baobab: Highlights

Success with No Bananas

OTTAWA, Oct. 30, 2001 -- A new film designed to raise awareness in the developed world about the importance of bananas to people in developing countries premiered to great reviews at the Annual General Meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) this week. The meeting, held in Washington DC, brings together members of the sixteen Future Harvest research centres and representatives of the group's member countries and donors.

"If There Were No Bananas" takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of the developing world where bananas and plantains mean the difference between hunger and hope. Starting at a lively banana market in southern India and ending as a plantain meal is lovingly prepared in Cameroon, it travels to Thailand, the Philippines, Cuba, Uganda, Tanzania, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

"It was an eye opener for me," says Producer-Director David Mowbray. "I had no idea bananas were anything more than dessert." Throughout the film people explain how their lives would be different if there were no bananas. For one farmer in western Tanzania, bananas mean the difference between life and death. As Dr. Joseph Mukiibi, the Director General of the National Agricultural Research Organization of Uganda says, "We say that if there have been no bananas, there is no food."

The sixteen minute video, written by Bob Huggan, was produced by Baobab for INIBAP , the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, a program of IPGRI , the International Plant Resources Institute. "If There Were No Bananas" is available on CD-ROM from INIBAP.

Baobab Productions Inc. is one of the world's leading producers of communications material about research in the developing world. For more information, contact Marlene Bedford :

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