Banana Wars: The Price of Free Trade: A Caribbean Perspective

In the Caribbean Windward Islands, one in three jobs and half of export earnings depend on bananas. But from the end of 2005, the European Union will give up the last non-tariff measures designed to protect this trade. Looming over the islanders are unemployment, poverty, further emigration, and the almost inevitable switch to growing illegal drugs. Banana Wars tells how the US government, answering the grievances of a single American corporation, forced the World Trade Organization to nullify a European Community commitment to protect small Caribbean banana growers. The international trading system lacks the flexibility needed to give states like the Windward Islands the protection that they need to survive, while powerful supermarket chains insist on ever-lower prices, to the short-term benefit of consumers but the serious detriment of growers. This book calls for new EU arrangements to help the Caribbean banana industry beyond 2005 and for the WTO to give greater consideration to the needs of very small states with vulnerable economies.