The banana trade dispute was one of the sticking points in the Doha talks

Banana world trade

Bananas are one of the world’s favourite fruits, a staple of almost everyone’s supermarket shopping. Europeans munched their way through 5.4 million tonnes of them in 2008.

Yet the way bananas are grown by often poor workers in hot places and sold to richer consumers in colder countries tells us a lot about the nature of world trade today.

The eventual “initialling” in Geneva of a stand-alone banana trade agreement between the European Union and Latin American countries not only ends what the EU itself acknowledges was “the longest trade dispute in history”, it also breaks one of the many stalemates in the stalled Doha round of world trade talks.

The first shots were fired in the banana wars decades before Latin America and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trade negotiators set out their respective stalls at the current World Trade Organisation in Geneva.

Frozen out

Since 1975, each Caribbean country has been given a generous import quota for bananas.

The idea was to enable the economies of former European colonies or dependencies to grow independently without recourse to overseas aid.

Tariff-free entry to the EU was extended to a string of ACP countries. Meanwhile, banana producers on Spain’s Canary Islands and in the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe also enjoyed tariff-free status.

But the effect of the agreement was to freeze out competitors from Latin America, or at least make their EU imports more expensive.

So called “dollar” bananas are generally cheaper to start with because they are grown on larger mechanised plantations run by giant US corporations such as Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte.

Eurobananas

Not everyone in the EU was happy with the Brussels banana regime; Germany for one.

For a start, the country had lost all its colonies after World War I, so had no favoured supplier to champion.

In the 1990s, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pledged to try and get the EU import regulations liberalised.

His election campaign played on the simple fact that Germans seemed to prefer the larger bright yellow dollar bananas from Latin America.

Some turned up their noses at the smaller, paler “eurobananas”.

Bananas have mattered to Germans ever since hunger overtook war-torn Germany, the fruit symbolised luxury.

When the Berlin wall crumbled, jubilant East Germans were seen sporting car stickers featuring two bananas forming the letter D for Deutschland. The banana was a symbol of better times to come.