The Caribbean Experience: Bananas, Sugar, Rice, Rum, Tourism and Other Services

• Author: Edwin Laurent
• Pages: 42-58

42 Understanding International Trade

The previous section reviewed the working of the international trading

and regulatory system and the operation of CARICOM countries within it.

This section deals with the varying experiences of some of the major foreign

income earners and seeks to draw lessons from those experiences.

Bananas –The Fight for the EU Market

Jamaica was the first Caribbean

country to engage in commercial

banana production and export. It

began towards the end of the

nineteenth century. Cultivation of

bananas for export to the United

Kingdom market was gradually

introduced into the Windward

Islands starting from the late 1950s

and steadily supplanted sugar cane.

Two decades later, it had come to dominate agricultural production in

Dominica, Saint Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and was making

a major economic contribution in Grenada. The Islands’ share of the UK

market grew steadily because of strict restrictions placed on the import of

cheaper bananas from Latin America. The rest of the Caribbean followed

much later. Production got underway in Belize and Surinam in the 1970s.

The Dominican Republic had long been producing bananas but did not begin

regular substantial export to the EC until the latter part of the last decade.

THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE:

Bananas, Sugar, Rice, Rum,

Tourism and Other Services

44

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The Caribbean Experience

Courtesy WIBDECO

At the start of the 1990s, production had peaked in the Islands, but by

then, threats to the foundations on which that trade could continue were

emerging. In particular, there was the high profile and long-running

transatlantic dispute on the trade in bananas, with its diverse mix of

participants that included the EU and ACP on the one hand and the US and

Latin American exporters on the other. At the centre, were the Windward

Islands, who were among the most determined and active, and as a result,

had a decisive impact on the evolution of the banana regime.

This chapter examines their performance, the implications of the outcome

of the dispute and the lessons to be learnt. Amongst the most intriguing

lessons is that smallness does not automatically preclude States from actually

being more than passive onlookers in the processes of international decision-

making that determine their future.

In 1986, the European Communities (EC) decided to unify the various

national markets by 1st January 1993, thus creating a Single European Market

(SEM). Prior to this, the various Member States had operated their own

import arrangements for bananas, often applying a variety of tariff and

quota restrictions. As that date approached, a struggle began over the nature

of the regulation of that Single Market and the extent to which it would

restrict cheaper Latin American bananas, thereby permitting European and

ACP bananas to be sold.

The following table indicates the changing origin of bananas supplied to

the EU before and since the single market. It shows that the countries that

have been most forceful in seeking reforms, the Latin American banana-

producing countries, have been the ones whose exports have increased the

most.