At 11.11 in the morning of 11 August, as thousands of pocket cameras flashed at a total eclipse of the Sun lost somewhere behind the clouds over Cornwall, England, most of us at the NI office were peering into a bucket at the reflection of a radiant banana in the skies above Oxford. Or so it seemed to me when I looked - through the rather fetching pair of shades you see in the picture - at the one per cent of the Sun that wasn't eclipsed but cast a chill, eerie light over a world without birdsong, like the deadly silence that hangs over the poisoned banana plantations of Guatemala.

Had I not been working on this magazine at the time I don't suppose I'd have seen any connection between the awesome celestial spectacle and a mischievous tropical fruit. Bananas, like a total eclipse, induce a special brand of lunacy - Woody Allen zipped up in a banana, the city of Liverpool erecting a half-banana-half-sheep sculpture, the European Union legislating on the degree of permissible bend, or me setting out in search of the terrible truth behind this food of jokes.

When anyone asked me what I was doing I had, quite naturally, to say: 'Bananas.' This unlocked a torrent of anecdotes, like the one about the number 49 'banana bus' in London that always came in bunches. I did not know, for example, that over-anxious parents of infants are apt to mistake the undigested remains of bananas for worms. Search the Internet for bananas and you come up with the Bananarchist website (http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/1702/) which sports a Hammer and Banana masthead. Bar owners in the region of France where Roquefort cheese is made are apparently charging five dollars for a can of Coke, in revenge for US import duties imposed on the cheese because of an international trade war called. yes, the Banana War.

The coincidence of one battle in this war with the bombing of Serbia spawned lampoons in the press depicting 'cruise' or 'ballistic' bananas launched between allies in NATO. I chuckled, although at the time the walls of my home shook every evening at dusk as bombers took off for Serbia from the nearby Fairford airbase.

In some ways the Banana War is more insidious than 'real' war. No-one knows, for instance, what the long-term effects on the human body of pesticides like organo-phosphates will be. I brought back from Guatemala a strip of plastic impregnated with pesticide and I've been trying to find out precisely what it is, as I promised the plantation workers I would (see dead zone). I've done the rounds of agricultural colleges, public-interest institutions, government departments and private laboratories, without so far finding anyone either willing or able to do the analysis. I've been spun yarns about beehives, vacations, Scottish crofters, how to dissect frozen bananas with matchsticks, the state of tea plantations in Sri Lanka; but I'm left to conclude that commercial interests are at work suppressing the hard evidence. If anyone reading this can help, please contact me urgently and we'll publish the result in a future issue of the magazine.

Banana split
David Ransom sizes up the Banana War contestants, before setting out for the battlefield in Central America and the Caribbean.
Spanish version of the keynote

Into the dead zone
How a modern form of slavery survives in the poisoned plantations of Guatemala.
Entrando la Zona de Muerte (spanish version)

And another thing.
Cartoonist Viv Quillin casts an eye over the uses and abuses of the fruit.

Caught in the crossfire
Small farmers on the island of Dominica have to think twice before throwing in the towel.
Atrapados en fuego cruzado (spanish version)

BANANAS - THE FACTS

Fruit of the future
Something stirs in the Dominican Republic - could it be the perfect banana?
Fruta del Futuro (spanish version)

The Battle of the Banana
A pocket history of the war.

One short of a bunch
Given half a chance, world trade will always take the wrong turning. David Ransom argues that a change of direction may come sooner than we think.
Uno menos del racimo (spanish version)

What you can do

Letters
Letter from Lebanon
Update
The NI Interview with Albert Brojka
Reviews: plus Nadezhda Mandelstam classic
NI Crossword
Endpiece: by Christopher Shewen
Country profile: Nepal

FRONT COVER:-
DESIGN: IAN NIXON
PHOTO: MARK MASON
MAGAZINE DESIGNED BY IAN NIXON
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER