绝代双蕉

Bananas, completely bananas. They don't do adverts like this any more, not for bananas anyway. This is the original 1940s cinema commercial for Chiquita Bananas. Chiquita, one of the remaining big five names in the banana world, is about to join forces with another big five name. Chiquita is merging with Fyffes to turn five into four "bignana" names. And talking of big, did you know that bananas are the world's number four fruit and the average American eats 28 pounds of bananas a year? Well, the firm Chiquita was once so intimately enmeshed in the murky and chaotic politics of Central America that it was referred to as the Octopus. So what about this merger? Mike Knowles is the editor of Eurofruit.

It's certainly the biggest deal that I've known in the sort of ten, 12 years I've been working in the trade. It's a result of where the market is going in terms of how supply and demand are balanced out at the moment. You know, retailers are very very powerful and they have a lot of buying power. And I think what these two companies are trying to do is just secure their own future in what is a very high-stakes business. They have to invest a huge amount. They don't make a huge margin but the volumes that they're trading, you know, you're talking about eye-watering sums.